Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

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> If there is evidence for it, this isn't it. Tesla cars having higher claim frequencies compared to say the puny Fiat 500 Electric (noted in the article) could just as well be explained by people driving it dangerously because it has "Ludicrous Mode".

This is not the claim in the linked article. The linked article claims that Tesla cars have a higher claim frequency than comparable gasoline-powered cars (i.e. large luxury cars such as a Porsche), whereas for example the Nissan Leaf has a lower claim frequency than comparable gasoline-powered cars (namely the Nissan Versa).

Put another way, if your choice is between a Tesla and a gasoline-powered large luxury car, the Tesla is more dangerous. If your choice is between the Nissan Leaf and the Nissan Versa, the Leaf is less dangerous. There was no comparison between the relative danger from a Tesla and a Leaf.

This thread started off with the GP comment by crabasa saying "Wouldn't Tesla vehicles have a higher rate of crashes [if Autopilot was so dangerous], all things being equal?".

I'm pointing out that all other things aren't equal, and you can't assume from overall crash data that you can tease out statistics about how safe a specific feature of the car is.

The comparison to the Fiat 500 is relevant because while the report didn't only compare Tesla vehicles to it, that's one of the comparisons.

Is a Tesla less safe than a Fiat 500 given that it's driven by the same sorts of drivers, in similar conditions and just as carefully as a Fiat 500? Maybe, but who knows? We don't have that data, since there's an up-front selection bias when you buy a high-performance luxury car.

I wasn't able to find the raw report mentioned in this article, but here's a similar older report they've published:

http://www.iihs.org/media/2648a3bc-0c73-4036-ae00-a53a399a18...

There you can see that the claim frequency of Tesla is indeed a bit higher than all other cars they're compared to, but this doesn't hold when adjusted for claim severity or overall losses. There cars like the BMW M6 and the Audi RS7 pull ahead of Tesla by far.

So at the very least you'd have to be making the claim that even if this data somehow showed how badly performing Autopilot was, that it was mainly causing things like minor scratches, not severe damage such as crashing into a freeway divider.

Just looking at these numbers there seems, to me anyway, to be a much stronger correlation between lack of safety and whether the buyer is a rich guy undergoing a mid-life crisis than any sort of Autopilot feature.

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