Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The number of Tesla-related deaths is much higher than Tesla reports.[1] At least 4 in California, at least 11 worldwide. That article points out how low the death rate for large luxury cars is, too. Tesla is at about 4x the death rate for the luxury car industry.

[1] https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...

View on HN

The author of the article admits that his fund is short TSLA. I don't know why I would believe his data.

Elon Musk is long TSLA so we shouldn't believe him either.

I would argue someone in a short position has more incentive to produce negative news than someone in a long position does to produce positive news.

Teslas are arguably sports cars more than luxury cars. You should really be looking at the driver statistics shouldn't you?

"Sports car" is just a marketing label now, says Road and Track.[1] Once a "sports car" was a little 2-seater with a roll bar and a 5-point harness. Not a 5-seater with a deluxe interior. Now, it's just a PR term.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a28225/sports-car-d...

Perhaps, but they're marketing to different people and have clearly different driver populations and accident statistics even though the cars themselves are probably not much different.

This is a biased article.

I do like that the article does some analysis to deduce that the NHTSA-FARS data is incorrect for Tesla and they make several well reasoned arguments why. Then using other data sources, they try to extrapolate what the correct data might be.

The problem is that the Tesla data in the NHTSA-FARS database is lower than expected. Yet they are comparing the "fixed" Tesla data with the rest of the data in the database that they take at face value.

It goes to reason if the NHTSA-FARS data for Tesla is easily proven to be underestimated (i.e. there are actually more fatal accidents than shown) that the data for other car manufacturers and models are also underestimated.

Their argument is the Tesla data is underestimated because, as a new and relatively unknown car manufacturer, Tesla is often miscoded.

It seems like these concerns are much less applicable to a BMW or other manufacturer of large luxury cars.

That article is fairly damning.

I’m not convinced yet (and neither am I convinced of Tesla’s claims). You can’t make strong causal claims from observational studies. Run a real experiment and I’ll take these claims more seriously.

(For example, there are a ton of potential confounding variables that could be causing the difference other than the safety of the car, like demographic differences.)

The burden of proof is on the claimant, whether it’s Tesla claiming their vehicles are safe or skeptics claiming they’re not. Until then, neither adds much to the discourse.

Until the onus is on Tesla to prove their claims, rather than cherry picking statistics for marketing, it's better to be sceptical of what they say about safety of an unproven emerging technology that they are emphasizing to sell more cars. Basically, Tesla needs to prove that this reasonable analysis is wrong because they are the people making the claims about safety.

They really shouldn't get the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof is on the company selling a system to control a two ton vehicle travelling over 70mph.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com