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Comment by nnm | Hacker News Reader

The Tesla Safety Report is so misleading:

1. The accident rate does not take into account of drivers age, credit score and prior safety record, or the age / value of the car.

2. Most people only turn on autopilot when driving is easy (e.g. on a highway).

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Sorry, a non-American here. By "credit score" are you referring to the financial credit score or some sort of "points system" for drivers? If the former, then why would it be important to include it?

In some states auto insurance companies are using credit score because there is correlation between insurance claims and credit score [1]. I guess you can establish "crash-free" and insurance claim correlation even more easier.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/auto-insurance-...

Not some states but 94% of the states, according to your link.

Looks like that article may be out of date, according to experian [1] 4 states completely disallow using credit scores to set auto insurance rates, and 3 more restrict it. However, this is still significantly more than "some states"

[1] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/which-states-pro...

Credit score is correlated with personality traits such as conscientiousness, risk-taking, etc, which in turn influence driving safety

While this may be true I always assumed the strongest reason for including this in insurance quotations was the lower risk of fraudulent claims from those with stronger finances.

Does any car company give a detailed normalized report like you're asking for in 1?

edit: by which I mean, if tesla autopilot gets into more accidents than rich white yuppies but less than the national average, it's not entirely obvious to me is the conclusion is rich white yuppies shouldn't use autopilot or that autopilot isn't safe enough. It also suggests its very useful for poor minorities.

Location and local driving conditions are the only real differentiator where this might make a difference on decision making. Those are going to be correlated with the demographics of the person driving them, but are weak proxies at best.

Car company? Probably not, but they'd be the wrong organisations to ask.

Insurance companies certainly would know a lot more detail.

Do any other car companies run a comprehensive surveilance system on all of their vehicles?

I'm not a car expert, but I think yes, its pretty common in newer cars.

Yes. OnStar is the most well known, but most of the other major automakers have similar capabilities in at least part of their range.

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