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Comment by yrral | Hacker News Reader

How about the predominately male ownership of teslas causing higher accident rates. I see the paper adjusts for age and road type but missing gender is a pretty big slip-up?

I didn't read the paper fully but grepped for "gender" and "sex" and couldn't find anything.

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Don't forget to adjust for the 50% greater distance driven by men [1]. In reality, per mile drive, the difference in genders is negligible and maybe even counter to what most people believe. Of course though, men will pay more in insurance because driving is inherently dangerous and driving that much more frequently is problematic.

[1] - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

Men are also more likely to drive drunk, under the influence and are more likely to buy a car with more than 250hp. There's a _lot_ of confounding variables when examining crashes.

Good question! According to one study in LA, [1] men cause 60% of accidents. I do wonder, however, the extent to which this gap fades with age. Given that most Tesla owners are not super young, it might not make as much of a difference as the 60% number (assuming it is nationally representative) would indicate.

1: https://xtown.la/2019/12/12/women-drivers-maybe-we-need-more...

Note when looking at 40% vs 60% of accidents (assuming males and females drive the same amount) the % difference seems small, only 20%, but actually this means males cause 50% more accidents than females do (60/40=1.5).

I don't know if we can assume males and females drive the same amount.

Men also drive 63% more miles than women. https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/average-miles-driven-p...

Keep in mind that men drive 16,500 miles per year on average, while women drive 10,100 miles. There is a noticeable gender gap in "accidents per year", but not in "accidents per mile". The paper compares accidents per mile, so there should be little gender effect in the results.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

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