Tesla Vehicle Safety Report
tesla.com
tesla.com
Well, if you want to know why some people are rear ending a Tesla, it's because it's far more unpredictable than a human driver.
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-auto...
Also it seems to contradict itself on data collection. First;
> In practice, this correlates to nearly any crash at about 12 mph (20 kph) or above, depending on the crash forces generated
But then they've decided to ignore crashes that doesn't deploy an airbag or similar...
> recent analysis led us to identify and implement upgrades to our data reporting. Specifically, we discovered reports of certain events where no airbag or other active restraint deployed [...]
So now we're only counting major accidents?
Also: Tesla has always been clear about their definition of "crash", it hasn't changed since they started reporting years ago.
But it says specifically it does since Jan 2023 and they've retroactively adjusted their previous reporting...
For Tesla Model Y:
> If regenerative braking is aggressively slowing Model Y (such as when your foot is completely off the accelerator pedal at highway speeds), the brake lights turn on to alert others that you are slowing down.
Source: Model Y manual: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/is_is/GUID-3DFFB07...
1: https://www.greencarfuture.com/electric/does-regen-braking-t...
Yes, but it depends on the speed you are going
> If regenerative braking is aggressively slowing Model Y (such as when your foot is completely off the accelerator pedal at highway speeds), the brake lights turn on to alert others that you are slowing down.
https://www.greencarfuture.com/electric/does-regen-braking-t...
Seems pretty obvious, the idea is that engine braking would also cause your car to slow down without lighting up the brake lights so any kind of slowdown at that level would not normally engage the brake lights. But as soon as you slow down more than that the lights will come on, making its behavior pretty close to what you'd expect from a regular car with and ICE lacking regenerative braking.
Or would you suggest that a normal car should engage it's brake lights when you let go of the accelerator and engine brake? (I can see a case for that.)
In comparison, my 2015 Leaf doesn't illuminate the brake lights during regen but it's regen is significantly less than my Model 3.
One episode per 3000 miles is too many, and that's about what I was seeing before I disabled the feature.
If someone has built an AEB system with the degree of immunity from false triggers that's needed to make it a net positive for road safety, I haven't seen any evidence yet. Similar complaints across many different car models are widespread.
It definitely is erratic with the speed, speeding up and slowing down slightly, which is annoying, but not so dangerous.
The dangerous parts are driving home from work, 6 miles, at least two very hard brakes each trip with no cars ahead of me (I only made a few trips like this before disabling it).
Automatic emergency braking (with the loud beeps and red message on the screen) on two lane highways, over crests, a myriad of other circumstances.
https://electrek.co/2022/06/08/tesla-files-use-new-radar-con...
(Absolutely no reason to stop and no weather or afternoon sun for confusion. My best guess is that flaky vision systems thought a semi truck was entering my lane, but I really don't know.)
All AEB's from all manufacturers have a certain amount of phantom braking, but non-Tesla AEB are well studied and definitely save lives.
"Oh, by the way, starting in 2025, your breakfast cereal will be legally required to contain this drug."
The radar system they use in modern VW and Audi cars is extremely conservative, claiming to not engage the brakes at all above 35 mph, and waiting until the last possible moment to apply the brakes below that window. It's been absurdly accurate for me. Once every few months or so it "warns" outside of a dangerous situation, but they are almost always situations I could have prevented with a gentler approach to driving, for example following closely a truck with a trailer that is slowly turning off the street will erroneously activate the warning because I'm continuing as if it will be out of my way, which is not the safest.
The time it activated in a real danger situation it didn't even apply the brakes, it "primed" them so that my action of pressing the brakes would happen faster.
Thanks, Dad. Clearly I have no idea what I'm doing, or what I'm talking about, so my real-world experience is invalid.
For the benefit of everyone else, phantom braking is a thing that by definition occurs when you're not following anyone. Such as when the car slams on the brakes upon approaching a car that's clearly about to turn right from a nearby parking lot, but who is equally clearly waiting for you to pass before entering the road.
I shouldn't have been patronizing, I'm just so confused how the same hardware and (possibly) software can produce such different results. Why would the audi version be so much more sensitive?
>Such as when the car slams on the brakes upon approaching a car that's clearly about to turn right from a nearby parking lot, but who is equally clearly waiting for you to pass before entering the road.
Like I've driven past this exact situation hundreds of times with not even a peep from my car.
I love my 2021 RS 5, but I have to disagree with this. Even in Traffic Jam adaptive mode, many times it will accelerate towards a vehicle _that it detects_, and only brake very late, and hard. On several occasions I've intervened because I wasn't sure if it would. When I've been alone in the car, I've waited later (and seen it brake hard, of its own accord), when I've held off on the brake since I have no passengers to give whiplash.
It will also absolutely emergency brake above 35mph.
Tesla seems to have a lot of software issues when it comes to "smart" features like these. I wouldn't be surprised if they are indeed worse than the competition, but I'd love to see a similar comparison
How unpredictable is a solid 5 seconds of the Tesla signaling it's lane change then slowing down? I blame the asshole that was in the far left lane going way too fast and not slowing down (just letting off the accelerator when the Tesla signalled would have prevented the accident) when someone is trying to enter. Then they brake way too late. Everyone behind that first vehicle is also to blame for following too closely at too fast of a speed.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/07/federal...
[1] https://www.autobison.com/2020/03/has-tesla-been-lying-about...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/15/data-shows-tesla-accounts-fo...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/technology/tesla-autopilo...
[4] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-27/tesla-stop...
[5] https://phys.org/news/2018-05-fact-tesla-safety.html
[6] https://securityboulevard.com/2022/11/its-official-tesla-has...
It's absolutely amazing that we have to go through this every time someone gets video of a Tesla event. There are millions of these cars on the road now, surely the fact that this happens only monthly sits as evidence against your position, no?
Edit: FWIW: my money is on this story being quietly retracted at some point anyway. FSD doesn't behave like that. It just doesn't. Almost certainly the driver got confused, panicked, or otherwise overrode the automation and then blamed it when talking to police. The police report is almost silent on the subject: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23569059-9335-2022-0...
This entire kerfuffle is based on this one sentence: "P-1 stated V-1 was in Full Self Driving mode at the time of the crash, I am unable to verify if V-1’s Full 24 Self-Driving Capability was active at the time of the crash."
The clear and inarguable truth is that the Tesla fleet is pushing three million cars now. They're safe. Are they safest? safer? less safe? There's space for argument. But the kind of absolutist story you're spinning just doesn't hold. If these cars were actually causing accidents at even a moderately higher rate, we'd quite clearly know about it. And they aren't.
You accused me of gish gallopping. I've since slowed down and focused on specific events. See my other comments about the battery swapping scam for example.
Please provide some actual data proving these cars are safer than average. Tesla certainly hasn't been able to. And research, like the one I just linked which you refused to acknowledge, definitely does not back up Elon's claims
But... they have. That's exactly the link we're discussing. You don't want that to be true, so you're digging around trying to pretend via a flood of bad evidence that they're somehow "lying" in that data.
But... what if they aren't? Again, three million cars are an awfully big signal to try to spin. Isn't the Occam's Razor interpretation (also jives with my personal experience with the product, FWIW) that... they're safe?
I just paid $5k on a used extended van. One of the most dangerous cars you can buy. Obviously I don't expect this to be any safer than a $100k Tesla.
Similarly, I find any comparison between the "average car" and a Tesla's crash ratings to be completely useless. How do we know that other luxury cars around that price point don't actually do much much better than tesla does? The "data" provided is insincere at best. It's also not actual data. They're just telling us some numbers. They've consistently refused to provide any actual data
This OP also again makes the claim of the "lowest probability of injury of any car by NHTSA" which the NHTSA has repeatedly asked them to stop saying.[0] The NHTSA doesn't rank cars by probability of injury at all
Remember when they said the Tesla S earned 5.4 stars and NHTSA had to make a public statement that it does not award more than 5 stars? lol. Yet another lie
[0] https://krcrtv.com/features/auto-matters/nhtsa-to-tesla-stop...
From the first link:
> Federal safety regulators accused Elon Musk of issuing “misleading statements” on his company’s Tesla Model 3 last year, sending a cease-and-desist letter
Federal regulators don't exactly send cease and desists casually. Misleading and misrepresenting is dishonest, i.e. lying.
The first one states that Tesla is being misleading for claiming that it’s cars scores better for safety but not mentioning that the weight classes affect the scores. The original claim is still true though.
Most of the others deal with the claim that the cars accidents per mile ratings are lower because they’re highway miles or because they’re driven by rich people. But… they’re still low.
You can argue at best that there is no rigorous proof that Tesla cars are safer than other cars and that these are cherry picked stats for marketing. But there’s no compelling evidence that they’re more dangerous. Calling them lies is disingenuous. Regardless of one’s opinion of musk.
Edit: but you get the meta point, right? Upstream comment threw a ton of links at you along with an intended (and deliberately incorrect) interpretation knowing that you wouldn't read them carefully. That's why that kind of argumentation is so toxic.
[0] https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1973/3986
> In independent research, Templeton (2020)compared Tesla’s stated crash rates with Autopilot enabled and not enabled by attempting to control for increased use of Autopilot on relatively safer freeways. To compare human-driven crash rates of freeways and non-freeways, Templeton used fatality rates, which may overestimate crash rates on freeways as higher speeds increase crash severity according to a fourth power law (Evans, 1994). When controlling for road type, the crash rate benefits of Autopilot narrowed significantly. Templeton was unable to fully assess their comparison of Autopilot crash rates with national estimates due to their different definitions of crashes.
> Goodall (2021)investigated struck-from-behind crashes of automated vehicles using age-weighted crash rates from SHRP 2 NDS database as a baseline. Automated vehicles were struck from behind at five times the rate of human-driven vehicles, although much of the difference could be attributed to higher rates of urban driving experienced in automated vehicle testing.
I'm also not sure what percent of level 2 ADAS vehicles are Tesla vs other brands but they're by far the most common vehicles with driver-assist involved:
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/15/23168088/nhtsa-adas-self-...
Google's Waymo was lightyears ahead of Tesla. The reason they didn't go to market was that they knew it wasn't really ready. Elon Musk has lied (as in he knew the truth and lied) about their driver assistant technology's safety and capabilities and has been sued for it[2]. There's no other way to sugarcoat it
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/14/23353787/elon-musk-tesla-...
Your second argument… again, sure, whatever? Not a contradiction or evidence of a lie.
I've got more, but I think I'd have better luck taking it one at a time so I'll wait...
[0] https://dailykanban.com/2015/05/27/tesla-battery-swap-unused...
[1] https://dailykanban.com/2015/05/27/tesla-battery-swap-unused...
???
What am I supposed to take from this? I think maybe you intended to provide a different article with an actual claim but the first one seems unlikely to matter.
I’d like to see something specific to claims that teslas aren’t actually safer than average if possible
Short of "not driving", human drivers don't have the option of "well, this is less than optimal, I can't do well, so I won't try".
FSD absolutely does. Disengages, or is not even engaged in the first place.
I wonder Tesla's FSD safety / disengagement stats for December to February in Pittsburgh, for example.
> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.
According to Tesla, that's not an accident.
For FSD evaluation purposes? It sure as hell is.
But it's no longer counted.
They, strangely, didn't mention that this warning was issued for a single steering wheel inactivity failure, and that that happened _eighteen_ _minutes_ prior to the collision.
They sure do, and will stop when things are too complex for them (e.g. bad weather).
Anecdata: Almost all (95%?) of my highway driving (Europe) is on Autopilot. I don't even enjoy doing the driving myself any more in those situations where I know that Autopilot is doing a pretty good job. In particular, Autopilot does a better job than I can in conditions of heavy snow / rain / otherwise poor visibility conditions. I feel a lot safer being the operator than the driver in those instances! (The alternative would often be to slow down by a significant amount, and/or use up more of my focus/attention, leading to either less safe driving or forced breaks.)
There is a ton of data using industry defined conditions and a ton of research has gone into determining the types of conditions that can affect accident rates. The only reason we can't compare is because Tesla only releases what we see in the link above. [1]
Best guess estimates of normalizing autopilot data against the average mix of highway/city driving finds that AP's safety advantage effectively disappears. Of course this is rough and Tesla likely has much better data that they are choosing not to share. [2]
[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...
[2] https://twitter.com/NoahGoodall/status/1489291552845357058
You should probably slow down.
Really they should know this, because the autopilot system should be identifying it based on speed limits and detected type of road.
Of course that assumes some ability to look into a black box, but also location tracking should provide it too.
Since we don’t see that spike, I’m inclined to believe that the effect size of the highway driving preference is relatively small.
And as an automobile manufacturer, I cannot believe in good conscience that Tesla is unaware that active restraint and airbag systems of today are far more nuanced and weigh multiple criteria when deciding to deploy, versus "speed exceeds X mph, deploy" of old. You can have a very significant incident (two that I've witnessed recently involve vehicles into stationary objects at ~30mph) without airbag deployment. But if that was a Tesla in FSD that hit something at 30mph and didn't deploy airbags, well, that's not an accident according to Tesla.
That also doesn't account for "incident was so catastrophic that restraint systems could not deploy", also "not counted" by Tesla. Or just as egregious, "systems failed to deploy for any reason up to and including poor assembly line quality control", also not an accident and "not counted".
1: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tesla-and-elon-musk-exagge...
The absolute easiest miles for a luxury vehicle vs all miles for all cars.
There was a particularly nasty intersection near the most popular bike shop that the bike club kept going to the city about but since nobody had died yet, they weren't going to put one in.
People know which intersections are accident prone, well before the city does something about it. There are routes I don't take because there are others that are safer or easier to follow at all hours of the day instead of just outside of rush hour, or also when I'm tired/distracted. But there are also magnets that pull certain demographics to them. Like that bike shop, or the shitshow outside of CostCo where I live now.
More important is the fact they are driven by older people (median age 48 years old), that is more important.
Model 3 Demographics: https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2019/03/tesla-model-3-demogra...
You would absolutely expect Autopilot/FSD to have fewer crashes than human-in-control crashes because AP/FSD isn't available in the conditions that result in more crashes: bad/variable roads, poor conditions, etc. Anything else would imply AP/FSD is absurdly dangerous as it would be getting higher crash rates in good conditions than human drivers in bad conditions.
If AP/FSD were actually better and/or safer than human drivers you would expect Tesla to aggressively demonstrate that. Given that they are choosing not to compare crash rates by road condition it is reasonable to assume that the statistics do not support the claim.
This is before we get into whether AP/FSD disconnecting moments before crashing counts as crashing under AP/FSD. I recall articles claiming that Tesla didn't include such crashes as being caused by AP/FSD, but I have no idea if that was ever confirmed. Certainly I know Tesla has gone out of its way to blame drivers for AP/FSD crashes, so my faith in any kind of honesty from Tesla in these matters is minimal.
> By comparison, the most recent data available from NHTSA and FHWA (from 2021) shows that in the United States there was an automobile crash approximately every 652,000 miles.
The figures they are using for this are 4,954,323 vehicles in crashes (ie a single crash with 3 vehicles adds 3 to this total). This includes large trucks, motorcycles, buses, other, and unknown vehicle types, from the NHTSA data. and 3,228.8 billion miles from the FHWA data.
Previously, accident culpability was diffuse across individual drivers in a way that motivating any group of individuals to action is inherently a _social_ problem, and one that is often dismissed as such.
The development and deployment of a singular identifiable causal agent casts off that shield of diffuse social responsibility in a way that leaves Tesla vulnerable to intense scrutiny. It doesn't help that as Tesla's figurehead, the collective schadenfreude we gain from Musk's failures are converted into a cathartic group joy.
Nevertheless, the dynamics of blame have changed because the terrain has changed. The closest analogy would be a human driver that drive all the miles autopilot drove in 2022 and was responsible for the same number of autopilot crashes in 2022. Presented outside the frame of this debate, I can't help but imagine we would want them off the road regardless of whether their miles per crash were less than the population on average.
Autopilot is used far more often on the highway, I believe, than in residential areas – where I also believe crashes are more frequent.
It'd be interesting to see the miles broken down by road type, speed, etc.
Also just seeing improvement from Q3 2022 vs Q3 2021 is good, although small margin.