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Comment by joshspankit | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or are these numbers almost low enough to be labelled positive PR?

> The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings. The number of crashes is more than 1000. A table of incidents involving driver assistance systems where customers have expressed safety concerns has more than 3000 entries.

Out of millions of cars? And for the entire time Tesla’s been making cars?

I’ve watched YouTube videos of a SF Tesla driver who submits one or two reports every video (autopilot wasn’t aggressive enough, or failed to navigate a complicated turn, etc). Are each of those counted in the 3000 safety concerns?

I can’t even fathom any other car manufacturer having lower numbers.

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People are just not reporting them. My model 3 does something scary at least a few times a month but I've never reported any.

Number of actual accidents per million miles is the important stat though, and Tesla appears to be doing reasonably well on that front.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fsd-beta-safety-crash-statis...

Sure, and VW also self-reported that their engines passed emissions testing and Ford self-reported that the Pinto was safe. Self-reported numbers by the manufacturer who has a direct financial interest to lie and who maliciously miscategorizes their L4 design intent system as a L2 design intent so that they do not need to do safety testing or submit reports to regulatory agencys is the opposite of believable.

Except this leak confirms them in this case hence the subject of this thread?

Why not?

  > My model 3 does something scary at least a few times a month but I've never reported any.

Why not? The barrier of entry is pressing a button and then describing, in voice, what just happened.

The privacy violation of doing so and communicating who the hell knows what metadata to a man-child who will happily disclose it if he feels like it one day?

That's a fair point.

Not least because this is why I wouldn't consider buying a Tesla. It feels too much like dealing with software: it isn't your car. It is Teslas car. And maybe paying a bunch of money for it means you can drive it, but sometimes, when you hit some corner case, it doesn't.

As a Tesla owner, I would love to know what corner cases you are referring to.

I've been a tech at a Ford dealership, and I'd say that the incidents which render the average Ford undrivable are far greater than the incidents which render the average Tesla undrivable.

This is a much hairier and more nuanced conversation for a different thread, but second-owner (used) FSD comes to mind as an example of not truly owning the car.

Second hand Teslas represent a challenge as someone pointed out. You also can't necessarily modify or inspect the car without Tesla getting their panties in a twist (I dare you to connect to the network inside your car and try to get access to the onboard computers and then try to have the discussion with Tesla about who's car it really is).

The there are the massive privacy issues and the fact that you can't do anything about that: your car is spying on you. (I know consumers don't care enough about this in the US to elect politicians that take privacy seriously, but in Europe we do. Which is why Tesla is under scrutiny for not only collecting massive amounts of invasive data, but also for not being able to adequately safeguard the data they collect).

I'm not in the US. My Tesla has an option to disable data collection. You could argue that the company might not honour that option, but that argument then opens a very broad subject across many industries.

Here's a test you can do: try to access the ethernet inside your car.

Still think it's your car?

> Why not?

Why?

No, seriously. Why?

Most people are (correctly) disillusioned enough to understand not to use a company-provided feedback funnel.

It is possible that this one is different. Doesn't change the fact the correct first impression is to never use the feature.

> Why? > No, seriously. Why?

To improve the feature. The same reason that we report bugs to KDE, Mozilla, LibreOffice, Canonical, Debian, Red Hat, Anki, JetBrains, Oracle, etc.

I submit bugs to open source projects as they are transparent and it helps developers.

I don’t submit random bugs to Oracle because nothing happens unless it’s serious and I have paid for support to have dedicated engineers debugging stuff.

yea, in oss projects, users tend to feel more like stakeholders than with products of some mega-corp.

we all know that these feedback channels just create a corpus of opinions to be used for arbitrary arguments by management. no one is gonna read or even react to this unless it's necessary.

I get this a lot with institutional support at my organization’s IT. “Why didn’t you report it, it just takes a minute.”

The effort is in the follow up time and the pointlessness.

Submitting an IT ticket is different than a Tesla event. But I don’t want someone to ask me if I’ve rebooted my computer and trying to call and confirm I’ve tried all the things I said I tried.

I never submit tickets unless I expect some strong probability of solution.

I was going to say "Because you believe in the Tesla mission. That's why someone buys the car." but I realize that that's actually no longer the case. That they've become a car manufacturer where customers can simply weigh the pros/cons as they decide what car to buy.

my six year old model 3 with 60,000 miles on it doesn’t do anything I don’t tell it to- this sounds like user error. I wouldn’t report user error either.

There's no reason to assume that of owners of other car brands are reporting 100% of issues, so relative comparison is still valid.

It’s not the burden of society to prove the dangers of the technology we purchase on behalf of the businesses that sell it.

We recall consumer products for danger well below the numbers reported in the article above. A vehicle on the road should be held to an even higher standard.

> We recall consumer products for danger well below the numbers reported

Aren't recalls related to systematic failure and severity, instead of absolute number of occurrences of an issue?

It can be both.

I am wary of the word “society” when it means in this case “a counsel of my design”, but otherwise agree with the sentiment.

Safety testing has proven that Teslas are incredibly safe - probably some of the safest cars on the road. Both in crash tests and accidents per mile driven.

If someone is claiming that there is a safety issue despite the existing data, then yes, the burden of proof moves to them to validate their new claim.

Their claim IS the data.

Except that the data leaked does not demonstrate that the Teslas are unsafe.

No, of course not, a company with a policy to sweep accident data under the rug can't possible be unsafe, can it?

Do we? I don’t think so. We recall vehicles based on an investigation and quantification of the risk.

The numbers here aren’t very high and they don’t reflect any serious risk of harm. Recall math is interesting to me, but it’s not just a function of customer complaints.

Do you know how many sudden unintended acceleration were needed for Toyota to take a beating? How many fires were needed for Ford to recall Pinto? How many ignition failed for GM to take a beating?

All of those were low numbers.

No I do not. What were those nummbers?

Toyota recalled 9 million cars for about 40 deaths.

Ford recalled 1.5 million cars for about 40 fires.

GM recalled 30 million cars for about 120 deaths.

To put things into perspective, about 100 people die from traffic accidents each day in USA.

In Germany alone and for a period of time.

No. Despite the data being leaked to German newspaper most cases are reportedly from the US.

The overall safety numbers for Teslas speak for themselves. Teslas are some of the safest cars to own.

Obviously these issues should be solved, but net-net, Teslas are very very safe.

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