Comment by Uzza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Uzza | Hacker News Reader

There is a reason accidents are done on a per mile basis, so let's make a quick example to show why.

There is two cars, car A and car B. Each driven by 1000 drivers each year.

Car A: The drivers drive a total 10000 km each year, and 20 people get into one accident each, averaging one accident every 500 km.

Car B: The drivers drive a total 1000000 km each year, and 40 people get into one accident each, averaging one accident every 25000 km.

Which car is safer? According to this opinion piece it's car A. But anyone that has even surface knowledge about statistics would realize that it's car B.

It would take only 500 km in car A for someone to have gotten into an accident on average, while for Car B it would be 25000 km. Drivers of car A are therefore on average 50 times more likely to get into an accident. Statistically, if car A was driven as far as car B, every single driver would have had two accidents each.

Conclusion: It is impossible to reach the conclusion in the title given only accidents per total number of drivers. More data is needed.

You can actually assume fewer Miles per year per car with EVs. 4500 Miles per year fewer:

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/13/new-study-finds-electri...

That makes this Dara even more damning

A suspect there's also an aspect than longer journeys are safer to take into account. Merging onto a high speed road is a time where accidents are more likely, but you might only do it once between cities. Cruising at high speed on a good road0 is relatively safe.

Drive in a city and you may be merging 5-6 times as you move from road to road.

I'm just saying that assuming a linear relationship to distance is probably incorrect as well.

But is it not reasonable to assume that all consumer car makes drive similar distances in average?

No. High-mileage drivers have a reason to prefer electric vehicles, since they're cheaper to operate per-mile than gasoline vehicles.

But range is less… we need more data before making assumptions.

A reason, but realistically, EV buyers are, anecdotally, buying them because they're greener and cooler than ICE vehicles. Very little people I know are doing it for the perceived cost savings and almost none of the EV owners I know are high-milage drivers.

True. Ideally high mileage drivers are electric, but that doesn't make it true.

This data from 2018[1] indicates that the most frequently driven car models are driven 25% more than average, and the least are driven 75% less than average. That is individual models, which you would expect to average out over multiple models. The large car companies like Ford and GM with a broad range of model types and customer base are in the middle of the pack in the lending tree report, as expected, while smaller companies tend to fall at the extremes. This could be explained by either differences in the types of customers they attract, or differences in driving distance.

For example RAM only sells trucks, and their drivers may not be any worse than other truck drivers, but they don't sell other vehicles to bring the average down.

Looking at the brands with the lowest crashes, they are one that are stereotypically owned by older drivers who drive significantly less miles.

All in all, enough suspicious correlations for me to take the data with a grain of salt.

[1]https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/mark-phelan/2018/07/2...

One small paragraph on what the headline suggests the article will be about and the rest of the article is talking about Tesla’s latest recall

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