Cybertrucks Are Deadlier Than Infamous Ford Pintos | Hacker News Reader

Cybertrucks Are Deadlier Than Infamous Ford Pintos

motherjones.com

89 pointslaurex69 comments

I was confused on if they meant deadly to drive, or deadly to other people/vehicles that they hit. It appears that the article is about deadly to drive (I suspect that they are also very dangerous to those they hit, but that's just a gut feeling).

As much as I detest Cybertrucks, this study seems pretty flawed.

>the approximately 34,000 Cybertrucks on the roads had five fire fatalities

Is how they calculated it. Except they don't know how many are sold. And one of those five fatalities was actually a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Three of the remaining four fatalities occurred in a single incident. No information about how much these were driven, either.

Not sure I like the definitive sounding headline of this article, or the report ("the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto") given the unknown variables, caveats, etc.

Looks like a hit job article to bandwagon on Anti-Musk sentiment.

Hit pieces are red meat to this place. They all high five each other, then quietly get into their Teslas for the drive home when no one is looking.

If we accept 5 as the number of fatalities, there needs to be 588,000 Cybertrucks in circulation to have an equivalent fatality rate as the Pinto.

If we give some freebies (discount the suicide, magically remove the passengers from a giant passenger truck), and say it's only 2 incidents of "1" fatality, then there needs to be 235,000 Cybertrucks sold to be only as bad as the Pinto.

Both of those estimates are an order of magnitude away from the estimate of 34,000 Cybertrucks sold.

I think it's a fair conclusion that even if there were no additional Cybertruck fire deaths going forward, the Cybertruck will not have a better safety record than the Ford Pinto for several years.

@avidiax is right, but the wording (aside from the last sentence) makes it sounded like Cybertrucks are safer.

Here's the math.

27 deaths caused by Pintos. ~ 3 million Pintos produce. "The recall affected approximately 1.5 million Pintos with model years from 1971 to 1976" according to [1].

If we take the 1.5 million number, 27/1500000 = .000018%

If we take the 3 million number, 27/3000000 = .000009%

[2] says they sold 38965 in 2024. Wikipedia says "it entered production in November 2023 and was first delivered to customers later that month." Let's say they sold 40,000 in total, which is in line with 34,000. Let's remove the non-related fatality.

4/40,000 = .0001%

This is 5.5x fatality rate if we take the 1.5 million number, 11x fatality rate if we take the 3 million number.

Article took the 5 fatality and 3 million number to get 14x.

I don't see any problem with the math nor assumptions.

1. https://www.reifflawfirm.com/fords-fiery-pintos-lead-injurie...

2. https://insideevs.com/news/747195/tesla-cybertruck-sales-dem...

5 fatalities are statistically insignificant

The analysis is quite lackluster because it only compares vehicle quantity where as fires are more a function of quantity and usage, so you should really be comparing vehicle-years or vehicle-miles.

For the Tesla Cybertruck, we can overestimate the vehicle-years by counting the quantity at at the end of the year for the full year for a total of 34,438 vehicle-years.

For the Ford Pinto, we can underestimate the vehicle-years by only counting the quantity at the start of the year for the full year only until the recall halfway through 1978 (e.g. we count 1971 production starting in 1972 until 1978.5 for a total of only 6.5 years). In that case, we count a total of 10,125,030 vehicle-years.

Excluding the controversial fatality for the Cybertruck, so we only count 4 fire fatalities, that is 1 fire fatality per ~8609.5 vehicle-years versus the Ford Pinto at 1 per ~375,001 vehicle-years; making the Tesla Cybertruck ~43.5 times higher than the excess fire deaths of the Ford Pinto.

Comparing against overall fire fatality rate [1]. In 2022, there were 650 confirmed deaths in vehicles where a fire occurred over ~232,000,000 household vehicles. That is a rate of about 1 fire fatality per ~350,000 vehicle-years; making the fire fatality rate of the Tesla Cybertruck ~41.4 times higher than the average vehicle.

Note that the Ford Pinto is just excess fire deaths attributed to the gas tank defect rather than the total fire rate which is not well reported which is why it might be comparable to the overall fire fatality rate of today despite higher fire safety on most modern cars. All fires for the Ford Pinto is likely a higher number than the 27 fire deaths directly attributed to the specific defect.

[1] https://content.nfpa.org/-/media/Project/Storefront/Catalog/...

This analysis claims someone that detonated a bunch of fireworks and then shot himself in the head as a "fire fatality" and acknowledges it.

that's where I stopped reading. that let me know this was not a rigorous study and had other motivations

Yep, Timely FUD...

We don't make statistical exemptions for vehicle fatalities just because the driver failed in a way we don't like. Drunk driving fatalities count too. If a 3 year old hit the accelerator and goes straight into a brick wall, that counts. They all count.

From the Department of Transportation's statistics on aviation fatalities at https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/by_the_numbers/tran...:

"NOTES: 2001 figures exclude two events—the September 11th Attacks and the Flight 587 crash."

(which is especially weird, because the flight 587 crash was pilot error)

The guy who killed himself outside of the Trump tower lit the fire himself. It was not a failure of the truck. In-fact the truck protected people by venting the explosion up and containing the blast. It's as wrong as counting gunshot victims as dying of COVID

Lighting a truck on fire is fundamentally different than a truck starting on fire. The fact that they are willing to count that shows me they are disingenuous.

Link for the COVID reference: https://www.freedomfoundation.com/washington/washington-heal...

If that 3 year old shot himself with a gun inside the truck, which has nothing to do with the vehicle he was in, does it still count?

We can, and especially in this small sample size, we can exclude it if we want to. The question is if a cybertruck is a dangerous vehicle, not can I have mental illness and shoot myself inside of my vehicle, which happens to be a cybertruck. That danger is present for any vehicle, there's nothing particular about the design of the cybertruck that helps or hinders self-inflicted gunshot wound, unlike a gas tank at the back of the vehicle that causes fire when it gets into an accident.

Of course you can. In accordance with proper science and research they made their methodology and used dataset clear and transparent allowing you to run your own analysis.

Compensating for dataset bias in your preferred manner, we get 4 fire fatalities over 34,438 vehicles giving a Cybertruck fire fatality rate of ~11.6 per 100,000 units in comparison to a Ford Pinto fire fatality rate of ~0.85 per 100,000 units; ~13.6x the fatal fire rate of the Ford Pinto. Even counting mere incidents we get 2 over 34,438 vehicles which still results in a fire fatality rate of ~5.8 per 100,000 units; ~6.8x the fatal fire rate of the Ford Pinto.

Of course, this is all actually a massive underestimate as can be seen from my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039925

Where the comparable analysis on vehicle-years, a much better comparable, actually places the fatal fire rate at ~43.5x if we discount the suicide and ~21.7x if we only count incidents. And in comparison to current vehicles would be ~41.4x and ~20.7x, respectively.

In accordance with proper science and research, we're gonna ignore the fact that we've got 35,000 data points and are extrapolating to 100,000? How about we say early results look really bad but we have to wait for more data before making any conclusions?

Are you joking? It is a rate. It is cited in per 100,000 because that is the characteristic rate that results in low integer-scale values. Rates are scale-invariant so you could just as well cite it in per 1,000 if you desire, but then you get a fire fatality rate of 0.0085 per 1,000 for the Pinto which is a much more annoying number to understand and compare for regular people.

Frankly, it would have been better to just cite the inverse of 1 fire fatality per ~8609.5 Cybertrucks (I already discounted the suicide) versus the 1 fire fatality per ~117,536 Pintos. Does that help you understand the usage and comparison of rates?

Are you? The smaller the data set the more likely it's anecdotal and down to luck, good or bad.

If a self-driving car drives one mile with zero accidents, would we extrapolate from there and say they have a perfect driving record? Because thats just how the number work out? No! We'd want to see how this hypothetical self-driving car does over a million or a billion miles, over a wide range of conditions, before drawing any conclusions.

Oh I see. You appear to be unfamiliar with how to evaluate failure rates.

You appear to be under the mistaken assumption that your sample size needs to be in proportion to the failure rate you hope to achieve to draw any conclusions. That is untrue. Your sample size only needs to be in proportion to the actual failure rate to draw conclusions.

If your self-driving car drives one mile with zero crashes, that provides almost no evidence to support a claim that your self-driving car has a crash rate of 1 per billion miles. However, if your self-driving car drives one mile and crashes 10 times, that provides tremendous amounts of evidence against the claim that your self-driving car has a crash rate of 1 per billion miles. This is despite the fact that both instances only have a sample of a single mile.

Proving, failure to prove, and disproving are not symmetrical at all. But do not worry, that is a common mistake made by people with no training in scientific or statistical analysis; just take this as a learning experience.

You’re making a valid point about the asymmetry in proving vs. disproving failure rates, but the condescending tone is unnecessary. That might be acceptable behavior back on Reddit or Kiwi farms or wherever you come from, but we strive for a higher level of discourse here.

I never said a sample size needs to match the target failure rate—only that proving an extremely low failure rate requires significant data. Yes, a high failure rate can be detected quickly, but that doesn’t mean a small sample is enough to confirm an ultra-low failure rate. Just because a car doesn’t crash in one mile doesn’t mean it won’t in the next billion. You’re oversimplifying the problem while assuming I don’t understand statistical inference.

This is a ridiculous statement, and I'm fairly confident you don't know what you're talking about.

Mentally unbalanced people tend to go for cybertrucks. It is relevant.

While I would never voluntarily get into a Cybertruck, the infamy of the Pinto is mostly based on myth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...

A Rutgers Law Review article by former UCLA law professor Gary T. Schwartz, examined the fatality rates of the Pinto and several other small cars of the time. He noted that fires, and rear-end fires, in particular, are a very small portion of overall auto fatalities. At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions. When considering the overall safety of the Pinto, subcompact cars as a class had a generally higher fatality risk. Pintos represented 1.9% of all cars on the road in the 1975–76 period. During that time, the car represented 1.9% of all "fatal accidents accompanied by some fire". This implies the Pinto was average for all cars and slightly above average for its class. When all types of fatalities are considered, the Pinto was approximately even with the AMC Gremlin, Chevrolet Vega, and Datsun 510. It was significantly better than the Datsun 1200/210, Toyota Corolla, and VW Beetle. The safety record of the car in terms of fire was average or slightly below average for compacts, and all cars respectively. This was considered respectable for a subcompact car. Only when considering the narrow subset of a rear impact, fire fatalities for the car were somewhat worse than the average for subcompact cars. While acknowledging this is an important legal point, Schwartz rejected the portrayal of the car as a firetrap.

This analysis is flawed in many ways:

1) Sample size - there have been a grand total of 3 cybertruck fires that resulted in a fatality 2) Flawed data - they admit that they're including a suicide bomber in that count of 3 incidents 3) Sample size again - they admit they don't actually know how many cyber trucks have been sold

Given any of the above, let alone all of them, anyone would realize that there's not enough data to make any conclusions here.

And despite all that, apparently the DOD just awarded Tesla a $400M contract to produce armored Teslas. That will somehow charge up at the local war zone charging station? https://www.yahoo.com/news/musk-wins-400m-us-government-1413...

It doesn't matter if they get made, let alone if they are useful

What's key is the transfer of money to Tesla.

No.

>The December version of the document had included an “Armored Tesla” budget item that would span five years and start in 2025, however the document was revised to remove Tesla’s name. This followed reports of the company’s moniker on the procurement document from Drop Site News and the New York Times.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-13/plans-to-...

Last time I checked, Biden was president back in December.

War zones don't have gas stations either. The US military brings its own energy with them.

> Of all the cargo the military transports, more than half consists of fuel. About 80 percent of all material transported on the battlefield is fuel.

https://archive.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2...

Please don't allow partisan blog spam on the site. Liberal or conservative.

Even if it's true, don't use a partisan blog as a source.

There are thousands of historic hackernews news items from MotherJones, which has a long history of serious news reporting, and this seems to be researched reporting as well.

I cannot understand the basis of your argument.

"I've never heard of it, and I don't like what they said"

See also the similar argument "The media isn't reporting on this thing that they are in fact reporting on, but none of my friends on Facebook are sharing with me"

While I'm not sure exactly how we're supposed to filter out certain news sources, I would not for a moment say MotherJones has a sterling track record of "serious news reporting." In this case, in particular, their analysis is ridiculous.

They claim that the Cybertruck, which was chronically delayed, was actually "rushed to market" to "beat competition," and use that to make a comparison to a flawed vehicle from the 70s. Flawed because it had a misplaced gas tank. Nowhere in this do they cite any evidence that the Cybertruck was indeed rushed, nor do they support any claim that the Cybertruck might have a misplaced... battery.

Then they go on, incorrectly (which they've since corrected), to claim the vehicle hasn't been crash-tested. It has. But to counteract that reality, the author points out that Tesla hasn't released any of its own safety data. I'm not aware of any car company releasing private safety data — nor would I put any stock in such data. That's exactly why we have independent regulators.

I know everyone has bills to pay, MotherJones included. I understand "Elon's Cybertrucks" is just too juicy a headline not to publish. But please at least try to make a coherant argument next time.

I'm sorry, correcting a story with recent factual information doesn't strike me as undermining the fundamental credibility of a source. Given that they correctly source and attribute the claim that it wasn't tested to a recent article that was accurate at its time of publication.

And given that Tesla did not respond to their request for comment on the data, nor did the national highway safety administraiton, who was supposed to correct them, how?

This is not a problem of bias.

A thing can be both very late and rushed to market.

Your reading comprehension is not good.

From the article:

> In a classic Mother Jones cover story from 1977, reporter Mark Dowie spent six months investigating the deadly Ford Pintos and found that the company rushed to create and distribute the cars to beat the competition

I don't know how they can be clearer that that is talking about the development of the Ford Pinto, not the cybertruck.

Here, you can educate yourself so you don't look so ignorant next time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones_(magazine)

For those too lazy to click on a link, calling Mother Jones "partisan blog spam" would be like calling The NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the Paris Review, The Guardian, the NYROB, etc. "partisan blog spam"

"Throughout its circulation, Mother Jones magazine has been the subject of criticism regarding the editorial position of the staff"

I'm not surprised. Right wingers will complain about anything not vociferously against the interests of the people.

HN has been under a major astroturfing campaign lately IMO. The question is who is doing it.

If something is touted as indestructible, it probably means it will destroy everything else it encounters.

Ironically, the only reason the Ford Pinto is infamous is because of a Mother Jones hit piece in the 70s that vastly overstated the number of deaths from the Pinto.

Attributing the causes of observed vehicle incidents is a tough task. The Pinto clearly had a design flaw, but risk encompasses more causes than simply design. Vehicle models often target or appeal to certain subset of buyers and those buyers don't have evenly distributed driver risk.

The market that these vehicles appeals to almost certainly skews towards riskier than average, which will also be a contributing component of the observed risk.

motherjones is not a credible source of analysis and they are reposting from a blog that has "hot takes" in its mission statement.

this is not worth posting on this site, it's clickbait garbage

Sounds like a total deathtrap.

in the 5 fatalities, we have:

-The crazy man who loaded his cybertruck up with fireworks and killed himself in front of the Trump hotel in las vegas -A cybertruck that ran into a tree, killing 3 people and catching on fire -A cybertruck that ran into a culvert, killing 1 person and catching on fire

Cool ... and?

All of them are accidents caused by user and one of them is a suicide attempt.

How is tesla or any car manufacturer responsible for any of this?

>All of them are accidents caused by user

Wait, is that not the absolutely and by far most common cause of deaths in cars?

Sorry, I'm trying to follow up on your "logic".

Mother jones used to be an awesome magazine before they went full woke and developed Elon derangement syndrome

I saw someone calling out Tesla for not producing something called Tesla Roadster since 2017 even though they collected pre-order money for it. Doesn't really sound like a derangement. Any company would get called out for that.

And the state department is going to buy 400M worth. We live in a strange timeline.

The thing is, it's not strange at all. Graft and corruption were the usual way throughout most of history.

Over the last 80 or so years, we have, at least every once in a while, tried tackling those issues. For a variety of reasons mainly related to economics, the US government is now headed by people who want to return to the old ways, mainly for their personal enrichment. So it's, I don't know, 80 years of attempts to do better, and ~5920 years of the status quo.

Elections have consequences.

DNC cozied up to one of the last big ones to do it, Cheney, with Halliburton contracts

Edit: No, Dick was eagerly welcomed for his support. Liz helped spread the message of his support

Liz Cheney, the Republican who was elected by Republicans as a Republican to congress? I agree with your sentiment though, Democrats reach across the aisle far too often.

The thing is, the solicitation was initiated under the Biden administration and when Trump/Musk found out about it, they actually halted it [0]

> Vehicles made by Elon Musk’s company were on a purchase list issued before Donald Trump was inaugurated, and before Mr. Musk became one of the president’s top advisers.[1]

Sorry, but the basis for your narrative just blew up. But I'm sure you'll try to find a way to blame Trump/Musk for this anyway.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g-s1-48571/trump-administrati...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/us/politics/state-dept-ar...

I'll keep that in mind as a guy has his interns plumb around in sensitive government computer systems for... reasons... with no statutory or constitutional authority to do so.

Completely benevolent reasons, I'm sure.

You don't get to the levels of wealth that Trump and Musk have attained without thoroughly screwing over a lot of people. One contract being halted doesn't exonerate them from that.

Hmm. Doesn't that work out close to about 12% of all Cybertruck sales to date?

Wow, this false statement and these comments just falling in line with the leftist narrative even when it's based on pure lies.

Here are the facts.

- this solicitation for purchasing armored electric vehicles was initiated by the Biden administration.

- when Trump/Musk found out about this, they actually halted it

> In a statement, the State Department said the contract started in the Biden administration "to explore interest from private companies to produce armored electric vehicles."

>Tesla was the only company to express interest in the department's request at the time.

>Typically the next step would be "an official solicitation" for vehicle manufacturers to bid. But the solicitation is now on hold, according to a State Department spokesperson.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g-s1-48571/trump-administrati...

People dont know it, but tesla model Y was best selling car in 2023. This company is so far ahead, despite the hate

Yes, worldwide, and almost half of all Teslas are sold in China.

The idea that they can continue to stay atop of the Chinese market is not a bet I would be willing to take.

That has nothing to do with this article and CyberTruck?

Also, Tesla sales went down in 2024 in the US. https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/2491/tesla-suffers-sharp-d...

How can we not know it? It's every second sentence out of every Tesla fanboy's keyboard. Thankfully, people wised up to the scam and it's no longer the case.

There was a lot less hate in 2023. Only fairly online liberals were really paying much attention to Elon's politics. Interested to see 2025 numbers.

Is that why their sales are plunging across the world? Why their stock has been dropping since mid December?

In some countries sales started falling mid 2024 and have fallen ~50-60% in one quarter. Germany says new Tesla registrations have plunged.

They're plunging in China, too - the biggest EV market in the world - which really fucks Tesla over. BYD is eating them alive.

They have the best selling model but they only have a few models. Other companies don't have any single model that outsells the Tesla model Y, but they have more models and that adds up.

For example in 2023 Tesla sold 1220k model Y, and 508k model 3. Toyota's best seller was the RAV4 at 1070k and their number 2 seller was the Corolla at 803k, so even just looking at the top 2 for the two companies Toyota sold a little more. But Toyota has 3 more models that also sold less than Tesla model Y but more than model 3: The Corolla Cross at 715k, Camry at 650k, and HiLux as 605k.

Worldwide, Tesla has 2.77% of the market, which is tied with Audi. Here's the market share of the companies that sell more: 11.07% Toyota, 6.41% VW, 4.87% Honda, 4.82% Ford, 4.56% Hyundai, 3.84% Nissan, 3.77% Suzuki, 3.53% Kia, 3.48% Chevrolet, 3.47% BYD, and 2.67% Mercedes-Benz.

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