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Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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