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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

To pile on to this pathetic excuse for a company: anyone considering buying a Tesla should know that they are the #1 brand for fatal accidents in the United States, with over twice the accident rate of a typical automaker: https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...

This terrible statistic can’t just be explained by aggressive driving owners or some other factor like that. Dodge has plenty of aggressive drivers buying their 700HP V8 rear wheel drive vehicles but they have better fatal accident rates than Tesla.

I’m convinced that Tesla makes unsafe cars and covers it up wherever they can.

The crash test safety awards their vehicles have won are clearly not representative of reality.

The self-driving system Tesla offers is only “ahead” of the competition because the competition is unwilling to sell an unsafe system.

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Your link only suggests driver and road conditions to be blamed. Consider the amount of power coming from a base model, I would lean towards driver. What they do with FSD stats is terrible and it would be refreshing to have some unbiased looks at it. Your narrative though is too biased and the link makes no connection to Tesla being responsible for the fatalities.

I am proud of my bias against fascists and trillionaires.

Tesla’s fatality statistics don’t share my bias and speak for themselves.

At some point “it’s the driver’s fault” turns into “bad vehicle design” when enough scale is applied. Tesla is not some kind of low-volume niche automaker.

If I write software where the “Save” button is small and grey and the “discard changes” button is bold and blue, it’s not the user’s fault when many of my users lose their data. I was responsible for bad design.

It was Tesla’s choice to remove physical controls, make their screen as distracting as possible, make their cars accelerate faster than they need to despite competing in mainstream vehicle segments, deliver FSD with misleading promises in beta state, remove manual door releases from the vehicle trapping people inside, etc.

> Tesla vehicles have a fatal crash rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven, according to the study; Kia is second with a rate of 5.5,

Basically the same as Kia. Why are Kias so bad?

2 reasons I can see.

Kia have way smaller and cheaper cars with less security features to market. Tesla had front page news at some point saying how they were the safest car ever produced.

Tesla is giving people driving their cars a false sense of security.

But the article doesn't say that at all - quite the opposite:

> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws. In fact, Tesla vehicles are loaded with safety technology; the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) named the 2024 Model Y as a Top Safety Pick+ award winner, for example. Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well.

I am sure there is a component of safety systems in a Kia but I would bet the bigger weighting is on driver profile.

Until recently, Kias were sub-entry level shitboxes

This would affect both driver selection and performance during impact

Slap a ridiculously powerful drivetrain on it and a premium price tag and you have a Tesla

that study was pretty thoroughly debunked. Also, I believe it was put out by a lobbying group representing auto dealerships who see the Tesla DTC model as a mortal threat. There is a lot of legitimate criticism to be directed towards Tesla but the ISeeCars study "aint it".

Find a link that shows it’s debunked then? All they did was analyze federal crash data.

I don’t know what’s so hard to believe about the study. Tesla’s numbers are pretty similar to other low-performing brands.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/11/tesla-fatality-rates/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISeeCars.com#Partnerships

https://x.com/larsmoravy/status/1860100416819855492

Looking for more. tl;dr is that NHTSA publishes accident rates but not mileage. ISeeCars has access to legacy auto mileage from dealership data but guessed at mileage for Tesla's in the period in question. Their methodology was not released and was a fraction of the total mileage that Tesla recorded over that period.

I do agree that Tesla could do a much better job with data transparency. But the claims of the ISC report are pretty difficult to reconcile with the crash test ratings they've gotten from many regulators across the world.

So really, Snopes didn’t actually find any direct evidence that the study is wrong according to their own article, and the only way to debunk it is to take the word of a Tesla executive who made the total mileage denominator bigger.

This doesn’t show that ISeeCars is biased against Tesla specifically. Certainly their methodology could be flawed, but we don’t really have anyone else debunking them directly, and we have no evidence that it’s a hit piece.

IIHS crash test scores being good are the only counterpoint and those are synthetic in nature: crash test in a controlled environment. They can’t test for things like whether the occupants could get out or whether autopilot hallucinated and got into an accident that would have otherwise not happened.

I've heard people saying the study is bad, but whenever I've asked about why the answers have been pretty bad. Do you have a good source for why we should disregard it?

For a while they were the safest car in crash tests, weren't they? Was there an inflection point where they were dropping like a rock? Or is this a case of measuring different things (crash tests vs fatal accident rates)?

I know you probably don't know off the top of your head, I'm hoping someone can chime in.

Dan Luu had some interesting analysis about car safety, comparing how different auto-makers fared on newly introduced crash tests: https://danluu.com/car-safety/

The main take-away for me from that page is that very few manufacturers seem to design for actual safety (only Volvo had good results), and Tesla was angry that a new test had been introduced which feels indicative of a bad safety culture.

I am admittedly not a fan, but I note that in my social circle I don't have anyone who considers one, one that has one wants to sell one, one vendor has one ( the truck one ), but it is clearly for marketing purposes so at least it makes sense.

How do we know it can't be explained by self-selecting driver population? That sounds like the most likely explanation, and it's the only explanation advanced by the article you provided.

I guess there's something to be said for "hey, if you're considering buying a Tesla, you may be the kind of person that's likely to kill themself in a car crash. Consider buying a safer car or taking the bus!"

Reminds me of the first episode of madman where the guy pitches appealing to everyone’s “inherent death wish” when selling cigarettes haha

“That’s it? If you’re gonna die, die with us?”

Who would have guessed that a vehicle with no turn signal stalk or physical control to shift gears is unsafe!

Tesla sells too many vehicles for it to be a “self selecting driver population” thing anymore. They sell almost as many Model Ys as Honda CRVs.

I have a hard time believing that driver profile has anything to do with it, and I especially dislike the temptation to explain away the data by making unsubstantiated excuses for the company.

Dodge has better statistics than Tesla and they almost exclusively sell muscle cars.

They don’t, these are the anti-Tesla folks. No level of reasoning is available for discussions like this.

I don’t like Elon but I also don’t think fiction and misleading stats serve anyone.

We're talking about a brand whose every car has at least 350HP, and most of them have more.

It's not an apples-to-oranges comparison.

So why is Dodge better on the list? Most Dodge models sold are rear wheel drive performance cars. They basically only sell the Challenger/Charger and the Hornet SUV that nobody’s buying.

The lengths people will go to defend Tesla continue to astound me. Can’t we just say that they suck without making excuses for them?

Because the word "data" doesn't have magical properties? And the fact that you have some "data" that seems to contradict both the personal experience of many other people and data points is actually curious?

Like this: https://www.euroncap.com/assessments/tesla/model%2B3/1110/

Something has to be flawed or there has to be some bias.

Why does something have to be flawed? Because we have to find some way to exonerate Tesla by default?

Synthetic controlled environment crash tests can’t test for a lot of fatal and documented problems with Teslas like electric door latches trapping occupants, distracted drivers due to most vehicle functions being screen-based, owners who think the vehicles are more autonomous than they really are due to misleading marketing, and other issues that crash tests just don’t catch.

I.e., They might do well once they’re in a crash but they might get in more crashes per mile leading to more fatalities per mile and a crash test can’t show that.

I can even accept that they get into more crashes per mile because they aren’t road tripped as frequently as gasoline cars and are used in more high fatality settings (e.g., stroads have worse fatalities than highways). Obviously that in particular wouldn’t be Tesla’s fault.

Their electric latches are stupid and should be illegal. Screens don't add distractions, certainly not more than any Uber driver juggling two phones has. People really overestimate that imaginary issue, especially when every car on the road has a screen with a CarPlay now.

Care-free drivers could be the result of their marketing for sure but ultimately it's on them and this is precisely the bias I'm talking about.

Look, I do drive a Model 3. I like some parts and hate the others. Calling this "Autopilot" should have been illegal. But it does sound quite weird to me to insinuate they aren't safe as cars when European agencies found no safety issues with them.

> Screens don't add distractions

lol. Those same European agencies you claim find the Tesla to be super safe are the ones mandating physical controls in future vehicles.

https://www.autoblog.com/news/europe-and-china-now-require-p...

Study on the distracting touch screens:

https://www.washington.edu/news/2025/12/16/video-drivers-str...

Eyes off road during level 2 autonomous driving:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...

Teslas can do well in synthetic crash tests and still get into more fatal accidents per mile for other reasons. The two concepts aren’t mutually exclusive.

I’d be fine with admitting that it’s because EV owners put fewer highways miles on them. But Tesla’s dismissive and combative reputation on safety along with removing simple controls like turn signal stalks isn’t doing them any favors.

I own a Mazda from their physical controls era (sadly somewhat coming to a close with the 2027 CX-5). The idea that the median driver is an uber driver juggling two phones is not realistic. My Mazda does not allow me to operate CarPlay with the touch screen while I’m driving. This alone stops me from messing with it. I can operate common functions by feel with physical buttons in the vehicle without looking at the screen.

I can operate the climate controls, mirror adjustments, turn signals, gear shifter, windshield wipers, air vents, drive modes, basically everything without looking completely by touch and muscle memory.

As a model 3 owner you have to admit your Tesla is basically an impossible rental car for the average person who has never driven one. They’ll have to take a tutorial on how to shift with a touch screen, how to adjust mirrors, where are the turn signals, how to turn on the windshield wipers, etc.

Now imagine if every car brand was Tesla and they all had completely different touch screen software designs and everything was on the screen. I think Avis and Hertz might go out of business or have to start their own car company to compensate.

> I’m convinced that Tesla makes unsafe cars and covers it up wherever they can.

Tesla makes unsubstantiated, exaggerated claims about capabilities of their system and directly encourages unsafe behavior. How many other manufacturers encourage test subjects to drive full speed ahead into a concrete divider "to see what happens"?

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