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Comment by kirse | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but as a car enthusiast who spent much of his younger years devouring every ounce of Road&Track/Car&Driver mags, the phrase "any car ever tested" is a bit over the top... I'm almost positive the McLaren F1 (a car 20 years older) fared better than the Tesla in safety testing and was capable of being driven away after the testing finished...

F1 @ 30mph: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v482/Peloton25/McLaren%20F...

F1 @ 40mph: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUPq760LC00

I'm more than willing to acknowledge Tesla has fantastic results, especially for the price... but that top spot still belongs to my childhood automotive idol. ;)

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You may well be right -- I know nothing about car safety -- but I thought you might enjoy this fun bit of Elon-Musk-McLaren-safety-related info:

After selling PayPal (long before the Tesla Roadster), Musk bought a McLaren F1, subsequently crashed it, and walked away unscathed. Here's him talking about it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOI8GWoMF4M

As others have said — it's the side impact test that makes the Tesla Model S so notable.

There again, the F1 has one major advantage — it has a monocoque, and should therefore to do better than most (unibody) cars on the market. But to make a monocoque out of something like carbon fibre you need a lot of money!

(Good examples of this are the two Audi R18 crashes at Le Mans in 2011: http://www.carmaautolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Rock... is one after a ~200mph crash and spin into crash barrier. He got out on his own two feet. Pretty much everything but the monocoque is gone. Videos can be found on YouTube of both this and McNish's crash. At night, with so little video available, could scarcely tell what car it was…)

The article notes that the testing standards were changed substantially in 2011, in ways that makes them much harder to pass.

The McLaren F1 might still be much safer, but it did not go through the same testing procedures.

One more reason to not compare it to "any car ever tested".

That's a single test. It's not surprising that there's a car out there that can do better than a Tesla in one of the IIHS tests. However, to get a 5 star rating, you have to get a "good" on all of the tests, which I am very confident the F1 does not do.

Being a rear-engine design gives both the Tesla & the F1 a huge advantage in frontal tests. But I'm willing to bet that a side impact test or a roll over test will show much different results...

That's amazing! I had no idea the F1 was so sturdy. My assumption (probably common) is that these super light exotics disintegrate when hitting large insects, let alone walls.

Many of them do, although there is the notorious story of an Enzo that got literally torn in half on CA 1 and both people inside walked away.

Here's the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Eriksson#Car_crash

You have big part of why in your statement. "super light" Mass * Velocity. Less mass, means less energy to dissipate.

It's very likely that the Model S could also be driven away after the tests, since the engine sits on the rear axle and the only electronic component in the front is the 12v battery.

I don't know about the F1 these days but the P1 starts at million dollars. I would hope that for anywhere close to that cost they could build in protection for me from my own stupidity when I inevitable try to drive Decker Canyon at full speed. ;)

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