Tesla's vehicle safety record

My Nissan Leaf Forum

Help Support My Nissan Leaf Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Status
Not open for further replies.

edatoakrun

Well-known member
Joined
Nov 11, 2010
Messages
5,222
Location
Shasta County, North California
Continued from: Tesla's autopilot, on the road

GRA said:
edatoakrun said:
The very high fatality rate that seems to be emerging for Teslas is going to get its own thread soon. <snip>
Do you have any statistical data that supports your claim of a "very high fatality rate" for Teslas?...
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=22213&start=360#p528133

The main problem limiting analysis is there don't seem to be any high-integrity sources for comparing Tesla vehicle fatality rates to other cars with similar characteristics, basically both huge and expensive, that you can simply refer to...yet.

But the first thing to note is how very rare driver fatalities are for the large luxury cars and large luxury SUVs cars sold by TSLA's competitors in the USA, which are available up to MY 2014, and deaths through 2015, by selecting the options below:

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates

As far as I know, as of today (and with no figures produced by TSLA itself) you have to rely on TSLA critics (who tend to use language almost as innacurately as TSLA does) for similar compilations of reported TSLA vehicle deaths:

Are Tesla's Self-Proclaimed 'World's Safest Cars' Actually Among The World’s Deadliest?

If there’s one thing that Elon Musk likes more than pseudoprofundity, it’s superlatives. Small wonder, then, that the company that brought us the Gigafactory, Superchargers, and Ludicrous Mode has had an easy time convincing its fan base that Tesla makes the “safest car on the road”:

Lurkers on Tesla forums can confirm that these safety superlatives are articles of faith among Tesla’s flock.

@ElonBachman’s list has grown to include 40 Tesla fatalities globally, including 14 U.S. deaths of Tesla drivers and occupants and a Wile E. Coyote-esque smattering of deaths-by-cliff and deaths-by-swimming-pool. A link to that list, and the sources behind it, is included below the following table:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lkQJjG9gNQffucvL9Uf0Ag__aUbTyCj8/view
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-29/are-teslas-self-proclaimed-worlds-safest-cars-actually-among-worlds-deadliest

Comparing the number of reported USA driver fatalities from that chart, with the numbers and rates for miles driven from the IIHS, certainly seems to lead to the conclusion that the big Teslas are likely to be having more of their drivers killed on the road in the USA than their competitors, but if any one wants to try show why I'm wrong (statistical significance?) feel free to make your points.

Try to keep it on topic...

A recent CT article give a good summary of broader safety issues:

True or false? Tesla's bold safety claims come under scrutiny after fire, Autopilot crash

The latest test for Tesla is to determine true or false when it comes to the electric vehicle automaker's safety record. For years, Tesla has boasted that its cars and SUVs are safer than other vehicles on the roads, and CEO Elon Musk doubled down on the claims in a series of tweets this week.

The electric vehicles are under intense scrutiny from federal investigators, who have been looking into post-crash battery fires and the performance of Tesla's Autopilot semi-autonomous driving system. On Wednesday, they traveled to Utah to open another inquiry into a Tesla crash — their fourth this year — in which a Model S slammed into a firetruck that was stopped at a red light.

A look at the tweets and Tesla's past claims about the safety of its vehicles and Autopilot:

MUSK (from his tweets Monday): "According to (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), there was an automotive fatality every 86M miles in 2017 ((tilde)40,000 deaths). Tesla was every 320M miles. It's not possible to be zero, but probability of fatality is much lower in a Tesla."..

THE FACTS: This is based on a Tesla analysis of U.S. fatal crashes per miles traveled in 2017. The company's math is correct on the fatality rate involving all of the nation's 272 million vehicles, about 150,000 of which are Teslas, according to sales estimates from Ward's Automotive. But Tesla won't say how many fatalities occurred in its vehicles or how many miles they were driven.

Statistically, experts say Musk's tweet analysis isn't valid...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/ct-auto-tesla-safety-claim-factcheck-20180518-story.html
 
edatoakrun said:
Continued from: Tesla's autopilot, on the road

GRA said:
edatoakrun said:
The very high fatality rate that seems to be emerging for Teslas is going to get its own thread soon. <snip>
Do you have any statistical data that supports your claim of a "very high fatality rate" for Teslas?...
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=22213&start=360#p528133

The main problem limiting analysis is there don't seem to be any high-integrity sources for comparing Tesla vehicle fatality rates to other cars with similar characteristics, basically both huge and expensive, that you can simply refer to...yet.
That's what I thought, so any claims or discussion of "very high fatality rates" based on non-existent statistical data (which may be far too small to be statistically significant in any case) is premature and currently without foundation beyond anecdote. Should that situation change, this thread can discuss a real issue.
 
GRA said:
edatoakrun said:
Continued from: Tesla's autopilot, on the road

GRA said:
Do you have any statistical data that supports your claim of a "very high fatality rate" for Teslas?...
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=22213&start=360#p528133

The main problem limiting analysis is there don't seem to be any high-integrity sources for comparing Tesla vehicle fatality rates to other cars with similar characteristics, basically both huge and expensive, that you can simply refer to...yet.
That's what I thought, so any claims or discussion of "very high fatality rates" based on non-existent statistical data (which may be far too small to be statistically significant in any case) is premature and currently without foundation beyond anecdote. Should that situation change, this thread can discuss a real issue.
Nice of you to crop my post...to corrupt its meaning.

My next sentence reads:

.But the first thing to note is how very rare driver fatalities are for the large luxury cars and large luxury SUVs cars sold by TSLA's competitors in the USA, which are available up to MY 2014, and fatality rates through 2015, by selecting the options below:

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates
So, you can see zero USA driver death rates overall (and ranges, within confidence limits) for several of Tesla's competitors' car and Luxury SUV models (and numerous other vehicles) as most recently reported, compared with what looks to me like twelve reported USA driver deaths (forty total deaths) for the Tesla S/X series since introduction, as collected from news reports.

And while the twelve USA Tesla driver deaths, based only on the collection of published news reports, probably understates the true number of fatalities, translating that (or a correct higher number) into the corresponding death rate(s) and CLs overall, would obviously require much more data, or a great deal of speculation.

Avoiding unsupported claims of vehicle safety is what Elon Musk and other TSLA promoters should have done, until actual evidence existed that might back them up.

This could well be fertile ground for legal action against Tesla in the future.

In a few years we should have more accurate data on Tesla driver deaths and fatality rates from the IIHS:

...Why can't I find driver death rate data for new models?
It takes considerable time to gather and tabulate the real-world data needed to provide statistically significant results for new models. Complete vehicle registration data for each model year typically are released about two years later, and data on fatalities are first available approximately nine months after the end of the calendar year...
If you want to ignore the subject (and all other discussions of Tesla vehicle safety) until then, it's certainly your right to do so.

And I'll admit I should have been more careful choosing my words on the previous thread, and incorrectly used the term fatality rate below, rather than the intended number of fatalities reported but what I actually said, before you again cropped my quote distorting its meaning, was:

The very high fatality rate that seems to be emerging for Teslas is going to get its own thread soon.

The latest death reported (at least according to Tesla) was the human driver's fault...
 
edatoakrun said:
GRA said:
edatoakrun said:
Continued from: Tesla's autopilot, on the road


http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=22213&start=360#p528133

The main problem limiting analysis is there don't seem to be any high-integrity sources for comparing Tesla vehicle fatality rates to other cars with similar characteristics, basically both huge and expensive, that you can simply refer to...yet.
That's what I thought, so any claims or discussion of "very high fatality rates" based on non-existent statistical data (which may be far too small to be statistically significant in any case) is premature and currently without foundation beyond anecdote. Should that situation change, this thread can discuss a real issue.
Nice of you to crop my post...to corrupt its meaning.
and I';ll do it again here. I cropped it to concentrate on the critical issue in your original claim. The rest is subject to numerous variables that require detailed statistical analysis, and since you agree that the data for that doesn't yet exist, it's currently a waste of time.
 
Ed, don't start unneeded threads specifically to start an agenda biased thread. You are getting out of hand with this stuff. This is a warning for you to take it back a notch. This thread is locked.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top