Tesla Has Highest Rate of Deadly Accidents Among Car Brands, Study Finds
shoulderoforion@fedia.io to 
rollingstone.com
Automotive research firm finds that Tesla has higher frequency of deadly accidents than any other car brand
shoulderoforion@fedia.io to
Which is odd, because most electric vehicles (including some models of the Tesla) have better crash ratings due to having a crumple zone where the engine would be. Assuming that’s still true, there must be another factor that tips the balance towards deadly accidents. Some thoughts:
That was going to be my suggestion.
More irresponsible than Nissan Altima or Dodge Ram owners isn't easy
Used to be the 350Z
Most deadly to driver is not the same thing as most deadly. SUVs are usually extremely deadly to pedestrians and other road users.
As an SUV driver in Appalachia, I’ve mostly only injured pedestrians.
Anecdotal, I know. I’ve only killed 2 people. What’s the average?
Now I won’t sleep for fear of jinxing myself.
Being human is stupid.
please be kidding because otherwise im a terrible person to have laughed my ass off to this 😂
Of course I’m kidding lol.
Obviously you’re kidding. You said you drive in Appalachia. Yet, you are so clearly a seal. Driving by the beach, okay maybe I could see that, but mountains? Is there even anything for seals to do in Appalachia?
Why do you think I’m so angry? I’ve never even seen the ocean!
Am I being wooshed, and if no, wtf? When did killing even one person become an "only" occurrence?
...This is a stereotype I've never heard before.
Let me bring you up to speed fam.
If there's a systemic reason Tesla drivers have more accidents in a Tesla than drivers of other cars, that car is inherently less safe.
You can't simply put it down to "Tesla drivers suck", that's irresponsible and flawed logic.
If it's the acceleration, maybe we shouldn't have cars that accelerate the way a Tesla can. But I very much doubt that is the reason except anecdotally. I suspect more that safety features may in fact serve to distract, or people "learn" to rely on them, and than they turn out to not be 100% reliable.
We've all heard the weird tendency of Tesla breaking for no reason, that is hazard, also the turn signals are placed wrong, causing them to be impractical in some situations like roundabouts. Also the instrumentation in general of a Tesla is centered very much around the touch screen, another source of potential distraction. AFAIK even the speedometer isn't placed where it should be to observe it quickly without looking away from the road for too long.
A lot of inherent safety feature in traditional cars, have been shaved away in Tesla cars. Even getting out in an emergency can be a problem, as the handles may fail because they are electric, and the "real" handles are hidden.
There a dozens of examples where Tesla is designed for less safety than traditional cars, and if (when) the safety features fail, I bet they are a lot less safe than if those features weren't there to begin with.
Tesla cars are designed with a VERY strong focus on reducing production cost, Elon Musk is even boasting about it, and how he has an uncompromising goal to simplify production. But Tesla also lack the experience about why things are like they are in traditional cars.
The systemic reason might just simply be "They were the kind of a person that would buy a Tesla".
If I wanted to buy a safe car to drive responsibly while respecting all the traffic rules, an EV with almost a thousand horses with a 0-60 time of 2.1-2.4 seconds wouldn't exactly be my first choice.
If you want a more environmentally friendly car, which would you prefer: A Tesla or a Prius?
A lot of Tesla cars were sold when there were very few to no alternatives if you wanted an EV.
Also 2.1-2.4 is not normal for a Tesla. That's the very fastest of them.
Prius. Teslas are way too large and heavy for my tastes.
Though preferably I'd swap my VW Up to an electric one, they were too expensive back when I got mine.
As for the acceleration figure, I took it from this review:
We have had an e-UP for 3 years. We have ended up driving more in that than in our "primary" car which is a Golf. Had an ID5 as a loaner once, and it was great to get our UP back instead. If only the ID3 could tow our 1200kg caravan, that would be an ideal replacement for the Golf some day. Most electric cars are too large and heavy for my taste as well.
Tesla seems to me like a performance car that's sold as a luxury car. I think a lot of drivers bought it when they might not be able to handle them. Anecdotally, I remember my mom spinning out at a light years ago after she bought a used luxury vehicle that was actually a powerhouse.
That being said, your points are more then valid and user error is at most a small part of the equation.
Neither. Consumption isn’t environmentally friendly, it’s liberal greenwashing from leaders who think we can continue to consume infinite resources on a finite planet.
That's bullshit. EU has halved pollution and energy consumption since 1985, don't tell me it doesn't make a difference to work towards sustainability.
The raw materials don’t grow on trees and aren’t renewable. EVs are a fantasy solution that doesn’t actually solve the problem. The batteries are full of rare earth metals and toxic as fuck.
The problem is consumption itself, but rich Europeans such as yourself pat yourself on the back for being so virtuous when really all you’re doing is replacing one kind of pollution (dead dinosaurs) for another (rare earth metals).
And as we’ve seen with environmental regulations for shipping, now that the ships burn cleaner fuel there’s less pollution, which means less particles for sunlight to reflect off of in the air leading to faster global warming. An unexpected negative side effect of reducing pollution.
Then there’s the freedom issues with EVs. They’re expensive as hell, you can’t work on them yourself or with an independent mechanic, and they can get bricked remotely whether by bad software update, because you missed your payment that month, or a cyber attack. Sorry but if they can brick my $500 phone with a software update there’s no way in fucking hell im allowing these tech companies access to a $25k car. The capitalists will find a way for planned obsolescence so this way the line forever goes up.
Fuck that I’ll take the ICE with minimal computer bullshit in it everyday. My 2013 Subaru Impreza with 230k miles on it is more environmentally friendly than buying some stupid new EV for $50k that I don’t have. Keeping an efficient ICE car on the road for as long as it will drive is more efficient than trading it in for any EV. Raw materials don’t grow on trees.
100 companies produce 70% of the worlds pollution (not including the US military which is the largest single polluter in the world) fuck this EV and no plastic straws or bags bullshit. It’s not on individuals. Capitalism itself needs to be fucking overthrown if we have any chance of stopping climate change. And it’s already likely too late - the time to overthrow was in the 90s and people tried. A whole lot of leftist groups in the US got thrown life in prison as “terrorists” for it. ELF and ALF.
Batteries can be repurposed and recycled, and new batteries are free of rare earth metals.
https://thenextweb.com/news/the-cobalt-free-electric-vehicle-batteries-are-here
The newer LFP (Lithium Phosphate) batteries already widely in use do NOT use rare earth minerals, and are better than older batteries.
Old fashioned car battery uses lead, and is heavily regulated in EU, and is recycled. The new LFP batteries will probably rid os this use of lead.
Although I do agree with some of your other points, I don't see any of them really relating to the better sustainability of an EV over an ICE. I also don't see an argument against working towards better sustainability.
“Recycling” at least in America is its own form of greenwashing.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse
The only thing I know of that actually gets recycled is aluminum.
I am convinced it’s the acceleration. Also because you have that ability, it influences you to take risks in traffic (eg. Pulling out of a stopped lane) that you might not take in an ICE car because you can’t hit a high scored fast enough. They opened Pandora’s box by making every family car a Porsche.
I haven't noticed that at all for Tesla, and I did absolutely notice with BMW and AUDI for many years. Not so much driving fast, as driving like assholes. Yes an EV often starts quicker at a read light, but I've never seen anything wild here that I recall, and we have a lot of Tesla and other EV cars here now (Denmark).
But to be honest, it may be different here, because ICE cars are generally manual, which is way more fun to drive. With A Tesla you just press the speeder like an Automatic. It just responds faster. But a Tesla can also be driven for comfort, and it seems to me that's what just about everybody does here.
Luxury car owners are rich so they behave like the privileged assholes they tend to be.
This killed a billionaire a few months ago… maybe not such a bad feature
When this was posted last week, I mentioned that it was odd that all the most deadliest models on the list were all low production cars, meaning there might be something wonky with their methodology.
There was a similar "study" done a year or so ago where they simply looked at car insurance applications and used people's accident history and whatever vehicle they were trying to insure at the time to generate a list of which models had the "most accidents" in an incredibly flawed manor (Pontiac and Oldsmobile were among the safest even though neither company exists anymore).
The study said they normalize by mileage, which will account for both model popularity and driving distance. Driving safety is usually reported in incidents per mile or something to that effect, so that's all standard.
The data is by "Fatal Accident Rate (Cars per Billion Vehicle Miles)", Model Y having 10.6, Model S having 5.8. Ignoring Model 3, the average would be 8.2. Back in 2023 Tesla tweeted "Total miles driven by the Tesla fleet has exceeded 100 billion miles globally—equal to 532 round trips to the sun!"
So that math says 820 fatal accidents, Tesladeaths reports 614. I'd say the numbers seem close enough?
Or, hear me out, maybe they are just shit because so many corners have been cut in manufacturing that tesla cars should be perfect spheres by now.
This is my first thought. Anecdotally Tesla drivers joins the ranks of Audi and BMW of insane drivers around me.
Eh, I've seen the opposite. Most of the Tesla drivers in my area seem to drive relatively slowly. Yes, Teslas can go fast, but that burns through range like crazy, so I think a lot of them want that better range.
BMW drivers here are the worst because act completely entitled. They'll cross multiple lanes on the highway w/o signaling, aggressively pass on the right just to slow down to the speed of traffic again, and they'll park across multiple parking stalls. Audis are similar, but the demographics seem to skew a bit older.
Here are the main demographics I tend to see in my area (Utah):
The first three drive super aggressively, the fourth can vary, the fifth drives pretty normal, and the last tend to drive pretty conservatively. At least that's my read from my area.
That's Exactly my experience with Tesla drivers too (Denmark), Tesla drivers generally drive "comfortably" as I see it, and I've never seen a Tesla show off at a red light.
In my experience Tesla drivers are responsible drivers as much as everybody else. So I am pretty sure this is NOT a driver issue.
I think of tesla drivers like BMW drivers who aren't good with their money.
They're a cross between BMW drivers and incapable Prius drivers from the oast when they were the first hybrids.
Aka, you have the douches driving like entitled dicks because of the speed and prestige of the brand, and then you have the eco focused clueless drivers putting around.
I tend to keep a wary eye on all teslas because either way, they're unpredictable.
My bet is on the extra torque being the primary problem. Rental companies have complained about increased incident rates, and they're probably not renting out Teslas.
Hertz has had Tesla's most of the time I've picked up a rental
And they did U turn on that. June 2024:
This is my hunch too. Perhaps the UI is more distracting with Tesla's implementation of screens/menus/feedback for car functions too.
Just pointing out the study emphasize occupant fatalities which I take as to exclude external fatalities such as other vehicles.
Oh yeah, the big infotainment system could definitely be a factor in bad driving.
Also thanks for pointing out the methodology on how they’re counting fatalities, that easily scratches one item off my list.
Re bullet 2. Irresponsibility.
My theory is that it is isn’t the badge on the car, it’s the fact that people’s grocery getter now was the performance of a high-end sports car from a decade ago. And, like a with a sports car, Teslas are designed to encourage users to have “fun” driving. Every test drive from a Tesla store ALWAYS includes a segment where the store rep encourages people gun it onto or on a large open road.
Before Telsa it was the German manufacturers who dominated the commuter-car-with-sports-car-performance market. And guess what? Those people drove like a-holes.
That is not true. I mean the bit where you put that into the past tense. They still do.
I expect (hope) it's a small factor, but I wonder where pedestrian fatalities fit in. Several of the worst models seem to be large SUVs or sports cars - alongside these Teslas and some rather cheaper compact cars.
Pedestrians were not part of this study.
oh yeah, "... at least one occupant fatality".
The source dataset seems to have pedestrian/non-occupant fatalities, pretty shitty of tthem to go out of their way to exclude them.
Large SUVs must be worse for pedestrians because they’re essentially tanks that you can’t see out in front of for a good 20’ or so. A small child running to get their ball in the road will be completely invisible to a large SUV whereas a Tesla driver would be able to see the child a lot sooner and hopefully avoid them.
"A vehicle’s size, weight, and height certainly play a part in its ability to protect passengers in a crash,” said Brauer. “But the biggest contributor to occupant safety is avoiding a crash, and the biggest factor in crash avoidance is driver behavior. A focused, alert driver, traveling at a legal or prudent speed, without being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, is the most likely to arrive safely regardless of the vehicle they’re driving.”
Last time I looked up publicly available crash statistics in the US and calculated the per-maker numbers, Tesla was like 1/80th the typical per capita crashes of the average auto maker. That was a few years back, but I doubt that's changed without some sketchy statistic interpretations.
they used crash statistics for new cars with models from 2018 to 2022, where tesla is the most dangerous brand
They looked at fatal crashes only, which is presumably a very small share of all crashes. They also normalised to per mile driven using a sample of data they have - presumably some data on miles driven by car type.
Could be sketchy, could just be a much smaller sub-population.
But all they did was market their pretty good lane-assist and automated braking as a magic butler that lets you nap in the driver's seat.
How could this happen??
It really shouldn't be legal to call it "full self driving" unless you can take a nap in the back seat.
It shouldn't be called "full self driving" unless the company is going to cover the collision part of my insurance.
When insurance companies start writing policies that allow me to pay less for coverage if my car operates entirely autonomously, that's when I'll start taking car automation seriously. Until then, I'll assume all of these car companies and robotaxi services are just blowing smoke up my ass trying to convince me that this is the future of driving. Sure, it might be in somebody's future, but as long as I'm liable for what my car does while it's in motion, I'm going to insist that I remain in control of the vehicle. Lane/braking assist are all wonderful, but it shouldn't be a substitute for human awareness, it should be a supplement.
It's actually not. Tesla just won't care until the feds sue them in court for it.
Two Tesla owners got so mad…
Two Tesla owners walk into a bar. One stops in the middle on the way to the aeat and the other one drives right into a fire truck
As an ev driver, some people shouldn't be allowed this much acceleration 0-60 time, me included.
I've got a "shitbox" VW Golf - the twin charger version, it's only around 118kw. It's not quick by any stretch of the imagination even with the bolt-on mods mine has so far.
I'd not like to imagine the levels of trouble I'd find myself in owning even a midrange EV. Being able to give an EV a ham sandwich and hit 100kph in ~5 seconds or less is absurd.
Not to mention the weight. Those premium vehicles with long range stats are very heavy. That's what makes them so terrifying to me.
I work as a valet driver and the Tesla - unlike any other car including the newer EVs from other brands - seems like it was designed by people who have never driven a car. Ever.
Call me crazy but having nearly all the controls in a stupid idiotic touch screen where you have to scroll through multiple menus for basic car settings is a terrible idea. And so is braking by letting off the gas.
And the people who buy them tend to be a certain kind of person… not the brightest
B-but it looks so sleek and clean! Who cares about safety!
Does it? Looks outdated to me.
Braking by letting off the gas? So you can’t coast, it’s either go or stop?
It's called regen braking and puts energy back into battery. You can also control how strong the regen is in settings.
I prefer strong regen and hold mode. The car will slow as soon as you release the accelerator pedal. Hold mode basically means the car stays put when it's stopped until you press the accelerater. Creep mode would have the car roll forward when you release the brake.
The one pedal driving works really well but there is a small learning curve. I would find it a bit annoying to switch back and forth like the valet guy.
Do you put your foot over the brake and maybe hold some pressure on the pedal?. Just asking as I'm going to just put this out there If not your doing it wrong. As a responsible driver your foot must at least press the brake pedal to hold you still and I'll tell you why. What if you get hit from behind. Where is your foot? Over the brake or gas? Most people like 99 percent tense when hit with sudden stress. But are you going to clamp down and shoot into traffic or help everything behind you also come to a stop?
Regenerative braking happens through the brake pedal on my Ford PHEV. I prefer it, because it drives the same way every other car does but still allows you to stop with 100% regenerative braking as long as you don’t press too hard on the pedal.
Yeah and I HATE it. I drove my cousins Tesla when it first came out, way before musk started publicly acting like the douchebro he is and before there was really a Tesla fanboy club with a bunch of wannabes slobbing musks knob online.
I think I drove it in the neighborhood for like five minutes, stopped and parked the car and asked my cousin to drive it back. Hating it is an understatement.
Last year all the valets and I agreed we won’t be parking Tesla’s because of how much we hate them, but management overruled us this year.
I’ve been driving for 20 years. I shouldn’t need a lesson from a Tesla owner on how to drive their car. The fact that I do shows how fucking dangerous they are. They’re not designed by people who drive and it’s so fucking obvious that the computer nerds who design them get chauffeured everywhere by Ubers.
Hard disagree on this one. The regenerative braking has a learning curve yes, but the pros outweigh the cons imo. When you brake (in a traditional car or an EV), you are wearing out yor brake pads, turning friction into heat. Done right, renerative braking means almost all energy is captured back, and even lower maintenance by not bothering the brake pad.
It takes getting used to, you hate it at first, which is why tesla has an option to disable it, but there is a reason why most people who own Teslas use it, and other EVs are getting it as well.
Regenerative braking is good thing, yes .But implementing it as one pedal driving is terrible. Other OEMs like Ford or VW blend regenerative braking into the brake pedal of their EVs such that it feels exactly like a normal car. The friction pads are there for either emergency braking or for bringing the car to a final stop after slowing down.
Regen breaking. My guess they can't bake it into the brake pedal because some rules for what a break pedal is allowed to do or just bad design. Both very possible.
Bad design. Plenty of EVs have their brake pedal apply a mixture of regen and friction braking, with the actual proportions dependent on factors like how quickly you hit the brake (soft braking is entirely regen, slamming the brakes apples almost entirely actual brakes in my experience), or how much charge is in the battery (you can't safely pump power from regen into a nearly full battery).
Plenty of them also let you control how much passive regen happens when you lift the pedal, with the default on mine at least feeling very similar to the slowing you get when lifting off the gas with an automatic transmission. It's adjustable from none at all to moderate braking force, and when I turn it up lifting my foot from the gas illuminates my brake lights.
My Ford PHEV does regenerative braking through the brake pedal. The brake pads only engage if you press hard enough that the braking demand is higher than the slowing caused by regenerative braking. It will show you how well you’re doing with a gauge to show how much of your regen-braking force you’re using, and if it never engages the brake pads until you’re already stopped (for the brake hold function) it tells you 100% of the braking energy went into the battery. Pretty cool.
People always clown on BMW drivers, Tessholes are the absolute worst.
I wonder if they have the data broken down by propulsion technology rather than manufacturer. One thing about Teslas and other luxury electric cars is that they have insane amounts of horsepower and instant torque. If you buy a Model S to schlep the kids around and are expecting it to behave like a minivan you'll be really surprised what happens if you floor it.
I'm curious to know if this trend is the same for other high-powered electric cars like the Hummer or Rivian. Cars that go that fast used to be limited to supercars, not large and widespread SUVs and pickups.
(Note this is not saying electric is bad or we shouldn't use it. But maybe manufacturers could ease up on the mo powah baby.)
But I also agree with the article that it could be related to their claims of "full self driving" because people might trust it too much and just not pay attention, or have it fail to detect something.
But... but... more power better.
But the article seems to be about deadly accidents, and not just accidents.
You can hit an awful lot of things at a shocking rate of speed and walk away with modern car crash design, so I'd be inclined to think it's more than just the torque curve responsible for all the dead people.
I'm all for mo powah baby, but only for people who can handle it. Grandma driving to the store shouldn't be able to get their car to act like a Mustang leaving a car meet.
Plus electric cars are a ton heavier which means way more kinetic energy which can cause worse accidents, negating some of the crash safety improvements, especially in smaller cars.
Yes please performance class tiered licensing.
Yeah the Rolling Stone article is written really weirdly. I don't think it's technically wrong anywhere but it reads really misleadingly when you compare it to the actual report.
Like it leads with "the group identified the Tesla Model S and Tesla Model Y as two of the most dangerous cars" - meaning they are in the list - at sixth and twenty first places respectively. The mix is really weird though. As you mention the top of the list is cars like the Chevy Corvette and Porsche 911, but also things like the Mitsubishi Mirage and a load of Kia models. So it seems like there's a lot to interpret there.
Certainly it's somewhat damning that despite the driver assistant technology, these models are not particularly safer. But I think other manufactures have a wide range of vehicles at different price points that also vary in safety, which brings their averages below Tesla's in the final rankings.
Thank you for linking to the actual report. It makes a lot more sense. Since they're basing it on occupant fatalities it makes sense that smaller cars are deadlier, since they'll suffer more damage in an accident. It's also interesting that the small SUVs are more deadly, which I attribute to the low mass and high CoG leading to more frequent rollovers.
Aha, occupant fatalities. I was hoping to find out if they were measuring people inside the cars mentioned or people in other cars or pedestrians or all of the above
As a note, it looks like the data they used is publicly available from the NHTSA. They mention that "models not in production as of the 2024 model year, and low-volume models were removed from further analysis." I wonder where the Hummer and Rivian show up there since they are not mentioned in the report whatsoever.
It's 100% FSD....
A human driver will almost always realize they're actively having an accident, and will be slamming breaks and attempting to swearve.
FSD not noticing something and driving straight into it won't react itll just act like what it's about to hit isn't there right up until the collusion.
A second of brakes before an interstate accident and human drivers instinct to protect their side of the car goes a long way to saving lives.
I believe you, but do you have any data to support your claim?
What specifically do you want a source for?
Because I said a couple things, and you were vague so I have to guess.
And it could legitimately be any of the sentences I typed.
A good way to be sure you're asking a question that can be answered is quoting what you're referencing:
But I mean, that's just physics...
Applying brakes before a crash would (well I guess should) obviously lead to a crash with less force.
Anyways, if you can tell me what exactly you want a source for and what claim you're even talking about. I can probably find something for you. But it's not like I had to go look at data in the instant to reference before making that comment. So I have to go find whatever your asking me for.
This would have all happened a lot faster if you just googled what you doubted. I mean, by now you may have already done that.
So I'm glad you didn't just type "source?" But what you did type was just as helpful in telling me what you wanted.
Honestly, I've almost never seen anyone in a Tesla floor it. Yeah, maybe once or twice when they first get it, but most dual motor Teslas I see drive pretty conservatively, probably because they want better mileage per charge or something.
No, no. The car is not driving you. You are driving the car. It must do what you want.
If you let the car drive you, then no wonder you are dead quite soon. So, maybe these numbers are indeed telling something about Tesla drivers...?
If there's too much power the car will start driving you. Just like how Mustang drivers leaving car meets frequently get themselves in trouble by not being able to control the power they've got.
I have learned this from my mother.
When she was young and already married, it was the time when women could not drive cars very good. At least not as good as all the men. At least that was what the tradition and every man said, and they had many such stories to tell.
So my dad got a BMW 5 series then.
People in the village started to warn my mother, for serious! Be careful. Maybe better don't drive it at all. This thing could easily run away with you.
My mother stayed super cool and told them nothing is going to happen, it needs me first to press down the pedal. And although she really did not drive it as often as my dad did, she was a good and safe driver.
you have to understand how to tell the car what you want, and that's the issue at hand
People who've been driving has cars for 10+ years are going to have a harder time adjusting to the way an EV drives. Subconsciously it's easy to forget the differences in throttle response and how coasting works, every time I have to drive a gas car it feels like I'm driving in molasses
Even skilled drivers have trouble adapting at first because of how different it is. Luckily my car has a mode where it drives more like a gas car so the wife and I used that for a while to adjust to driving it, now I almost never use that mode, but if I leave it off and someone ELSE drives my car theyre likely to burn out my tires a bit even if I warm them, there's that much more torque
Elon: “We’re number one!!!”
**
Agustus Gloop lookin mf
So we will see some insane stuff from Elox to take the spotlight from this or meh?
I'm having a hard time understanding this article. They say the Teslas have the highest rating of deadly accidents, but then go on to say Tesla ranked #6 on the list of fatalities, then once again stated Tesla was the worst. So what happened to the other five vehicles that had a higher fatality rating?
Go to the actual report. There is one table for the top fatalities by vehicle model and another for the top average fatalities by manufacturer.
The way I understood it is the highest rate of deadly accidents refers to "5.6 fatal accidents per billion miles traveled" by the brand overall. The number 6 rating refers to the Model S specifically.
Ah thank you, that DOES make more sense.
Another way to interpret this is that other brands have vehicles that are far safer than thei unsafest model, while any Tesla model is unsafe.
They don't get clicks.
Or, their manufacturers also make some safer vehicles. It seems that all of Tesla's vehicles are high up the list, so the whole manufacturer average is higher than all others. Wheras Hyundai, for example, must sell plenty of safer models that bring down its average.
Yep, his battery factory in Germany got into lots of PR trouble for poisoning ground water and having a three times higher rate of work related accidents then is normal.
Makes sense to me, most people who own them seem to drive like jackasses.
Obviously the fault of too many studies. /s
Gived the number are estimated, how can we trust them?
It uses actual data to get a baseline of brand percentages then expands that to the total vehicles on the road total
Its not going to be a perfect estimate, but it's going to be close enough to avoid major errors unless something weird happened with the initial data (like not being diverse enough, but with 8 million cars that's unlikely)
I don’t think it needs to perfect, but without seeing the data I can’t trust it. ie one of the way the results can rigged is to set lower kilometers travel for some models.
e.v. drive weird.
Because they are very different machines on the same road :
in internal combustion engine vehicle, going downhill : let's accelerate a (little?) bit !
The electric car driver :
(slowing down) let's charge the battery !
There are approximately 250 million cars on the road and they only used data from 8 million? That's 3% of cars on the road to extrapolate into all the cars on the road. Seems like a huge flaw especially since we didn't know how they got that subset. All seems like click bait as most articles related to Tesla are...
Another good way / better way to see what cars are dangerous are insurance rates. Since insurance companies take in way more data than 8M cars when determining rates.
That's more than 3% of the user base. 0.5% is considered sufficient for statistical relevance.
A sample of 8 million cars is more than enough to be representative.
.... sufficiently random ...
Since they just use the 8m for the normalisation it'd be interesting to know how sensitive the rankings are if they assumed some bias. Or maybe even just swap around some normalisation factors and see how robust the ranking is.
I guess they do have near complete data on the deaths, and pretty good data on the population of registered vehicles.
The data on that is all there. Records like car fatalities are collected mainly through law enforcement reports and states have registration numbers. But the question is, how centralized is the data? City, county, state, or federal? There is a lot of data that simply isn't required to be collected to a central agency to keep track of.
Found the Tesla driver
Just honestly asking Im not a statistician. From a lay person looking high level this seems weird. The conclusion also does not match up with insurance prices that I've personally seen nor correspond with my experience.
I'm here for discussion not trying to put anyone down. Could someone just explain to me what I'm missing. No need to downvote. So if you take a non random sample of data how can you extrapolate that out so much? Does this data line up with other people's data? What am I missing?
Tesla's do cost more to insure than 'average' cars. But, that extra cost reflects more the cost to repair minor/moderate damage than cost of fatalities. Since fatalities are just a smaller subset accidents. Tesla's are extremely costly to repair and often get totaled vs repaired. Premiums reflect that cost of loss.
3% of 250 million could very well be the approximate number of cars on the roads that are involved in a fatal collision. And that is the only consideration of the article in this study.