Tesla drivers had highest accident rate, BMW drivers highest DUI rate, study finds

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 364 points – Tesla drivers had highest accident rate, BMW drivers highest DUI rate, study finds
cnbc.com

Tesla drivers had highest accident rate, BMW drivers highest DUI rate, study finds::Tesla drivers had 24 accidents per 1,000 drivers during the period from mid-November 2022 to mid-November 2023, according to a study by Lending Tree.

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Best part about this study is that Telsa beat out Ram trucks, giant lifted monstrosities that are loved by people rocking punisher stickers.

Telling the press that autopilot and FSD is critical for safety, then getting a worst safety rating than Ram, is hilarious.

Honestly thought that Dodge Ram drivers would carry Dodge to the highest DUI and accident rate combined. You have to really screw up to beat that.

Hold my bee- actually fuck it I'm gonna need all that I can get

slams down a 6-pack without breathing, burps for 12 seconds solid, then climbs into my dually pussywagon and does a brake-stand burnout before roaring into the sunset

I’m not intending to defend Musk or Tesla here, but this study is literally just insurance incidents by brand and makes no distinction between Teslas on autopilot and under human control.

Teslas tend to attract a certain kind of driver that likes their performance characteristics who are not typically known for being the safest drivers.

There’s no doubt that a lot of Tesla drivers abuse the autopilot capabilities, and the Elon Musk hype machine is at least partially to blame for that, probably more.

But this isn’t evidence one way or the other about the safety of Tesla’s FSD.

What's the point in these bots posting news articles about stuff covered a week ago?

I had thought that a number of subreddits took the repost thing a bit too seriously. I was a relatively heavy user, and I’d still be encountering content for the first time even though there were people complaining about reposts.

But on lemmy there’s not enough total content to begin with, and what there is gets fragmented across a fractal explosion of topics, so I end up having to browse /all sorted by new and just count on blocking communities rather than subscribing to tune my content.

I will still see the same article posted across multiple instances and topics in a row. I haven’t yet found a client that can make the UX as seamless as Apollo or even Alien Blue.

I have a similar strategy, and I don't mind the duplicate topics as it makes sense for how Lemmy works.

But this news was covered on this very community five days ago.

Voyager is basically a verbatim UX clone of Apollo.

And, if you really want to avoid dupes, it’s best to browse “local” or your subscribed communities. And don’t sub to similar communities on multiple instances. Then you’re going to see dupes.

don’t sub to similar communities on multiple instances. Then you’re going to see dupes.

This is the biggest problem with how the fediverse works IMO. By design it fosters fragmented, and to some extent isolated, small communities, which makes it harder to engage with content and find information. Or you have to wade through an abundance of dupes which gets incredibly frustrating really quickly.

I am using Voyager. It’s very far from a UX clone, unfortunately. When entering a link, for example, it simply creates the markdown for the link and leaves it to you to paste in the link on the text body, rather than popping up a text box and setting the body text itself. It frequently will lose the screen when scrolling down a list of posts, turning a solid black and requiring you to scroll back up to restore. When switching user accounts, rather than leaving you in the post you were reading, it drops you back into /all, which makes it difficult to impossible to juggle multiple accounts. I think k that’s also the one where the text you’re typing ends up underneath the visible part of the text box, making you have to scroll to see what you’re typing.

I’m also using Avelon, which has similar but not identical issues. I’m also using Memmy and Mlem, which get further away from a mature product, and I’ve tried Lemmios, Thunder, and that one whose icon was a rocket ship. Each one has bugs. No one has a great search function, no one lets you browse topics by instance (that I’ve been able to find), only a handful allow you to block instances and even blocking a topic takes three or four clicks in some clients. I also think there’s a performance falloff with the number of blocks in several of them.

And the reason I don’t just browse local or subscribed is that there’s simply not enough traffic.

I’m not slamming the devs here. Software is hard. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. UX can be very hard, especially if you’re letting the bar be set by AB and Apollo. One of them has a good text recovery tool that takes you back to the thread you were replying to, but others don’t even let you copy text from the post you’re replying to.

Honestly, I think Christian Selig should teach a master class on app development. Overcast is another one where a single developer writes a better app than most corporate teams (that’s still just the one person, right?). It can be done, and I’m sure it will be done. It’s just not quite there yet.

So people trying to insure a new Tesla were involved in accidents higher than Ram? Doesn’t say what car they were driving when they had accidents, only that they are looking for insurance on a Tesla. Anyone who claims this is because of Tesla vehicles has an agenda to push.

Anti Tesla/Elon agenda? On Lemmy? No - that can't be right

I'm sure next you're going to accuse us of communist apologia.

I read this and I missed the part where it only was for new vehicles. Based on what I read, this was for any requested quotes, which would include people shopping for better rates on vehicles they already have been driving.

Yea good point. The “study” is poorly done and the opinion fluff pieces coming out on top of it are just terrible.

It’s 24 out of 1000 for Tesla, close second 23 out of 1000 for Rams, and third 21 for Subaru.

By contrast, drivers of Pontiac, Mercury and Saturn vehicles were all involved in fewer than 10 accidents per 1,000 drivers during the period of the study.

I was wondering what the average was, but more than double the incidents than the lower end isn’t insignificant.

I was about the severity of these incidents. I imagine Ram incidents being much more deadly. Also, I thought Tesla would have technology to avoid accidents so I’m surprised it’s so high up there.

Tesla's a really expensive to repair, so even minor accidents often get claimed with insurance. So if you look at incident rate by insurance claims, you would expect them to be disproportionately reported.

I wonder if there's a correlation between the accidents and people fucking around with automation, the types of people buying them or the car itself.

Weird that this 'study' keeps getting picked up by different outlets and attributed to LendingTree who specifically notes at the top of said study that they don't endorse anything within it and it's solely the opinion of the author.

Furthermore, this study is obviously flawed as it states Pontiac, Mercury, and Saturn as the vehicles with the safest drivers, even though none of those companies have produced a car in around 15 years. The data is also sourced from people filling out insurance applications and doesn't actually account for who was at fault for these accidents, nor does it even track the type of vehicle involved in the accident. It simply tracks who has an accident or DUI on their record and what vehicle they're currently looking to get insurance quotes for. It's clickbait in its purest form.

Not to mention that people who buy brand new Teslas are more likely to submit an insurance claim for anything at all than someone driving a15 year old Saturn

So this basically means that drink bmw drivers still drive safer than sober tesla drivers

Ha, based on just the headline I started to wonder whether Tesla's "autopilot" is behind the accidents, and seems like it's at least partially the case:

A two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that Tesla’s Autosteer feature, which is part of Autopilot and FSD, had safety defects that may cause an “increased risk of a collision.” The NHTSA said it found that Tesla drivers can too easily misuse the cars’ Autosteer feature and may not even know whether it is engaged or switched off.

Are people upvoting this repost blindly or is this news truly new to them?

Tesla numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt. There are so few drivers it is easy too easy for a few outliers to mess this up.

The data set > 20 million quotes. It's not like they only looked at 1000 drivers or something.

With your own evidence, it's also a big deal to note this is just for people requesting quotes. Not anyone actually driving a Tesla.