Tesla Has Highest Rate of Deadly Accidents Among Car Brands, Study Finds

That sounds like he doesn’t understand how to use one pedal driving.

Teslas replaced bmw for sure, now I'm just like "sure they are dicks but at least they can drive" while teslas are mostly dicks who don't know how to drive.

They were bad before teslas existed! Benz drivers too

I think it’s a huge factor in the increase in traffic deaths. That, inexperienced new / rusty drivers after covid, covid fucking with peoples brains, bigger heavier faster vehicles, increased day to day life stress.

Lot of assumptions in this thread about how terrible one pedal driving must be. No, you can just set the car to coast like normal if you want. There's still a brake pedal of you need to slam the brakes. One pedal driving takes maybe an hour to get used to, but once you learn it you won't want to go back. There's a level of regen that can be adjusted, and you quickly learn how fast that is. I generally have my foot set at a certain level to maintain a speed and if I need to stop at some lights I've gotten very used to when I need to lift my foot up for the regen to stop me at the right spot.

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.

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.

Any decent car in the tesla price bracket has configurable regen from all the way off to progressively more regen all thr way up to one pedal driving that will apply the brakes for you to come to a complete stop without touching thr pedal.

Vast majority of these it's switched between the modes using the paddle shift. If you can understand changing gears on a modern ice auto using the paddles, then it's not beyond the average driver to quickly get to grips with using it for regen.

I'd you feather the throttle as you start to slow down you can moderate the amount of regen dynamically without having to change modes. However that requires more skill than the average driver seem capable of.

Cheaper evs tend to have off, on, and may be one pedal driving modes, but they have to cut things to be cheaper as with all cars.

I get between a fifth and a quarter back of my energy consumption from using regen. Learning how to use it is essential for good economy, and it makes you safer as you plan ahead more for where you want to slow down. The least safest way to drive is emergency braking 10m before a stop sign as your default driving style

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.

If you wanna coast just use cruise control. Otherwise you have to keep the "gas" slightly pressed to maintain speed. It's way better but the very real downside is that you forget how to drive ice cars.

Idk I live where there’s snow on the ground six months out of the year and I like the finesse one gets by being able to let off the gas without braking. Braking can trigger a spin or loss of control in slick conditions.

Does it? Looks outdated to me.

No way bro, single pedal driving is amazing.

What's amazing about it? Seems intuitive unintuitive as hell but I've never actually experienced it personally. How do you control how fast you stop or just coast? What if the electronics fail? My car the brakes are mechanically connected to the pedal, if the power brakes go out I can still brake without them (although it is much more difficult).

edit: that was supposed to say UNintuitive

I’ve never heard of electrify America

Our university campus and a couple of hotels have Tesla Chargers set up

To be fair, California is not even close to having the worst drivers.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/worst-drivers-by-state/

Florida drivers are the worst.

More irresponsible than Nissan Altima or Dodge Ram owners isn't easy

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 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?

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):

• wannabe cowboys - big lifted trucks
• rich "racers" - BMW, sports cars (mostly Corvettes here), etc
• entitled "family" types - huge SUVs (esp. Cadillac Escalade)
• "outdoorsy" people (and wannabe "outdoorsy" people) - Subaru
• wannabe "green" people - Tesla, Rivian, etc
• actual green people - Chevy Bolt, Toyota Prius

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.

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.

Hertz has had Tesla's most of the time I've picked up a rental

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.

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.

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.

Obligatory preface written after comment was written:

I am in no way a statistician or data analysis guru. I admit I could be looking at this shit entirely wrong and welcome anybody who corrects anything I I'm looking at incorrectly.

Actual comment:

The entire report itself is skewed as fuck before Rolling Stone cherry picked the fuck out of it for the article to slam Tesla. Listen I'm as sick of Elon as the next but these fucking shit on everything Elon hiveminds are so much more fucking obnoxious. Theyre always 10 to 1 comments by people who didnt read the article to comments by people who did.

At the end is the actual image from the site that issued the report. I didnt bother with a source link because it's right in the article OP posted.

Issues with the article and report:

1. The figures are not for every car on the road it only covers cars made between 2018 and 2022. Not a big deal but still deceiving as fuck to theme the article as Tesla has one of the highest death rates. Cuz they left the time frame out of the RS article. Kinda how they left out the fact that only 1 tesla is in the top 6 and the other Tesla is second to last with a flood of much larger much more common vehicle names that fill in between 1 and 23.

2. Each rate is calculated off 1 billion miles driven per year. When you put any Tesla model up next to any Ford, Honda, GM, Toyota, etc the % of all teslas on the road are going to be ridiculously higher than the % of the other much larger industry makes and models on the road that it takes to reach 1 billion miles. Because idk if I explained that well here is a made up scenario to illustrate it. Let's say there are 1000 teslas on the road compared to 1,000,000 Prius on the road. The tesla death rates are based out of 1000 Teslas driving 1,000,000 miles each. Whereas the Prius death rates are based off 1,000,000 Prius' driving 1,000 miles each.

3. Remember point 2 as it plays into point 3. The method they used to calculate the rate outlined in point 2, I believe is normal when govt is figuring out vehicle death rates by category, location, driver age, etc. However the study they reference is specifically for death rates per vehicle make. Which makes the methods used for calculating deathrate by make and model completely fucked. They should've done the same number of cars per each make and model type as well as the same miles driven to get a comparable outcome of death rates per make amd model over 4 year span.

Pedestrians were not part of this study.

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.

It shouldn't be called "full self driving" unless the company is going to cover the collision part of my insurance.

It's actually not. Tesla just won't care until the feds sue them in court for it.

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

Not to mention the weight. Those premium vehicles with long range stats are very heavy. That's what makes them so terrifying to me.

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.

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.

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.

I believe you, but do you have any data to support your claim?

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.

No, no. The car is not driving you. You are driving the car. It must do what you want.

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

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.

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.

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.

.... 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.

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?