I just saw the headline on Google News: “Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds.” Yikes. I’ve covered how safe Tesla vehicles are for many years. In fact, it was the #1 reason why I bought a Tesla Model 3 in 2019. So, on the one hand, it was surprising to see that headline. But not really.
We already saw last year that one of the reasons Hertz was selling off its Tesla vehicles and not buying more was because they were more likely to get into accidents, and then waiting for repairs/service/parts took longer than average as well. Those kinds of things add up a great deal when you’re managing a big fleet of vehicles.
Are Tesla vehicles actually designed to be unsafe? No, that’s not the issue. The issue is that while Tesla was designing its cars to be extra safe, it was also constantly focusing on making the cars super quick (insanely quick, ludicrously quick, plaid quick) and regularly hyping up how quick its cars were in order to stimulate consumer demand.
Believe it or not, when you’ve consumed all that hype around how quick a Tesla is, it’s easy to be influenced and want to smoke cars off the line at a red light, or just drive like a bat out of hell. The problem is: that leads to accidents, and fast accidents lead to deaths. Let’s get to the shocking stats:
“Tesla’s vehicles have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands in America, according to a recent iSeeCars study that analyzed data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).”
The author is very quick to write this off as “it’s people burning people off the line”, but that hardly a trait shared with Kia’s in the number two spot.
It’s still very possible it could be something to do with the design of the car.
I mean, what do you expect when you are sitting on more lithium ion batteries than structural material?
Yeah when I was buying an electric car one of the vehicles I considered was the Mustang Mach E. It was nice. My partner at the time drove it first and liked it. I enjoyed the ride in the passenger seat.
Then I sat in the driver’s seat.
That was all I needed to say no. The whole feel of being in the driver’s seat made me feel like I wanted to go fast and drive aggressively.
Absolutely, the narrative seems wrong. Yes Tesla cars are fast, but many people driving them are environmentalists and grown ups. Not generally people out to burn rubber in my experience.
I think maybe people are surprised by the speed, because you don’t really notice exactly how fast you are driving and accelerating in a Tesla.
There may even be problems with some of the safety features, making people rely to much on them, so they think it’s alright to not pay full attention to their driving, expecting to get notices or even to be helped by safety features. Obviously FSD/autopilot is a driving hazard if you rely on that.
I will argue that the controls of the car being on a screen instead of physical buttons is a problem too. That should simply not be allowed for functions that are needed for driving IMO.
People don’t become inherently better or worse drivers on average based on the car they buy, so such a significantly bad statistic, twice as bad as average, more likely shows there are actual inherent safety problems with the car IMO.
Have you driven one? The instant torque and acceleration is really fun, to the point where I can honestly say I was a worse (or at least more irresponsible) driver for about the first 6 months that I owned my model 3.
How many of these fatal accidents were in the first few days or months of owning an EV?
I’m too lazy to find it but there was a similar statistic around motorcycle deaths. If you survived the first 6 months the rate went way down.