This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
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.
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.
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
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:
"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
Maybe Tesla drivers are more irresponsible than other car owners.
That was going to be my suggestion.
More irresponsible than Nissan Altima or Dodge Ram owners isn't easy
Altima owners
...This is a stereotype I've never heard before.
Most deadly to driver is not the same thing as most deadly. SUVs are usually extremely deadly to pedestrians and other road users.
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.
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.
This killed a billionaire a few months ago… maybe not such a bad feature
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.
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.
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:
Hertz is dumping Teslas onto the used car market. The rental car agency made a huge mis-step by ordering too many electric cars, and now it’s rushing to offload 30,000 EVs. Tesla makes up roughly one-third of all of Hertz’s global EV fleet.
Since January, Hertz has been aggressively offloading teslas at the nationwide average price of roughly $25,000, according to CNBC. Earlier this year in a regulatory filing, Hertz said, “expenses related to collision and damage, primarily associated with EV, remained high.” in the first quarter, Hertz took a $195 million write-down for depreciation of its EVS.
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.
Maybe Tesla drivers are more irresponsible than other car owners.
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.
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.
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.
So we will see some insane stuff from Elox to take the spotlight from this or meh?
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.
ease up on the mo powah baby
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.
Elon: “We’re number one!!!”
<jumps, exposing midriff>
Agustus Gloop lookin mf
