Given Tesla's now well-documented history of lying about their cars' safety,[0-6] it's kind of alarming to see, what's basically an ad directly from a brand, being posted to the front page of HN
Almost as upsetting as it is to see a Gish gallop link list rise to the top of that topic. Needless to say not one of those corroborates "history of lying about their cars' safety", and you surely know that. But you'll challenge us all to figure it out on our own anyway?
It's absolutely amazing that we have to go through this every time someone gets video of a Tesla event. There are millions of these cars on the road now, surely the fact that this happens only monthly sits as evidence against your position, no?
Edit: FWIW: my money is on this story being quietly retracted at some point anyway. FSD doesn't behave like that. It just doesn't. Almost certainly the driver got confused, panicked, or otherwise overrode the automation and then blamed it when talking to police. The police report is almost silent on the subject: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23569059-9335-2022-0...
This entire kerfuffle is based on this one sentence: "P-1 stated V-1 was in Full Self Driving mode at the time of the crash, I am unable to verify if V-1’s Full 24 Self-Driving Capability was active at the time of the crash."
> Needless to say not one of those corroborates "history of lying about their cars' safety", and you surely know that.
From the first link:
> Federal safety regulators accused Elon Musk of issuing “misleading statements” on his company’s Tesla Model 3 last year, sending a cease-and-desist letter
Federal regulators don't exactly send cease and desists casually. Misleading and misrepresenting is dishonest, i.e. lying.
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, New York Times, and even published research[0] have all been calling Elon Musk out for years now, yet his fans will still believe him despite them withholding data
This is the gallop part. I called you out on your first set of links (one of which legitimately hoodwinked a commenter here!) and instead of defending those arguments you're pivoting to another. I won't engage here either, except to point out that this isn't "published research" (it literally tells you that on the first page).
The clear and inarguable truth is that the Tesla fleet is pushing three million cars now. They're safe. Are they safest? safer? less safe? There's space for argument. But the kind of absolutist story you're spinning just doesn't hold. If these cars were actually causing accidents at even a moderately higher rate, we'd quite clearly know about it. And they aren't.
This study is from one of the original links I shared...
You accused me of gish gallopping. I've since slowed down and focused on specific events. See my other comments about the battery swapping scam for example.
Please provide some actual data proving these cars are safer than average. Tesla certainly hasn't been able to. And research, like the one I just linked which you refused to acknowledge, definitely does not back up Elon's claims
> Please provide some actual data proving these cars are safer than average. Tesla certainly hasn't been able to.
But... they have. That's exactly the link we're discussing. You don't want that to be true, so you're digging around trying to pretend via a flood of bad evidence that they're somehow "lying" in that data.
But... what if they aren't? Again, three million cars are an awfully big signal to try to spin. Isn't the Occam's Razor interpretation (also jives with my personal experience with the product, FWIW) that... they're safe?
I can't tell if you forgot a </s> there but just in case you're sincere...
I just paid $5k on a used extended van. One of the most dangerous cars you can buy. Obviously I don't expect this to be any safer than a $100k Tesla.
Similarly, I find any comparison between the "average car" and a Tesla's crash ratings to be completely useless. How do we know that other luxury cars around that price point don't actually do much much better than tesla does? The "data" provided is insincere at best. It's also not actual data. They're just telling us some numbers. They've consistently refused to provide any actual data
This OP also again makes the claim of the "lowest probability of injury of any car by NHTSA" which the NHTSA has repeatedly asked them to stop saying.[0] The NHTSA doesn't rank cars by probability of injury at all
Remember when they said the Tesla S earned 5.4 stars and NHTSA had to make a public statement that it does not award more than 5 stars? lol. Yet another lie
I read through all these links. They’re not great aside from the worker safety one.
The first one states that Tesla is being misleading for claiming that it’s cars scores better for safety but not mentioning that the weight classes affect the scores. The original claim is still true though.
Most of the others deal with the claim that the cars accidents per mile ratings are lower because they’re highway miles or because they’re driven by rich people. But… they’re still low.
You can argue at best that there is no rigorous proof that Tesla cars are safer than other cars and that these are cherry picked stats for marketing. But there’s no compelling evidence that they’re more dangerous. Calling them lies is disingenuous. Regardless of one’s opinion of musk.
Good grief. Those are workplace accidents. In the factory.
Edit: but you get the meta point, right? Upstream comment threw a ton of links at you along with an intended (and deliberately incorrect) interpretation knowing that you wouldn't read them carefully. That's why that kind of argumentation is so toxic.
Musk has repeatedly been called out by regulators for his misinformation. Some claims, like the safety of autopilot have been directly debunked by research. This article has a good literature review if you're interested:
> In independent research, Templeton (2020)compared Tesla’s stated crash rates with Autopilot enabled and not enabled by attempting to control for increased use of Autopilot on relatively safer freeways. To compare human-driven crash rates of freeways and non-freeways, Templeton used fatality rates, which may overestimate crash rates on freeways as higher speeds increase crash severity according to a fourth power law (Evans, 1994). When controlling for road type, the crash rate benefits of Autopilot narrowed significantly. Templeton was unable to fully assess their comparison of Autopilot crash rates with national estimates due to their different definitions of crashes.
> Goodall (2021)investigated struck-from-behind crashes of automated vehicles using age-weighted crash rates from SHRP 2 NDS database as a baseline. Automated vehicles were struck from behind at five times the rate of human-driven vehicles, although much of the difference could be attributed to higher rates of urban driving experienced in automated vehicle testing.
I'm also not sure what percent of level 2 ADAS vehicles are Tesla vs other brands but they're by far the most common vehicles with driver-assist involved:
Google's Waymo was lightyears ahead of Tesla. The reason they didn't go to market was that they knew it wasn't really ready. Elon Musk has lied (as in he knew the truth and lied) about their driver assistant technology's safety and capabilities and has been sued for it[2]. There's no other way to sugarcoat it
Your first quote implies that the Tesla autopilot had better than average performance but not by much, when normalized for roads. Like… sure. Who cares? That’s a nuanced statistic that doesn’t even change the direction of the difference.
Your second argument… again, sure, whatever? Not a contradiction or evidence of a lie.
Ok lemme slow down and do it one at a time. Remember the battery swap scandal? There were many articles written about it.[0] Turns out it was a conscious scam by Tesla to increase its vehicle credits[1]
I've got more, but I think I'd have better luck taking it one at a time so I'll wait...
I don’t care about Tesla much so… no, I don’t know about a battery swap scandal from 7 years ago. But reading this first article (which is the same as the second article) it would appear that Tesla invited people to use a battery swap facility and a team of investigators staked it out for 48 hours and nobody came.
???
What am I supposed to take from this? I think maybe you intended to provide a different article with an actual claim but the first one seems unlikely to matter.
I’d like to see something specific to claims that teslas aren’t actually safer than average if possible
True, although it is indicative of some level of community sentiment and will certainly have a comment section full of rebuttals as your own. Good advantage of a mostly free speech platform.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/07/federal...
[1] https://www.autobison.com/2020/03/has-tesla-been-lying-about...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/15/data-shows-tesla-accounts-fo...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/technology/tesla-autopilo...
[4] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-27/tesla-stop...
[5] https://phys.org/news/2018-05-fact-tesla-safety.html
[6] https://securityboulevard.com/2022/11/its-official-tesla-has...