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).”
That’s not necessarily even a Tesla thing though. When I got my Subaru back when collision avoidance was new, someone tried to talk me out of it for this exact reason. They believed it was prone to phantom braking
There’s a particular curved road near the shore in San Diego where my crosstrek slams on the brakes every single time we are driving into the turn. The car seems to think we are driving directly into the guard rail and excessive number of triangle warning signs.
I had also had a rental car once in Boston that had some terrifying red symbol fill the whole fucking windshield and played an alarm probably 3/4 times on this one particularly narrow street by my abnb that has a sudden steep climb. I’m certain the car thought the road itself was a wall I was going to hit