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Comment by zombocomvibes | Hacker News Reader

They have the highest rate of fatal accidents across all car brands, more than double the average.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...

Your link is to an article that references an iSeeCars study from two years ago. They got their crash data from NHTSA FARS, but got their mileage data from sales of used cars on their platform. At the time I noticed some issues with their mileage data.[1] It's very likely that Teslas sold on their platform have very low mileage compared to average, because people either sell a car quickly after buying it, or they hang on to it for years. This also lines up with the fact that the other cars in their unsafe list were all released recently.

Working backwards from their stats & FARS data, I calculated that for their claims to be true, each Model Y would need to accumulate only 4,300 miles per year. This is far below Tesla's reports of 13,000-14,000 miles per year. Also iSeeCars claimed that an average of 2.8 vehicles were involved in fatal accidents for every billion miles traveled. But at the time the US had 13.3 deaths per billion miles traveled. So for their data to be correct, the average fatal accident would need to have five fatalities.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42209142

LendingTree's own research has Tesla in the lead for worst drivers and highest fatality rate, updated for 2026.

https://www.lendingtree.com/insurance/brand-incidents-study/

It says nothing about fatalities

That data is from an online survey of people who got insurance quotes using QuoteWizard, so hardly an unbiased sample. It’s not even data on insurance claims, just what people reported in the questionnaire. Also it claims that BMW drivers are the worst, not Tesla drivers. And both Ram & Subaru are more accident prone brands than Tesla. Oh and unlike you claim, it has no info about injury or fatality rates. Obviously an online survey would have difficulty getting accurate data on fatalities due to… survivorship bias.

Lastly, are you admitting that your first link was incorrect since you didn’t respond to my points at all?

Your comment is—at best—misleading. See the last two paragraphs of the article:

> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws.... Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well....

> “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities”....

You forgot to point out which part of the comment was misleading

That iSeeCars study is shaky. The death counts come from federal data, but miles driven are their own private estimates, so nobody can check the math.

The more rigorous data is the IIHS driver death rates, which use real registration data and adjust for driver age and gender (iihs.org/topics/driver-death-rates). It shows the RWD Model 3 is about half its class average (15 vs 29 deaths per million vehicle-years) and the Model S is about average. The AWD Model 3 is above average (39 vs 29), which points more to how fast cars get driven than to the car itself. IIHS hasn’t published a Model Y rate yet.

So Teslas aren’t the deadliest brand. The faster versions show more risk, which is the same pattern IIHS sees with muscle cars.

The discussion was about the car's safety, not driver behavior. A car can be the safest car, but if the drivers who choose that car all decide to drive it off a cliff, it doesn't speak at all to the safety of the car, it speaks to driver behavior.

We should definitely be excited about the customers that drive off cliffs now being offered a car which contains a bomb

Yes, it's a bomb, but there's no way in hell it's going to be legalized for public road use in the US or EU. It was a cool demo, it's literally a flying car, how could that not be cool.

Perhaps some billionaires will buy it, good for them.

Why do you guys contort yourselves into knots trying to find any and every conceivable problem with something that doesn't affect you ... get over it already. Go ahead and flag me.

It's not flying, it's just slowing the fall with compressed air maybe? If it's flying then drag racing cars can also fly.

It literally flew over the entire Tesla fleet starting from the ground. Or does it only count if it can do it indefinitely?

Do flying fish really fly?

I mean yes, they do. But we don't think of them as birds.

The safest car is one that is not driven, but that is not a useful measure. Put a car on the road and you add a driver, now you can start compare risk.

What?

could be that Tesla making fans believe their level 2 driving automation is better than it actually is and marketing BS terms like Autopilot and FSD contributing to the fatal accident stat. even if the car itself is rated safe by IIHS, isn't that mostly about how well driver and passenger of the car fare when they are involved in different types of accidents? the safety rating wouldn't take into account whether the manufacturer has done its best to accurately communicate capability of its driving automation system to its customers. and i think pedestrian or passengers of other cars dying is counted under the fatal accident stat.

and if you've been in Teslas that are a few years old, you might have experienced phantom braking. random hard braking for no apparent reason. i try to avoid being behind Teslas on the road if i can help it.

hater. i use it to go work every day while programming or scheduling things or reading and replying to emails in the car. no issues. today, right now, on this date there is literally no better ownable self driving car than a tesla. there need to be more. i will not buy a car without self driving again.

Yes. Tesla don't make bad cars. Elon makes people believe things that aren't true. It's the later that causes the statistic.

have you ever sat in one?

I would say the quality might be high for an american car but here in europe it's absolute dogshit tier.

Safety of a car is a different axis than safety of the driver. That combines them. Related, it's why performance cars have higher insurance rates: people who buy fast cars go fast.

i think some self selecting populations are skewed.

i remember reading about the first cobra in the 60's, where a huge percentage of the owners didn't live to make the second payment.

The fatality rate of an accident includes all parties involved. Most often when a Tesla hits someone, it kills the other guy, since it's basically an ultra-dense block of mass that can do 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, very quietly and without launch control[1]. Teslas are incredibly safe for the people inside the Tesla.

[1]Lots of other cars have technically faster times than Teslas, but most of them require launch control, good tires, and sound like the engine's about to explode. You can floor the Tesla at any time and the software will deliver however much power it can without slipping.

This is silly. I bought my Model Y specifically because its safety is so high. You can see it in (1) the crash rate numbers when using FSD, (2) the crash-test ratings are fantastic, and (3) impossible situations where people survived such as plummeting off a cliff on route 1.

but how well will the people in the other car fare if you crash into them? with the Cybertruck especially, its sharp edges make it seem like a set of knives on four wheels. the pommel is just facing the driver rather than the pedestrian or other vehicle.

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