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Comment by garbagewoman | Hacker News Reader

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

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?

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.

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