Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

tesla.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 94 posts

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#61

Post by FireBeyond »

Imnimo wrote: post #26

I do believe that Teslas are quite safe despite the high-profile failures, but I'm very unconvinced by a stat that compares accidents per mile using autopilot to accidents per mile not using autopilot. Those are not comparable miles - people don't uniformly use autopilot across all driving conditions. Imagine you had a subsystem that did absolutely nothing, but people turned it on when driving on empty highways. It's…

What's also egregious about this is that Tesla has now "decided" that if active restraints or airbags are not deployed, that incident "does not count going forward".

And as an automobile manufacturer, I cannot believe in good conscience that Tesla is unaware that active restraint and airbag systems of today are far more nuanced and weigh multiple criteria when deciding to deploy, versus "speed exceeds X mph, deploy" of old. You can have a very significant incident (two that I've witnessed recently involve vehicles into stationary objects at ~30mph) without airbag deployment. But if that was a Tesla in FSD that hit something at 30mph and didn't deploy airbags, well, that's not an accident according to Tesla.

That also doesn't account for "incident was so catastrophic that restraint systems could not deploy", also "not counted" by Tesla. Or just as egregious, "systems failed to deploy for any reason up to and including poor assembly line quality control", also not an accident and "not counted".

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#62

Post by chroma »

ok_dad wrote: post #49
FireBeyond wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This needs to be emphasized so much more. Short of "not driving", human drivers don't have the option of "well, this is less than optimal, I can't do well, so I won't try". FSD absolutely does. Disengages, or is not even engaged in the first place. I wonder Tesla's FSD safety / disengagement stats for December to February in Pittsburgh, for example.

Yes, how about a stat for, "accidents/incidents which were proceeded by AutoPilot disengagement within the past ~5 seconds."

That's what Tesla is counting. From the methodology section of the safety report:

> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#63

Post by oneoff786 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #56
oneoff786 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

[Deleted for my poor reading comprehension].

Those are work related injuries, not car accidents. I already agreed with that point.

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#64

Post by culi »

oneoff786 wrote: post #55
culi wrote: post #38

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 [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.nytim…

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 becau…

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:

[0] https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1973/3986

> 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:

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/15/23168088/nhtsa-adas-self-...

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

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/14/23353787/elon-musk-tesla-...

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#65

Post by femto113 »

seeekr wrote: post #34
Imnimo wrote: post #26

I do believe that Teslas are quite safe despite the high-profile failures, but I'm very unconvinced by a stat that compares accidents per mile using autopilot to accidents per mile not using autopilot. Those are not comparable miles - people don't uniformly use autopilot across all driving conditions. Imagine you had a subsystem that did absolutely nothing, but people turned it on when driving on empty highways. It's…

I don't disagree that it's not the best of comparisons (and I wonder if a better one could be imagined + implemented...). But still, it's not like we turn on Autopilot/FSD only "on empty highways", far from it! Certainly it's a tool where the user needs to learn its strengths and weaknesses and use it accordingly, but it is useful in so many more situations than not, that it's also not a terrible or meaningless compa…

It's not at all difficult to imagine many other measurements: minutes driven, type of road driven on, speed at time of crash, whether another vehicle was involved, etc. As a data analyst what I really want though is more granular data so we can figure out whether the published metrics are being cherry-picked.

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#66

Post by bagels »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #27
bagels wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autopilot does emergency braking for nonexistent obstacles. I'm sure it's contributing to rear end collision risk. I stopped using it for this reason.

Every autonomous braking system has that problem, including the one in my 2020 Macan. They are dangerously-flaky hacks. As of 2025 they are mandated by law.

The rate for me was approximately 1 emergency brake maneuver per 6 miles of driving. I doubt any of them are as bad as the Tesla system.

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#67

Post by mrguyorama »

FireBeyond wrote: post #48
mrguyorama wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own another VAG car with automatic emergency braking. If it is actually applying the brakes for you more than in cases where you are clearly about to rear-end someone, you should consider not tailgating as much. The sensor even gives you a warning if you are following too close at highway speeds. The radar system they use in modern VW and Audi cars is extremely conservative, claiming to not engage the brakes at all…

> The radar system they use in modern VW and Audi cars is extremely conservative, claiming to not engage the brakes at all above 35 mph, and waiting until the last possible moment to apply the brakes below that window. I love my 2021 RS 5, but I have to disagree with this. Even in Traffic Jam adaptive mode, many times it will accelerate towards a vehicle _that it detects_, and only brake very late, and hard. On sever…

It's possible the features introduced in the upmarket trims are to blame. I have all the hardware for things like distance based cruise control and parking assistance and lane keeping, but the previous owner did not buy them so I ONLY have automatic emergency braking. In 20k miles the worst problem I had was it failing self-calibration and just turning itself off for a few months.

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#68

Post by dbt00 »

ok_dad wrote: post #49
FireBeyond wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This needs to be emphasized so much more. Short of "not driving", human drivers don't have the option of "well, this is less than optimal, I can't do well, so I won't try". FSD absolutely does. Disengages, or is not even engaged in the first place. I wonder Tesla's FSD safety / disengagement stats for December to February in Pittsburgh, for example.

Yes, how about a stat for, "accidents/incidents which were proceeded by AutoPilot disengagement within the past ~5 seconds."

Right, like when they tried to blame Walter Huang for FSD veering directly into a barrier US-101/CA-85. "Autopilot was disengaged when it crashed." Yes, because the driver grabbed the wheel when autopilot veered directly into a gore point.

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#69

Post by ajross »

FireBeyond wrote: post #56
oneoff786 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

[Deleted for my poor reading comprehension].

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.

Re: Tesla Vehicle Safety Report

#70

Post by bagels »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #30
CamperBob2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every autonomous braking system has that problem, including the one in my 2020 Macan. They are dangerously-flaky hacks. As of 2025 they are mandated by law.

Better a false positive (phantom braking) than a false negative (not braking when it should). I imagine they're all tuned with this in mine.

I think the current state of Tesla's self driving is more dangerous in this respect than I am.
Post reply on HN