> So, why are Teslas — and many other ostensibly safe cars on the list — involved in so many fatal crashes? “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities,” iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer said in the report.
In a big picture, this makes sense. You can load the cars with safety features, but it doesn't change the fact that these cars are very heavy, very fast, and loaded with features that reward distracted driving. In the US at least, the top killer of drivers are trees on the side of the road.
In a bigger picture, cars are a bad solution to the problem of transportation at scale, and really always have been. As safety features go up, complacency goes up, and to be blunt that's combining with the fact that drivers are getting consistently worse overall at the skill anyway.
Between EV's that are much, much heavier than ICE cars and SUVs/Trucks that are much larger than they need to be, vehicles themselves, despite having more safety features than ever, are also better at killing that they've been at a long time too.
We really need to get serious about improving our transportation infrastructure.
> We really need to get serious about improving our transportation infrastructure.
Better yet, we really need to consider urbanization. That way everything you need is right there by your own two feet. No need for any extra special transportation at all.
It seems people have a burning desire to live the rural lifestyle, though, even in so-called cities. I'm not sure we can actually overcome that pressure.
Stacked like a sardine for $3,500/mo, yet still have to travel long distances to do anything. The curse of the wannabe rural city. But, as people want to (or at least want to pretend to) live in a rural area, change is unlikely.
This is a colossal failure for humanity, primarily due to home ownership as an investment vehicle, plus regulatory capture pushed by the car companies and oil and gas companies.
There is no technical reason we can't have livable, quiet and spacious apartments, where multiple apartment buildings share a huge, enclosed backyard (almost park-like, even), a setup with tons of small shops, pharmacies, easy access to everything, etc.
Plus you can also have access to large parks, in a suburb you'd never have access to those, just your limited backyard.
Even nice apartments are pretty miserable places to live if you have multiple small children, or engage in hobbies or activities that require much equipment. Imagine coming home to your apartment with a muddy mountain bike. Do you haul it up to the 4th floor in the elevator and wash it in your shower? It's possible to make it work but living in a single-family home (or townhouse with attached garage) sure makes regular life a lot easier.
> Imagine coming home to your apartment with a muddy mountain bike. Do you haul it up to the 4th floor in the elevator and wash it in your shower?
We have the tech for this, we could have literal multi-bike sheds/parking garages and all that's needed is 1 (ONE) water source with a hose inside. As I said, failure on the part of our species :-)
In my city there are actually a few public bike washing stations, so the game plan in this case would be just to bike that way before coming home.
Many of us simply don't want to live in expensive urbanized environments (especially in more desirable ones)--at least at many points in our lives, so yeah no.
I mean the problem isn't those who don't want to live in cities nor is it those who want to live in cities: the problem is the suburbs, which is where those two meet. People who aren't in and do not desire an actual rural lifestyle where one has a standalone home on a large plot of land in the middle of nowhere, but also don't want a condo. They want their own little plot of land, with a small yard, and a standalone home.
And like, same. That's also me.
But the problem is the actual costs of that style of home are incredibly, heavily subsidized by the cities they surround and indeed even the rural areas they border, because suburbs are just... a bad goddamn way to house people. They're incredibly inefficient, basically require your own personal car, require the most infrastructure build-out for the smallest population, require the largest footprint of services over the largest area to serve the smallest number of people, etc. etc.
And like, I don't think it's unreasonable to say if you want to live this way, that's fine, but then you need to actually pay for it. Your property taxes need to reflect how much it actually costs to serve your property, to build the huge number of roads needed to access it, to maintain those roads, to maintain the electrical grids, to maintain the water and sewage services, to bus kids to schools, etc. etc. etc.
And yeah that's going to make suburbs WAY less appealing because they're going to be fucking expensive but like, the alternative is, again, everyone wanting that, and not paying for it. The dense urban centers they surround absolutely hemorrhage money supporting the suburbs around them.
Around where I live (greater Boston metro) most of the tech jobs are actually out in the suburbs/exurbubs. There were basically no tech jobs in the city ~20 years ago any longer. (It's mostly only changed with the establishment of of satellite offices of some west coast companies.)
I don't know. My town has a budget. We argue over property taxes at town meetings. We argue over enterprise zones like distribution centers that certainly aren't going in the middle of large cities. We argue over school spending that tends to be lower than in large cities. No one is wiping out highways that connect large cities to other places.
Even with heavy urbanization you'll need some form of transit on top of walking. Have you ever visited any really big cities (eg. Tokyo)? Every time I'm in one, I get the impression they would grind to a standstill without their mass transit systems.
> Have you ever visited any really big cities (eg. Tokyo)
Yes, these are the rural areas of which we speak. Everything gets spread out and then you're stuck travelling long distances to do anything, just like those who live in actual rural areas. There is no question that transportation is necessary in a rural area.
A proper urban environment, however, puts everything right there in a short distance. No need to ever travel beyond where your feet can take you. That's the whole reason for living so close to other people.
But it's clear that people want to live in (or pretend to live in) rural areas. It seems to be in our nature. As such, there is a lot of pressure to maintain the way things are. Hence the ill-conceived cries for better transportation to maintain the rural way of life instead of actually embracing urbanity.
I would say that's better characterized as an opposition to urbanization that's designed for and presumes the ownership of cars by those who live there, and to that I heartily agree! Gridlock-bound US cities are a nightmare to navigate, but again, that is not the fault of the city, that is also the fault of the car and how inefficient it is as a transport solution.
If cars simply didn't exist, our cities would not, could never have, been designed the way they are, in any way.
> If cars simply didn't exist, our cities would not, could never have, been designed the way they are, in any way.
Nah. Many cities long predate the car. They absolutely were designed in the same way they are still found now, aside from what are now roads were squares for people to walk in. Return the road back to being a square and nobody would be able to recognize that there was a car era. But, so long as the people want to live a rural lifestyle, good luck…
I've never understood the argument about small towns being worse for urbanism.
Back in the day, before cars were widespread, everything had to be close by.
You don't even have to sacrifice the backyard for that, you can have a city layout that puts the houses themselves fairly close to each other, and the yards can radiate outwards. Then you connect each cluster's main street with the other ones, but unlike suburbs, you make each "subdivision" mixed-use and you allow public transit , pedestrians and cyclists to cut across subdivisions for easy access everywhere.
If anything, small towns should be urbanism done right, because they don't (shouldn't?) have the money for sprawl and they don't have all the pressures for increasing density a lot, that big cities have.
Indeed, and there are small businesses mixed in with the houses. But the problem is cars (it's always cars). A coffee shop next to your house is fine - a delight even - when 20 people arrive by walking or biking. When it's 20 cars though it's misery.
Your desire to not be inconvenienced is not as important as the lives of other people who are being killed unnecessarily for it.
That being said, to be clear, I don't think we need to make driving illegal or whatever. I think a TON of people would happily not be saddled with the expense of owning a car or the task of driving if there were reasonable alternatives on offer, which in the few pockets of the US that actually have decent mass transit, is broadly the case.
That said, I drove into a nearby city after dark which is increasingly early last night. There are no reasonable alternatives--I will for a 9-5 event but just doesn't work for the evening. There's a decent mass transit system including commuter rail but it it's just not organized around coming in at 5pm. It's chaos with cars/cycles/escooters/pedestrians often randomly crossing streets, poor visibility, etc. I mostly just don't go in any longer.
I think a lot of people would be happy to use it if it was convenient and reliable. I live in NYC and haven’t had to drive to/from work in over a decade. I consider the subway ride a vast, vast improvement over driving… but only when the subway works right.
The vast majority of people I talk to, including myself, don't use public transportation for:
1. Time. For example, my commute is 25 minutes, but 2 hours ride and three mile walk by public transport.
2. Safety, intimately tied to the homeless problem.
3. Cleanliness. In my experience, related to #2, and the fact that government institutions are incapable of caring about user experience, because they get funding regardless. Matted, stained fabric seat cushions, and dried whatever caked on the floor.
There's nothing better or remotely alluring about public transportation for the vast majority of people (as shown by gridlock traffic).
Like I said, when it works right. A 2 hour ride and three mile walk is very obviously not a viable commute.
As for safety, you’re orders of magnitude more likely to get into a car crash than have anything happen to you on the NYC subway. Yes, incidents happen but they’re dramatically inflated in the public consciousness.
Your objection (and most of the others I see) aren’t objections to the fundamental nature of public transit, rather they’re objections to shit public transit or to urban life in general (whole lotta city car parks that aren’t clean!). Which is entirely understandable. But there are plenty of examples of functional public transit serving millions of people in cities across the world. Those people aren’t all secretly wishing they were in a car.
It's kind of boring to respond to a comment about public transit needing to work well by complaining about how it doesn't. Especially when limiting investment has often been an explicit choice in whatever given area.
Yes, I was just listing specifically how it doesn't work well, for me and most people. I'm not arguing against the concept or something. It's an extreme chicken and egg problem, with almost certainly no solution that would work outside of SF and NY type densities.
> In a bigger picture, cars are a bad solution to the problem of transportation at scale
They're not a great solution to transportation at scale, but they're pretty good at small volume point to point traffic.
There's not enough people going my way on most of my trips to make transportation at scale worthwhile. Ferries work well for part of many of my trips, but I can take a car on the ferry to deal with the lack of scale on either side.
I could sometimes take a bus to the ferry, walk to light rail and take light rail to the airport. But the bus only runs during commute times, so that impacts viable flight times, and the walk to the light rail got pretty sketchy in the past several years and light rail itself can be sketchy too.
Most of my cars run fine any time of day, although peak traffic is annoying, and I'm dealing with lighting issues on one so I can't take it out unless I know I'll be home before dusk.
Decreases your tendency to flip over. I'm astonished by all the dashcam videos out there showing collisions, usually the first thing an ice car does is flip over. Not EVs though.
That's more a factor of weight distribution rather than weight itself.
EVs carry their weight lower to the ground. SUVs and pickup trucks are more top heavy. Passenger cars have a higher probability to rollover, but not that much greater than an EV.
Ice cars have a much higher rollover risk compared to EVs. All the data supports that along with physics. Absolutely weight distribution. Compare the heavy battery in an EV vs the heavy motor that's up a bit higher in an ice car. Pretty much any hit over around 20mph to the front quarter panel of an ice car, truck, or SUV will flip it over.
The study seems to contradict this: "When broken out by size, small cars have the highest fatal accident rate while midsize and full-size cars are both below average."
And later in the study, “When two small cars collide the forces are equalized and both vehicles tend to hold up well. But if a compact hatchback and a full-size pickup truck try to occupy the same space at the same time, the smaller car always loses.”
In insurance they call it the "law of lugnuts" - bigger cars have better survivability in direct collisions.
However, most traffic fatalities do not come from direct collisions. They come from driver hitting immobile objects.
Smaller, lighter cars take less kinetic energy with them around corners, are easier to steer and avoid obstacles, and are more likely to stay upright when leaving the road.
> From 2016 to 2018 an average of 19,158 fatalities resulted from roadway departures, which is 51 percent of all traffic fatalities in the United States.
FTL: "FHWA defines a roadway departure (RwD) crash as a crash which occurs after a vehicle crosses an edge line or a center line, or otherwise leaves the traveled way. Another term our partners often use is lane departure, which is synonymous with RwD, since both include head-on collisions when a vehicle enters an opposing lane of traffic."
Road departure fatalities are high because of head-on collisions, not because there is an epidemic of people crashing into trees along the side of the road. If you follow the links on the cited page, they clearly show that head-on crashes result in more fatalities than tree+utility pole crashes.
Aside from the distracted driving part, which is real, there are two physical aspects of the model 3 that I find to be safety issues as well-- the two front windshield beams are thick and add a sort of blind spot, and the side mirrors don't give you great field of view.
Same with my older Toyota. They stuffed airbags in them, which is nice, but I've had several times where an adult on a bike is completely obscured, with my passenger having to scream "stop!". After the second time, I now bob my head like a maniac to look around them.
Can't wait for displays on pillars, to make them appear transparent.
The pillars on my 2006 CR-V haven't been a problem. Did pillars get bigger on newer cars, or did Honda use smaller pillars, or what?
They are wide enough that their horizontal angular width could be larger than the horizontal angular width of a pedestrian more than a couple or so meters away but due to their angle there is plenty of the pedestrian still visible.
I spent a while just sitting in a busy parking lot watching people go by and seeing how their visibility changed and I couldn't find any situation where I'd have trouble seeing a pedestrian unless they were far enough away that there was no chance I'd hit them even if I never saw them.
It is a problem with most modern cars, and it is actually for safety reasons. These beams have to support the entire weight of the car in case it flips over in order to protect the occupants.
Also, the instrument cluster is located in the center, outside of the driver's direct view. And most of the important controls for the driver do not have tactile buttons.
Same with both of my Mitsubishis. There's a roundabout near where I live that, when approaching it from one angle, the "beam" on the right hand side of the windshield totally obscures the whole road leading to the roundabout from another angle.
I have to shift in my seat to crane around to see if there is oncoming traffic I have to give way to.
I've never been in a Tesla so don't know if this would work, but you might try getting a small convex mirror (often called a "blind spot mirror") like these [1] at Amazon. I linked Amazon for convenience. They should also be easy to find locally at anyplace that has an auto section like Walmart, or auto parts stores like NAPA, O'Reilly, and AutoZone.
I never understood how in America, a DUI seems to be (from films etc) a relatively minor issue. In the UK you get a prison sentence, even if you didn't cause any harm (eg we're spot-tested).
For the average American with no criminal record it’s relatively serious. It depends on the state but you’ll usually spend the night or weekend in jail until you can make bail. It can have career repercussions and America’s lenient approach to road accidents goes out the window so if anyone gets hurt except you, there will be a felony charge up to manslaughter.
DUI simply isn't enforced. If it were, the number of arrests would be stratospheric, and people's lives would be completely upended by being unable to drive.
I mean, from films etc, us Yanks would think everyone in the UK is piss arse drunk 24/7, sounds like a chimney sweep waiting for Mary Poppins, sends their kids to magic schools, and all live in castles wearing period clothing, all while their gov't watches everything they do from CCTV.
However, most of us understand that films etc are made up stories told for entertainment where if we based our expectations of people solely on that information we'd be grossly mistaken.
There are plenty of people that have their lives severely tilted if not turned upside down from a single DUI. There are also people of means that get off with a much less interruption to their day. I'm guessing it is the same on your side of the pond as well.
There also clear lack of alcohol enjoyment education. Gather at friends place and stay overnight, carpools and draw a sober Sam, don’t get overdrunk and drink water for the last 90 min of the party, etc…
I do agree infras and density is a better option. But lack of infra doesn’t justify to drive drunk.
Actually that would be Texas. Texas has more road fatalities than California. This is _not_ per capita, but in total, which is an interesting statistical point in and of itself.
The data is really easy to get. I wish more people would avail themselves of it.
Huh? I agree that there are way too many DUI deaths everywhere. The thing I am mocking is this idea that "MY group DOESN'T have these problems and YOUR group DOES." In one case, the group is Tesla owners; another case, the group was, I guess, trees on roads; another was people who drink and drive - a typical HN reader, I am confident, believes that he does not belong to that group. And yet. Perhaps there is a group that the typical HN reader belongs to that does indeed drink and drive.
It's just a little funny you think California is unique in this regard. Pretty much all of the US is extremely underdeveloped when it comes to public transportation. Hillbillies in the boonies have to drive a lot too.
If you have driven around rural roads in the US, you realize it does not take alcohol to leave the road. A moment of distraction is all it takes to get into a ditch.
Indeed, people really under(over?)estimate how small a loss of attention has to be to become catastrophic.
I once wanted to know the name of a track that was playing while driving on the highway. I looked right to the stereo display and read it, that probably took a tenth of a second, but it happened right at the moment when something came into my lane and I had to veer off not to hit it, I did not hit it but also almost drove the car out of the road.
When you're distracted, even if you're looking straight ahead, coming back to reality, assessing the situation, reacting, ... takes at least a couple seconds and that's a lot of time in these scenarios.
Tesla - autopilot that really isn't, gets fooled in many situations, driver lulled into not paying attention, can't react quickly enough when the computer bails, and ends up driving into a bridge abutment at 75mph.
Kia - cheap cars built to minimum safety standards driven by young people who aren't very experienced drivers.
Buick - cars driven by geriatrics whose declines in vision and reaction speed probably should have resulted in their licenses being revoked five years ago but who still insist on driving themselves.
I'd also venture that the profile of Tesla drivers is also a factor along with those other two brands. I'd be pretty sure that Tesla owners collectively drive more aggressively than the average car on the road. Teslas aren't being driven by soccer moms and careful grandmas.
Where I live, I'd estimate that a third of the passenger cars are Teslas. No data to back that up, but that's what I tend to see day to day. The diversity of drivers is significant enough to suggest that "all kinds of people" drive Teslas.
A third? Wow. Where I am they are not exactly rare but uncommon enough that I still notice them when I see them. I see a few a week I'd guess. Pre-pandemic I knew one person who owned a Tesla. And now... I know two people who own a Tesla, but one of them lives in another country.
This runs completely opposite of my observations. Especially with Model Ys, which seem to be driven exclusively by parents. (Call them "soccer moms" if you want.)
> Buick - cars driven by geriatrics whose declines in vision and reaction speed probably should have resulted in their licenses being revoked five years ago but who still insist on driving themselves.
It takes until 85+ years old to match the accident frequency of the 16-25 years old cohort. Should we ban young adults from driving?
The reality is that the drivers tests should be MUCH more stringent for all cohorts. The reality is also that not having a car in the US is a horrible handicap.
So, we are stuck in a very suboptimal spot until self-driving cars come online.
>In the US at least, the top killer of drivers are trees on the side of the road.
A decade or so ago the Georgia Department of Transportation tried to do away with the trees between streets and sidewalks because of so many fatalities coming from collisions with trees. Clearing out an "automative recovery zone" as they called it likely would have saved lives of some people in vehicles but of course it would increase the danger to pedestrians, who might or might not be present at that moment. Lots of trade offs in these types of analysis and not all of them are always immediately obvious.
In the US at least, the top killer of drivers are trees on the side of the road.
This is false. Your cited link (https://highways.dot.gov/safety/RwD) clearly demonstrates that head-on collisions cause more fatalities than tree+utility pole collisions combined.
How can any reasonable person know if any story about Tesla (good or bad) is actually factual and useful, or is just a story told from a particular angle to manipulate the stock price for gain?
While many says it's the ultimate meme stock, I also can't help thinking it's the ultimate manipulation stock - it seems some people desperately want it to go down while others desperately want it to go up.
Tesla is a memestock. There's no reason it should be as high as it is; the fundamentals aren't that great and Musk is a danger to the company whether he's in or out of government.
Some context for others - 2015 is fairly early in Tesla's history. The model 3 didn't even exist until 2017. The overwhelming majority of Teslas on the road today are Y's and 3's.
FWIW, I've personally owned three Teslas with zero problems, but none older than 2019. YMMV.
Early or not, it sure stings when you get hit with a $15k battery replacement cost -- for a refurbished pack! -- literally the day after the warranty dies. And that's only because my parents hadn't driven for a week. All because of an a corroded interior wire they refused to repair? Yet they had refurbished packs to sell.. at $15k.....
I also have a 2017 and 2023. It's a little early to declare success if your oldest car is 5yo
While the linked article is playing up the tesla angle (and so may be thought to be manipulative) the underlying study does not seem to be unusually focused on tesla, it's simply listing the results of a fairly straightforward analysis. I also have no reason to doubt it as I more or less expected tesla to have bad fatality rates compared to class (although I guess I wouldn't have expected them to be quite this bad - I thought they'd be bad compared to other luxury vehicles of similar weight size and price, not absolutely bad compared to most cars).
But you can find the underlying numbers and critique them if you have reason to think they might be wrong. E.g. if you believed the claims that autopilot was safer than human drivers and was saving lives, you might have expected to see a sign of that in this data (I didn't).
>How can any reasonable person know if any story about Tesla (good or bad) is actually factual and useful, or is just a story told from a particular angle to manipulate the stock price for gain?
This is a data-based story. Follow the link(s) to review the data if one is unsure whether or not the reporting piece can be trusted.
> Karl Brauer said in the report. “A focused, alert driver, traveling at a legal or prudent speed, without being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, is the most likely to arrive safely regardless of the vehicle they’re driving.”
... implication being that Tesla drivers are more likely to be driving like pricks and/or under the influence?
I wonder what the rates are like for specific models from other brands that are associated with morons. G-wagons, M3s etc etc
> ... implication being that Tesla drivers are more likely to be driving like pricks and/or under the influence?
Or perhaps the large amount of power available instantly makes it easier to get into dangerous situations than an equivalent to combustion engine car. And as the largest EV brand with the most data available… they really stand out.
I paid $10K for FSD when I was drinking the Kool Aid but haven't used it in over a year due to it being a steaming pile of garbage. But hey, it's a great party gag and the stock price is still soaring so keep the pedal to the metal and take us all to RICH town Elon! What could possibly go wron...
I wonder how much of this is because (IME anyway) Tesla drivers are not very good. With all that tech it's easy to get distracted (there's literally a giant tablet looking thing for a console). It's also easy to think all the bells and whistles will do things for you so drivers are paying less attention because the car will beep and holler at them if things are going awry (except by that point it's too late).
Tesla drivers are young men with big wallets, stereotypically. That demographic is not known for their carefulness in traffic, or in any other matter. I'm sure that simple confounding factor is enough to explain the excessive fatality rate of Tesla cars.
Whats the temperament of the driver. Certain brands attract hot heads who will drive recklessly. I was kind of expecting more sports cars in the top 5. 2/5 is still a good score.
Given the amount of SUVs as well, no matter how safe you make a small car, if an SUV rams you, it is just not going to end well for the smaller.
I thoroughyl expect the Deparment of Government Efficiency to recommend U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) be shut down to save previous taxpayer dollars.
Diesel gate involved also many others manufacturers
> Opel (General Motors) publicly demonstrated (while representatives from the TÜV Hessen were present) a Zafira that met the NOx emission limits. At the same time, Opel started clandestinely pushing an engine software update that limited NOx emissions in Zafiras that were already on the road.
> German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that US authorities investigating Mercedes have discovered that its vehicles are equipped with illegal software to help them pass United States' stringent emission tests. The claimed defeat devices include a Bit 15 mode to switch off emissions control after 16 miles of driving (the length of an official U.S. emissions test), and Slipguard which tries to directly determine if the car is being tested based on speed and acceleration profiles
> Dodge Ram 1500 and Jeep Grand Cherokee trucks, had software that allowed them to exceed NOx pollution limits, undetected by the usual testing methods.
>
BMW was sued in 2018 when certain models were named as producing several times more nitrogen oxide emissions than laboratory tests indicated
UK, French and German government agencies lobbied for weaker testing. Probably because of car industry lobbyists, and all the blah blah about "we sell cars, people stay employed, economy keeps going, you get reelected.". Ah, isn't democracy beautiful...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc...
This is why we need the Department of Department of Government Efficiency Efficiency so we can ensure the governmental efficiency of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Nobody needs to take notes, we’ve known what this is for a hundred years. We spent most of the last century trying to get rid of autocracy in various places, there’s entire libraries worth of books detailing this playbook at this point.
autocracy is about concentration of power, correct. bureaucratic is not autocratic. it‘s the opposite. Removing checks and balances is a bad thing, yes.
A president can't pardon himself. He can still be held responsible for this crimes that he's already done. they'll just be shelved for a time. With any justice we'll come back to his crimes after this presidency proves to be a complete failure. I personally don't believe that Americans will allow anyone to become dictator.
Well, they have certainly allowed a convicted felon to become president, so I’m not as convinced of their ability to defend themselves. Any Netflix showrunner designing Trump as a character would have been called of for such a flat caricature of a narcissistic villain, but somehow people thought that would be a good leader.
Even if Trump does not ruin the USA, I have forever lost my respect for its citizens.
He does not need to pardon himself if he has presidental immunity for offical acts for the rest of his life. That just hinges on the definition of offical acts, which will be made by a partisan and corrupt supreme court.
Am I the only one that is not excited about the next four years being constant banter of this nature? I loathe it. Nothing personal against your comment but the new administration hasn't even gone into office and I cannot get away from this.
Try not to dismiss my comment for what it is. I'm not taking a stance on political affiliation or preference. I'm trying to highlight a behavior that is the result of elections of recent past. I'm not excited about another 4 years where communication diminishes to snarky comments that point finger at the side they oppose. It makes me want to just go outside and smell the fresh air.
I come to HN for substantial conversation, not this elementary unsubstantial conversation.
With that in mind, "Am I the only one..." is not substantial conversation, because it is rarely the case where one person is the only one who holds a certain viewpoint.
Your presumption that it was snarky banter and not a deductive prediction based on publicly documented behavior is itself a political stance and affiliation.
They have already announced what they are going to do, with the pro-Trump side saying he's not serious or will mellow out the plan before he takes office, and the anti-Trump side saying he will do exactly what he says he's going to do.
not a repeat of 2016 at all. he's got every lever of the government at his disposal. stacked supreme court, three branches of government on his side. hiring the worst people for every job possible and hiring only for fealty to him.
You may wish to revisit your timelines. COVID-19 and the associated widespread shutdowns occurred throughout 2020 and 2021. The national debt (e.g. the thing the "money printing" goes toward) rose by a staggering $8.4T from 2017-2021 and only $4.3T from 2021-.
Unfortunately complex systems cannot be fixed by simply going full forward in the opposite direction of a bad direction.
And yet we not only want to revert any decision that was made that we think correlates with an unhappy situation, we also want to choose people who are as different as possible from the guys we think are responsible for the unwanted status quo. So if the current politicians are serious people who talk in an articulate way we conclude that seriousness is a problem, because it's two faced. We conclude that being articulated is a problem because it's judgemental, it's a symbol of being elites.
If you conclude that serious looking articulated people are two-faced lying elites there are many alternatives in a multidimensional solution space. You could desire honest serious elites, or honest serious commoners, or many variations on the theme.
But no, we obviously want to get exactly the opposite, because that's the monodimensional thing to do! It's simpler. Let's pick the exact opposite of the people we have. Current people are too serious? Let's pick an unserious person. The current elites are too educated? Let's pick people that don't have formal education and/or that actively denigrate higher education. Etc etc.
I understand the human urge to flip tables. But if I stop thinking about it for a moment, I don't think the strategy is good. In rare cases it might be the necessary strategy, but in most cases it's destroying something that has plenty room for improvement and replace it with something that is much worse and will take even longer to improve over the previous one
I really can't take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously.
I had someone try to claim we had "complete lockdown for years", which is news to me. We had one year of sporadically enforced lockdown-ish measures. Although, we did go out to eat a few times.
Hell, I bought a house during end of 2020/beginning of 2021. By the time we closed, I was back in office, we weren't wearing masks, and people didn't seem too concerned.
Depends on where you lived. In some places they enforced longer lock downs and required vaccines to eat in public and this went on for years. Texas was different compared to Minnesota for example. Canada was locked down for a long time.. New Zealand too.
He had both chambers in 2016 too, on similarly narrow majorities. The hiring has consistently been for allegiance. The court has changed a little. One thing you don't mention that is perhaps the biggest thing is temperance for reelection. But overall, I don't see much reason that it will be that much different from last time. Talking about things being much worse seems like an emotional statement.
Politicians bend the truth or promise what they are later unable to deliver (and often had no chance of delivering). But I think Trump usually tries to deliver on whatever he said in the campaign (like in 2016), like you can expect wide reaching tariffs in January or February (especially since half-way competent advisors, congress, and the courts are probably not going to moderate him as much this time).
Maybe make any computer purchases in December just to be safe.
Why would it be ironic? He has less regard for the political group and general stability than a more run of the mill politician and now there is explicit immunity for anything he wants to do, like when he sold classified documents but "declassified them in his mind" right before once he got caught.
We watched four years of this already, including a rally with gallows being built in the crowd being told to march on the Capitol (he claims figuratively, and everyone just misunderstood, despite all the posts and planning and travel and tour groups). Last time it was absurd news headline after headline just to distract from the other things going on. We saw some bonkers stuff that would have disqualified other candidates in the past (or at least most candidates probably thought it would).
At this point I think his promises are easier to deliver on and he doesn't care about (and has been made immune from) the consequences that usually temper a politician's ability to deliver. Tariffs, no health plan, another wall (remember when he pardoned bannon for stealing the money they raised for the wall?), "stopping the war in Ukraine" but without a free Ukraine at the end, and decimating government regulatory agencies.
The weirdest part of this narrative for me is how the supporters say he wont do what he promises and the detractors fear he will. I don't know enough history to know if that is common but it sure feels backwards to me.
"The weirdest part of this narrative for me is how the supporters say he wont do what he promises and the detractors fear he will. I don't know enough history to know if that is common but it sure feels backwards to me."
That's pretty common on all highly polarized topics. Happens all the time with stuff like democrat candidates and firearms seizures - supporters walking it back and detractors believing ever word.
Trump is probably the first politician in history where supporters claim he isn’t going to do what he says he is going to do (“take Trump seriously, not literally!”) while his detractors claim that he is. It’s already a weird spot in history.
That's pretty common on all highly polarized topics. Happens all the time with stuff like democrat candidates and firearms seizures - supporters walking it back and detractors believing every word.
They are like this literally any time a Republican is in the White House. They were like this when Dubya was President too, even though today they act like he's some sort of elder statesman just because he hates Trump.
What? Dubya was selected by the Supreme Court. He started a war after peddling bullshit evidence in front of the whole world. Dubya was and is a piece of shit.
There were some people (former staff of his) openly asking him, before the election, to denounce Trump. He didn't do that. November 6, he issued a congratulations to Trump. A piece of shit and a coward .
Respectfully, why not?
That's the whole point of campaigning. I seriously hope an incoming administration has a plan before they get to office. "I wouldn't change anything" fortunately doesn't seem to win elections when everything's sideways.
Campaigning is done right happens between elections. In most countries you only have 4/6 weeks. As Kim Campbell of Canada famously said an election is not the time to debate issues. Now the US has a much longer campaign period.. and elections every 2 years. They are always campaigning.
Every US President is constantly campaigning. Not necessarily for his own re-election but to create public pressure on Congress to support his agenda, and then to get votes for his endorsed successor.
Many other countries have that. It’s like not giving you admin credentials before you contract start. But there’s no credential, the admin power comes from talking. And as a manager of managers, they has to restrain themselfes.
These people have been inundated with the drivel of a billion dollar propaganda machine run by the most expensive campaign in history.
It's gonna take a while before they're back to normal again. I've heard so many "office of government efficiency" jokes in the last week I am tired of it too. But, in their defense if all you hear is how this administration is going to be the fourth reich (lol), destroy the country (lol), introduce fascism (lol), kill people (lol), etc you're going to react in a sarcastic way to anything you can grasp onto.
Though tbf, again, "office of government efficiency" seems like an oxymoron.
edit:
But then again P.A.T.R.I.O.T act etc is a thing so hard to tell if actual joke or just going with how US politicians like to be witty while naming stuff.
What's 4D chess about saying they'll diminish the government capacity to regulate their business and proceeding to doing so? It doesn't take an evil genius master plan to go about that.
The genius would lie in planning that in advance. You'd need to buy Twitter for quite a lot of money, use it to influence elections or at least give the impression that you'd been instrumental in influencing the election so that the new president will want to give you a new department with a funny name you made up.
I don't know man, my Occam's razor cuts another way.
> You'd need to buy Twitter for quite a lot of money
On the other hand, if he had been forced to buy Twitter against his better judgement, he may have an axe to grind against the "overbearing" administrative state and use the tools at hand to achieve his ends. No evil genius required, just happenstance and humans seeing patterns in chaos.
It doesn't take genius for an opportunistic rich person to expand their power and wealth. You're just creating a narrative from a string of cherry picked events. The Twitter acquisition also destroyed a ton of value.
Ever heard of Chestertons fence? Coming into a government for over 300 million people without the faintest clue how it works, removing stuff that doesn’t look too useful is the worst possible strategy to improve efficiency. You don’t renovate with a wrecking ball.
Not only do other HN commenters largely agree that it belongs to HN, they decided that it deserves to be the top comment on this discussion, at the time I authored this comment
Which is sad for someone who has been here for well over a decade. I never came here for political banter, I came for technical discussion. Facts, truths and subject matter experts. HN is slowly becoming less concentrated version of that.
Pretending that “politics” exists as something separate or invasive is not only ignorant, it’s dangerous.
If this were a thread about IBM machines of the 1930s, would it be playing “politics” to note that those machines were sold to Nazis and supported by IBM through sub-contractors even while we were at war with them? Is it crossing a line to mention they were used to facilitate the Holocaust?
"I don't want to discuss politics" when it's directly related to the topic at hand, is a complaint from the decadent class. It affects peoples lives, it's relevant, it's entirely plausible given the situation.
People are going to have to deal with the presence of politics in regular life for the unforeseen future, because the luxury of avoiding politics is generally the sign of having good governance.
Let's not pretend everyone is aghast at the goals of this administration. We just had an election and these viewpoints resoundingly won the day.
A non-trivial component to this election was this constant, smug nagging. "We know better, you're all so stupid".
If you turn out to be right, enjoy your smug "I told you so", but until then - these views are a minority and are very tiring to constantly see/hear/read.
Wait, when you see someone say "department of government efficiency" and mention corruption you hear "hitler hitler hitler"?
Maybe you're just really tired of hearing any criticism of blatant corruption and I'm sorry you're feeling that way. I bet that feels really discouraging and tedious and adversarial.
To me this comment reads as a callout of corruption, not fascism. The hitler criticisms you mentioned, in my experience, have been for things like the maga hats with the nazi font, the republican convention stage in the shape of the SS glyph, and the claim that immigrants are watering down the proper American bloodlines.
To your other request that people stop sharing their concerns: just because a lot of people vote for something doesn't mean it's inherently ethical nor does it mean people should be silenced. My assumption is most people don't want corruption or abuse or racism or fascism; if you think that too then you might have better success helping people understand why they are mistaken about what looks like corruption instead of telling people to just stop sharing opinions you're personally tired of reading.
I'm not Nielsen Ratings or anything, but that would be consistent with what I would think. Fox viewers being older, and older being consistent with tv viewers. Younger being consistent with TikTok, YouTube, InstaFaceTwit intake.
Fox has the youngest demo (500,000 for Jessie Watters) and most viewers. At night or during the day. Interesting cnbc has the oldest audience and least. Gutfeld crushes all late night shows (Tonight show, Late Show, Kimmel).
“Young” among tv viewers is different from “young” among social media tiktok’ers. The article you linked actually says that exact thing:
> “suggesting younger voters were either less engaged, or getting their election night information from other sources such as social media and at-home streaming, which are not tracked by Nielsen.”
Young people won’t watch tv unless there’s a game or tv series on they’re interested in. Even then, a lot of them will DVR it on Hulu or something. If you want those eyeballs, you’re going to need to be creative. And tv networks can’t be as creative as instaFaceSnap, Netflix and TikTwitGram.
Doesn't Fox News have the highest viewer numbers of any of the news stations? What fraction of local news stations are owned by Sinclair? I don't think you get to call "legacy media" out for being liberal when such a large part is not.
The vote was like 50.1 to 48.2 at latest (accurate) count. Which is terrible news to everyone. Because, unless my math is wrong, that means there were more people who were so unmoved by either party that they couldn't be arsed to go out and vote, than there were voters for either party.
And all those people are pissed off.
Personally, I think stuff like comments on HN and Twitter are gonna be a good pressure valve over the next few years. Maybe even some Onion, Saturday Night Live and Daily Show for those masses. Because if those people ever get what they perceive to be a reason? I mean, they've already shown fairly consistently that they're no longer interested in the whole non-violent democratic norm of voting thing. And if a guy like Trump can't even bring them out, that means they're not at all interested in anything either side is selling.
After looking at those numbers, I guess I just wouldn't be so sure that the people making these comments are liberals. Or even independents for that matter. Independents on the sidelines are, at least, reasonable and vote. What we have boiling outside the stadium, so to speak, is something different entirely. And if they'll satisfy themselves yelling insults at the people inside the stadium then we should all probably let them. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's a bad thing.
If a lion starts chewing on your football, let it have the football. Don't be foolish. Just back away and go get another ball to continue your game with the opposing team.
That's a pretty simplistic analysis. People largely voted on immigration and inflation. You can't infer anything about what they thought on other issues.
The last COVID stimulus package added from 1 to 4% to inflation, but that was transitory. The wider rise was largely due to other factors such as supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The latter significantly raised oil prices worldwide which in turn raised costs for all kinds of things.
Here's an article that covers a lot of the factors [1].
I trust a survey of economists over a random study. That study might be right, but it also might be wrong, and I don't have the expertise to say which.
You are not alone in this sentiment. It is beyond the pale that the denizens of a 'hacker forum' are often so narrow-minded when it comes to engaging those who think outside of the personal zone of ideological preference. The same people who have been yammering about the importance of 'diversity' are dead set against diversity of opinion. Grow up, folks, get outside your comfort zone and engage some of those deplorables, irredeemables, garbage, rednecks, hillbillies and bible thumpers instead of howling along with the masses. Go ahead and try, you may find they are more like you than you've been told by the chattering classes. Sure you'll have disagreements over certain things but that does not make them the evil monsters your moral mentors have been claiming they are. Just... grow up.
Hacker News' eventual death started the moment it joined the hysteria over the Lab Leak Theory. Since then it has trended more and more to be like Reddit, with ideological tribal concerns occupying an increasingly large mindshare. This drives away people who want to have earnest conversations in good faith, giving even more power to the ideologues. It will be a long death spiral but you can see it happening day by day.
The idea that the novel coronavirus didn't escape from the local coronavirus R&D laboratory never had anywhere near enough evidence to be credible.
It was pretty much the WHO simply repeating the claims of the Chinese government, who had already tried to cover up the outbreak (with any warnings sent to the WHO coming from Taiwan instead).
It was about as believable as the completely baseless claims that the emergency use authorised vaccine was safe and effective.
I've genuinely never seen "hysteria" from the people talking about the lab leak theory. The closest I've seen is from people who were extremely keen for no one to mention the theory. Not because of some cover-up, but I think just because that was what everyone was telling everyone else to do, hysteria-style.
I’ve engaged with these people a good bit actually. They’re very normal people, in that they largely don’t know much about politics but have strong opinions.
In this context, diversity refers to characteristics, not to differences of opinion. That said, diverse thinking can be valuable when used for prosocial purposes.
I love the argument you’re making. If you’re against socialist policies, it serves as indication you don’t like the things I find good.
Please don’t ask me to fund anyone else’s EV purchase. It doesn’t matter to me one bit who’s in office to get rid of that evil policy, I’d still love it.
It doesn’t suck for the majority of people in the country. For them, it’s what they’d love to see.
Funnily enough, comments like yours are also what they’d love to see. Seeing leftists in tears over the policy changes we’re going to see is a great form of entertainment for many people.
To expand your last paragraph, I've been wondering about how the whole thing will affect geo-politics (as well as national politics). I wonder if there's a forum of people doing thinking about all possible scenarios. Things like the world pivoting towards China because, hey, Xi is a despot, but at least he isn't volatile...
The joke was, when Putin invaded Ukraine everyone turned from epidemiology experts into geo-political experts. I wonder where the proper experts are now.
They are planning to appoint a nutjob who has publicly that he admitted cutting off the heads of whale carcasses with a chainsaw and dumping dead bears in the Central Park for "fun". Presumably he is also consuming those rotting animals carcasses that he keeps finding somehow (how else do you get brain worms?) to be the new US health secretary.
You oppose moving away for inflammatory seed oil that is known to cause cancer? You oppose removing incentives that have drug companies writing health policy? People with gilbert's syndrome are happy to remove fluoride from the drinking water.
Educate yourself before someone else does and sells you short.
Fluoride can damage the liver in a number of ways, including:
Liver function enzymes: Fluoride can increase the activity of liver enzymes like transaminases and phosphatases, which can indicate liver damage.
Liver cell membrane: Fluoride can rupture the liver cell membrane.
Mitochondrial damage: Fluoride can damage mitochondria in liver cells.
Protein synthesis: Fluoride can prevent the liver from producing important proteins like albumin and clotting factors.
Glucose metabolism: Fluoride can disrupt the liver's ability to regulate glucose metabolism, which can lead to metabolic disorders like diabetes.
Histological changes: Fluoride can cause histological changes in the liver.
Fluoride is a small, active molecule that can easily enter cells and cause damage to tissues and organs. Studies have shown that fluoride exposure can cause liver damage in a variety of animals, including rats, mice, goats, and cattle.
To treat fluoride toxicity, you can try:
Calcium chloride: Lavage with a 1-5% calcium chloride solution to bind the fluoride in the stomach. This is most effective when done within an hour of ingestion.
Hemodialysis: For critically ill patients who don't respond to other treatments.
Regardless, this kind of straw man argument isn't very convincing. You can be against someone's stated policies while holding either supporting or opposing views on any particular topic; implying otherwise is baffling since it would require someone to PERFECTLY align with every opinion you have. Thinking RFK will be a good or bad leader has nothing to do with if someone opposes "moving away from seed oils".
Seed oil removal is part of his agenda. If you like that idea things may be better than what the media is selling you. The dead bear is part of an entertaining story. At most you could say he initially didn't to waste the meat but lost track of time hunting birds then had to meet someone for dinner in New York before boarding a flight an hour later. He creately solved the issue.
I do agree about his view on water fluoridation. So what? That doesn't make him any less of an unhinged lunatic. Again, I'm not even talking about his specific views or qualifications at all only his personal behaviour and character.
What do I need to know? Tech oriented, factually grounded discussion. The thing I come here for that allows me to partially escape reality and enjoy the finer things in life. I can tune into Fox, CNN, Facebook, or a myriad of places for political banter.
As a non-american watching the election, this was one of the reasons I didn't want the result to be the way it went. Just for having to hear about it constantly from everywhere.
A certain faction always think the rule on keeping politics out of forums doesn't apply to them, because their politics are too correct and important. I experience this problem in groupchats where the very people who furiously demanded people not bring politics into the group and to make the group politics-free routinely push their own politics. They say their politics are too important to not bring up.
These same people LEFT other groups dedicated to politics so presumably if others respond in kind by discussing their own politics, they will leave the last groupchats too. This is why a certain faction is such an echo chamber. Incidentally, I was just banned from r/Archaeology for arguing that a post arguing that archeologists should prepare to fight the fascist takeover was too political.
I suspect the biggest factor is speed. After getting used to EV for over a year, every ICE vehicle feels painfully sluggish and slow. If that's the case I'm curious to see how the numbers compare to other EVs.
I find the touchscreen actually less distracting and easier to use than the cell phone I had to use in a Honda civic. Also no critical functions need to be done on the touchscreen, they can all be done via physical buttons on the wheel or stocks.
I think you've just made that up; however, I am willing to stipulate that 99.9% of Hacker News posters will never tow anything. I always forget how out of touch the audience here is.
I'm not sure which of them are evs, but you could work it out fairly easily. Even if many of them are, it still looks to me like tesla is doing poorly by this metric.
EVs have full torque at 0 RPM so they are capable of accelerating much faster than an average ICE.
The manufacturer can alter based on software, how much current the electrical system is capable of supplying, how powerful the motors are, etc.
But even “normal non-performance” EVs that aren’t designed for performance like a Chevy Bolt come off the line way quicker than an equivalent normal car, even if they’re full 0 to 60 time isn’t that much faster.
I recently drove a 2014 Nissan Leaf. Not exactly a performance oriented EV, and the acceleration it's capable of is 'nice'. Not crazy, but was unexpectedly good given it's 10 years old and only trying to be an EV rather than a "hey look I'm an EV!!!".
People love to say that EVs are very heavy, or are much, much heavier, massively heavier and so on. This paints the wrong picture in people’s heads. The same people will use the Hummer EV as an example, but most people aren’t driving that.
> full electric versions are only around 10% to 15% heavier than their direct ICE equivalent
To put it into perspective, from the table, you could load an ICE with passengers and some luggage and it would weigh the same as the EV equivalent with just the driver.
I assume the misconception is because EVs are massively heavier if they had comparable range, as the reason is the poor energy density of batteries. If an EV had the same range as the ICE then it would be massively heavier, but with significantly reduced range it is only slightly heavier.
I don’t think people talk about hypothetical EV weight when they make such claims, the claims tend to revolve around EVs currently on the road.
We should also try to discuss “waiting time” rather than range so that people start to think in these terms.
My overall waiting time is much lower for my EV than my old diesel, despite the range of the EV being lower. Less time waiting to fill up on a weekly basis (0 mins while I sleep vs 5 mins filling up + journey time to the petrol station), less time defrosting in the winter (0 mins remote pre-heat vs 5+ scraping), less time waiting to fill up on long journeys (0 extra mins while I eat vs 5 extra mins filling up).
These are all situation dependent of course, but making people adjust their thinking will help them get a more accurate picture of EV ownership.
I would also like to know this. How many fatal crashes happened where autopilot was engaged in the 30 seconds prior to a fatal accident?
By definition, if the autopilot has disengaged it’s a more dangerous situation, so it is fair to place the blame on it. A relief pitcher doesn’t get charged with earned runs he inherits.
Have the demographics of typical Tesla driver changed in last 5-10 years? I think it was at first wealthy environmentalists, but it shifted to be a new Yuppie mobile, and most recently probably skews to a young male crowd?
> The study was conducted on model year 2018–2022 vehicles, and focused on crashes between 2017 and 2022 that resulted in occupant fatalities.
Teslas can go fast real fast, so naively this is the result I would expect given how they have filtered the data. In other words, unless they controlled for this, this would be biased by natural selection playing out.
Having said that, as someone who had a couple of close calls with the autopilot. I would love to know what percent of those crashes was with autopilot enabled.
> Teslas can go fast real fast, so naively this is the result I would expect given how they have filtered the data. In other words, unless they controlled for this…
Explain to me why you would want to filter out fatalities caused by going “real fast”?
Because comparing the fatality rate of a Corolla going 50mph and a Tesla going 90mph is useless to a person who wants a car that is safe when driven responsibly.
Unless the Tesla induces unsafe behavior, of course. Does the car make it easier to break the speed limit, drive distracted, or drive under the influence? I don’t know.
It seems fair to say that it's difficult to control for variation due to the drivers being different. But I don't think giving faster cars a better rating is a good way to control for that. Faster seems more dangerous for other reasons.
Corollas can easily go 90mph, so can a Prius, so can a dodge neon.
Even eco-shitboxes in the US have 160 hp. Sure, they get 0-60 times of 10 seconds, but I don't think there's been a car model in the US that cannot reach 100mph in decades
If a bunch of lunatics buy the car because it is fast, and kill themselves, that doesn't necessarily affect my safety in the car if I'm buying it for some other feature and don't intend to drive it dangerously.
I think gathering the data to judge who's a lunatic is quite hard and fragile. Finding proxies like past infractions record would be already hard enough to compile at scale, I can't really derive a passable methodology that could tell you what you're asking for.
At least the data informs others that perhaps it's good to be cautious around Teslas, not very much if it's a safe purchase, and they state that it's a safe car so I don't see the hangup you had about it on position of a buyer.
Perhaps Musk needs to come to terms with the fact that the Teslas are not so safe. Maybe he needs to come to terms with the fact that his successful business model does not include customer satisfaction at all. Elon, just cope.
> “Most of these vehicles received excellent safety ratings, performing well in crash tests at the IIHS and NHTSA, so it’s not a vehicle design issue,” said Brauer. “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities.”
Quoting what's easily the most important passage in that study.
The two Teslas on the list are the Model Y, right beneath the Porsche 911, and the Model S, right beneath the... Toyota Prius.
So yeah. No surprises here. It's a study where the lesson should be "a car is as dangerous as its driver" and everyone is going to read it as "Teslas are deathtraps". What else is new.
That just assumes that the crash tests are good indicators of actual safety. My understanding is that car manufacturers could go much further in the name of safety, but do just enough to scrape by on those crash tests. So there could definitely be differentials in terms of safety even among cars that have perfect safety measures from IIHS/NHTSA.
It is better. But in the year 2024, why should I believe the data from a random source, with unknown data analysis? When will they be releasing their data package for independent analysis? Why isn't this the expected norm? And how can we make it so?
Did you email them to ask for it? What sort of meta-analysis do you intend to do with their data? Have you released other interesting work in this field that would benefit the post? Why weren’t your intentions for their model published in your comment? What can we do to denormalize rhetoric in forum discussions?
I'd love to see some sort of multiple regression or ANOVA on this, instead of singling out a single variable. Is car brand really the best independent predictor? Or is it specific design decisions you tend to see in certain brands?
(Like, say, maximizing driver distraction by consolidating a bunch of essential controls and information displays into a touchscreen display that's really difficult to operate when it's sunny outside. Just to pick something at random, of course.)
Somewhat related, I was recently shopping for refrigerators, and fell down a data rabbit hole. If you just look at the overall style of fridge, French doors look like a terrible option from a reliability perspective. But then, digging in a bit more, it turns out that's kind of a spurious correlation. Actually it's the presence of bells and whistles like through-door ice dispensers that kill a refrigerator's reliability. And then perhaps on top of that the amount of extra Rube Goldberg machine you need to make a chest height ice dispenser work in a bottom-freezer French door refrigerator creates even more moving parts to break. But a those problems don't apply to a model that doesn't have that feature.
It's an interesting perspective. I was recently shopping for shoes, and a fully closed shoe had more places where it could break compared to my flip flops. That's why whenever you are doing a dangerous activity, flip flops are recommended.
I'm not entirely sure an anecdote about the dangers of singling out just one variable is a great counterpoint to a criticism of the practice of singling out just one variable.
I mean, even lacking proper scientific data, ask yourself how often your brain “autocompletes” someone based on a brand or object? There’s a reason advertisers spend so much money and effort cultivating a very specific customer image: it works.
In the case of Tesla - and I cannot overstress enough how much lf this is purely subjective conjecture on my part and not a statement of fact - the image cultivated by the company and its Chief Executive is very much one of rejecting norms and expectations, fierce independence, and a hostility towards others (mostly from the Cybertruck unveiling onward). The people who relate to that brand would, I would think, be more likely to flout laws like speed limits, failing to use indicators for turns or merges, and drive more aggressively than a brand that emphasizes safety or enjoyment of experience (like Hondas and Toyotas). My purely subjective experiences bear this out, and I’m consistently rewarded giving Teslas a wider berth on the roads.
So as far as branding as an indicator of outcome, yeah, I can totally see that being a reliable indicator. I’d still be darn curious to see more research about it, though.
> The people who relate to that brand would, I would think, be more likely to flout laws like speed limits, failing to use indicators for turns or merges, and drive more aggressively than a brand that emphasizes safety or enjoyment of experience
This was my thought as well from looking at the actual list. Of the top 5 models with the worst fatal accident rate, 2 are luxury cars that seem like they'd attract drivers with reckless personalities (the Chevrolet Corvette and the Porsche 911). I don't think the average mile driven in a Corvette is really equivalent to the average mile driven in a Honda Civic.
This data is interesting, but not really useful for decisionmaking if we can't isolate the extent to which the disparities are caused by features of the actual vehicle, as opposed to driver selection factors.
Is anyone making an argument that the Model Y has an actual safety problem in its design? I'd like to hear about which physical aspect of the car people think is making it 4x less safe than the average car? I don't see anything obvious. Its crash test performance is fine. I'd hesitate to blame autopilot, since we know that they crash less often with autopilot enabled than without (even if due to selection factors).
It’s why I was very careful to make it as clear as possible that my own theory is rooted purely in conjecture and speculation based on personal experience, because:
A) I don’t want to get sued
B) I am not a researcher
Though if I had to take a guess on the CR-V: big, cheap SUV, often seen driven by young drivers in my area. Could be lack of experience? I can only speculate, though.
I guess I wouldn't be surprised if there were issues with data and/or analysis. Should we assume they are basing their miles driven off of used car listings? That is, they see someone puts a 2019 Subaru Impreza up for sale in 2023, with 50,000 miles, and they add that to their data set on how many miles the average Impreza gets driven per year? But maybe people leasing drive differently than those who own or keep vehicles longer? I'd like to see the data on their average number of miles driven per car model per year.
Would also be interesting to see which were the safest cars according to their analysis.
The Tesla Model Y is a two ton SUV with the performance of a Porsche 911. The base RWD model is fast and the Performance model is stupidly fast. I don't think anyone would be particularly surprised to learn that Porsche drivers get into a lot of fatal accidents.
The top most model of the Model Y is as fast in a straight line as the lowest base model 911, and the handling isn't even close to the same. Saying the Model Y has the performance of the 911 is not really an accurate statement.
I dislike how tesla kills situational awareness. It is the central touchscreen.
The model 3 and y and cybertruck put everything there - both status and control. You have to look to the side to see the speed of the vehicle, and the gearshift is on the touchscreen.
The S and X both retain a dashboard in front of you, but most of the controls moved to the touchscreen.
And the removal of stalks from all models have moved turn signals to steering wheel buttons, and most of the rest to the touchscreen.
I think the cars are really well designed, it is just that these user interface choices make you worse driver.
My 2024 Mazda CX-5 has a heads-up display and I quite like it. It presents in the windshield right above my hands on the top of the wheel, shows current speed, cruise status, and lane detection. I feel like I don't have to take my eyes off the road to get a speed update, it's nice.
I've had two cars now with head-up display info on the window. It shows speed, adaptive cruise control status, lane keeping, maximum speed, navigation info and warnings. I will definitely get it again on any future cars. It's so much easier than looking at the displays inside the car.
A small but well thought out safety future using the HUD is in the dark, when the car detects a pedestrian or cyclist on or moving into the road using the infrared camera it will show a yellow warning icon. Has shown me people walking in dark clothes on dark rural roads a few times far before I could see them myself. This is a video of the detection, mine doesn't have that spotlight, but shows the warning on the window instead: https://youtu.be/WpB8ZLGq7EE
Don't the aerodynamics severely limit the cornering performance of the Model Y? How can it have the same performance? Or is there only one metric of performance that is being measured?
I would suspect that it is the weight of the vehicle that is the primary driver there. There is some additional negative effects of the vehicle being taller (increasing roll), but that is probably mostly mitigated by the battery pack pulling down the (vertical) center of mass. But certainly the aerodynamics creating less down-force would play some role.
So the Tesla Model Y has a lower fatal accident rate than sports cars, but they report it as Tesla overall having the highest fatal accident rate? Perhaps that's because _all_ the cars they make are stupid fast and heavy, and they don't offer cars where it's far harder to get into those situations?
...and the study only covered model years up to 2022. It would be interesting to compare the hybrid to the standard version. If there is a significant difference, I'd be suspicious of data quality.
The Highlander rates somewhat higher on crash ratings from what I can find (both are top picks). Also a significantly heavier vehicle (by about 10% depending on model years).
My fridge has been repaired twice, the first time within its first year. Both times, each repair guy said the same thing: Avoid LG and Samsung. Avoid counter depth. I have no idea if that's accurate, so I'm curious if your data dive backs up either of those notes?
maybe that's why my 12 year old samsung fridge seems fine. no repairs yet, but I've been expecting it to die anyday according to the internets. of course it could also be that samsung is the most popular brand for fridges in the USA
My Samsung fridge (in Europe) died after 12 years, and the tech guy said it actually lasted more than average as they used to have some experimental compressor back then.
But he also said they have since improved that, and indeed, now samsung fridges come with a 20 year warranty on their compressor.
I assume the issues with counter depth and reliability are due to them not compromising mich on internal volume (thus reducing the heat dissipation ability around the compressor). Most folks are going to buy purely based on volume inside. Compressor failing was what killed our Samsung but at the end of the day these appliances are cheap enough to let folks choose what they value.
Rent a Tesla and try to adjust the mirrors while driving I dare you.
Less difficult but much more common:
Change the radio station / music.
Change the climate control.
Both of those require taking your eyes off the road and navigating through multiple touch screen-only modal windows. I have owned one for years and it is a distraction factory.
I get it but Climate and Music can wait right? It’s a vehicle not an entertainment room. And adjusting mirors while driving seems crazy and dangerous!! changing something that supposed to be set before departure?
At least that’s what taught at driving school and written in texts I guess… too sad the distraction factory is so dangerous. I wouldn’t drive that.
I dunno, I adjust climate and music frequently while driving. I have a Volvo now which requires touchscreen for those things, and I can't stand it. Otherwise a great car though.
After a while you "learn" to do it without looking at the screen too much. Nonetheless, it's far inferior to having tactile controls.
The mirror's angle can change, while driving, in such a way that pulling over to stop and fix it isn't the safest option. With dedicated tactile controls you can adjust mirrors without taking your eyes off the road, while also verifying that the mirrors are adjusted correctly.
I think the number of people who can say that they have never needed to adjust mirrors while moving, even after having spent a few minutes adjusting them in the driveway, is very much next to zero.
13 years driving so far. Only time I've had to adjust mirrors while driving is if I am in a car I haven't driven before and I didn't adjust them before departing.
You are complaining about having to look over at a screen however taking several seconds to look evem further from the front of the car while adjusting a mirror isn't an issue regardless of the controls?
> you can adjust mirrors without taking your eyes off the road
Now I imagine one eye looking at the road, the other one doing active strabismus to check the mirror, one hand on the wheel and the other using muscle memory to operate the settings on a flat surface.
> The mirror's angle can change, while driving
Maybe a loose screw somewhere in the mirror or a manufacturing defect? It would be surprising QA and legal security standards don’t require mirrors to stay in the position set for a reasonable mileage…
All of these things can be done without looking if you use voice commands. They can be done with a scroll wheel/button as well if you spend five minutes, once, to set your preferences for what the wheel controls.
That said, I hate the touch screen only UI of my car. There are times when I can't use voice or the scroll wheel and want (not so much need) to do something with the menus. In most cars, it's trivial to do most things by feel if you know where the buttons are.
Even if you could get really good at only touching the "right" place on the touch screen, one software update can change things enough to where it's now accessed differently.
Gear selection is done via the screen on a Model 3 [1]. Technically, there is a touchscreen button on the rearview mirror unit, but I doubt anybody actually uses that.
Alternatively, you can use the AI gear selector from park which guesses what direction you want to go.
While I think that a single variable isn't always very useful, when something is an outlier and people are moving from other luxury brands with much lower rates to a new brand and experiencing high rates, there is definitely something wrong.
I'm guessing that while the total accident rate declines with automation, that the serious accident rate is increasing, because a human driver drives in a risk adjusted way and takes less care to avoid minor accidents and more care to avoid serious accidents, but when a robot find itself unable to drive the errors are more evenly distributed or even more likely to result in a serious accident, because its doing things idiotically with no sense of self preservation.
How much data does Tesla have on the details of crashes? Probably depends on whether enough electronics survived to phone home.
It's possible to dig the airbag controller out of the wreckage and read out the last 30 seconds or so. Airbag controllers have a short but nonvolatile memory and usually survive crashes. That gets you speed, acceleration in several axes, plus steering, brake, and power inputs, and detailed info about what the airbag system did.[1] Those were originally created to tune the airbag algorithm, and, over the years, false airbag deployments have dropped almost to zero.
That's the basic info needed to analyze fatal crashes. Speed at collision? Speed 10 secs before collision? Accelerator and brake inputs? Maneuvering (side accel) before crash? That, plus the crash scene, tells most of what you need to know.
Law enforcement will sometimes read out those units, when it's not clear what happened. It's not done routinely.
"Fun" fact... Tesla doesn't count fatalities in their accident stats!
Nor does it count accidents where there was no airbag deployment because as you point out, modern airbag systems use a wide variety of parameters, not just "if speed > x and collision = true; deploy".
So you can hit someone obliquely at 30mph, and due to factors, airbags don't deploy, and Tesla says "great, not an accident".
Or you can be in such a serious collision or similar where the airbags CAN'T deploy, and Tesla? "Not an accident".
Seems flawed. Tesla Model Y was the best selling model worldwide for 2023. (I think #3 if limited to US.) The study only covers 2017-2022, but we can infer that for the entire Brand, Teslas sold quite well over at least that latter part of that period.
Now if there are more Teslas on the road vs other vehicles (note they excluded car model years earlier than 2017, another fatal (heh) flaw in the study), it makes sense they would have more fatalities.
So this should be normalized "per capita" to vehicle counts if we want to extract any brand-related causality, in the same way as the data is already normalized to miles driven.
I enjoy hating on Tesla as much as the next person, but come on.
If you had clicked through to the article before writing your comment, you would know that the stat being compared is "fatal crash rate per billion miles driven", and that the fatal crash rate for Teslas is 2.0x the national average
If you had read my comment before replying, you would know that I recognized and even stipulated that the report was already normalized to miles driven.
I am suggesting that per mile driven and per vehicle brand on the road are not the same thing. Now that I think about it, miles driven per brand would be an interesting data point.
Just as an example of why per-brand might be useful, let's imagine that teslas are driven half the miles of the average for all other brands. so if that were the case and if the number of fatalities were equal, then that would result in tesla having 2x the fatality rate per mile. but at the same time, this doesn't let us appreciate the amount of time tesla spends on the road vs other brands. so miles might be half but time spent might be closer to 1 (equal time). and maybe that is because teslas are concentrated in urban-suburban interface environments in high congestion areas, whereas other brands are spread out across the country where for the same amount of time spent, twice as many miles are covered and congestion is less.
Data like that is needed to properly evaluate this result. And while I asked for per-vehicle-on-the-road, and my example didn't match that, you can still see how the simple per-mile-driven is insufficient.
They also could have noted the demographics of the drivers -- male/female and years of driving experience, things like that.
So again, I find the implications of this article to be very unfair.
What is the Horsepower equivalent of the Tesla power trains? Is this just because they are the new luxury sportscar and many of these drivers haven't been trough major car repairs, ever? The zero to sixty of even a basic Tesla is very quick and even with strong breaking other physical limits with turning and maneuvering can arise if some one is zooming around weaving in traffic. These stats need to be studied by age and other demographics like age, income and alcohol consumption.
It’s not just the horsepower, a big thing is the torque. There is so much and it’s available basically from zero. So even if you can compare it to a combustion engine with the same amount of horsepower it may take off the line a lot faster.
I remember some car collision data that showed that men were more likely to get into any collision and women were more likely to get into a fatal collision. A comment I read about the study suggested the conclusion that men take more risks while women take bigger risks.
It's interesting to think in that context about this. Could Tesla drivers be taking bigger risks because they think the car's software will save them from the negative consequences of their risky decisions? (As an extreme example, one such driver opted to drive in the back seat instead of the driver's seat. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patr...)
Guess what year the NHTSA started using female crash dummies?
2003, thirty years after they started using male crash dummies. And the NHTSA's female dummies were essentially male dummies shrunk to 4'11" and lightened to 97/108lbs.
What year do you think they mandated a crash dummy that was actually based on the female body?
Just guess. I think you might be surprised that they haven't done this yet. It's in the works (see THOR-5F), but it's crazy it's taken so long.
Now guess when they first put the 2003 female crash dummy in the drivers seat for the frontal collision crash test. They still haven't!
>And the NHTSA's female dummies were essentially male dummies shrunk to 4'11" and lightened to 97/108lbs.
Lol. Lmao even: "According to a 2021 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, the average weight of women in the U.S. over the age of 20 was 170.8 pounds."
459 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadBetween EV's that are much, much heavier than ICE cars and SUVs/Trucks that are much larger than they need to be, vehicles themselves, despite having more safety features than ever, are also better at killing that they've been at a long time too.
We really need to get serious about improving our transportation infrastructure.
Better yet, we really need to consider urbanization. That way everything you need is right there by your own two feet. No need for any extra special transportation at all.
It seems people have a burning desire to live the rural lifestyle, though, even in so-called cities. I'm not sure we can actually overcome that pressure.
I just want like... to not be stacked like a sardine for $3500/mo. I would gladly take a rural lifestyle if I could find a job that would support it.
There is no technical reason we can't have livable, quiet and spacious apartments, where multiple apartment buildings share a huge, enclosed backyard (almost park-like, even), a setup with tons of small shops, pharmacies, easy access to everything, etc.
Plus you can also have access to large parks, in a suburb you'd never have access to those, just your limited backyard.
But most places will never have that...
We have the tech for this, we could have literal multi-bike sheds/parking garages and all that's needed is 1 (ONE) water source with a hose inside. As I said, failure on the part of our species :-)
In my city there are actually a few public bike washing stations, so the game plan in this case would be just to bike that way before coming home.
And like, same. That's also me.
But the problem is the actual costs of that style of home are incredibly, heavily subsidized by the cities they surround and indeed even the rural areas they border, because suburbs are just... a bad goddamn way to house people. They're incredibly inefficient, basically require your own personal car, require the most infrastructure build-out for the smallest population, require the largest footprint of services over the largest area to serve the smallest number of people, etc. etc.
And like, I don't think it's unreasonable to say if you want to live this way, that's fine, but then you need to actually pay for it. Your property taxes need to reflect how much it actually costs to serve your property, to build the huge number of roads needed to access it, to maintain those roads, to maintain the electrical grids, to maintain the water and sewage services, to bus kids to schools, etc. etc. etc.
And yeah that's going to make suburbs WAY less appealing because they're going to be fucking expensive but like, the alternative is, again, everyone wanting that, and not paying for it. The dense urban centers they surround absolutely hemorrhage money supporting the suburbs around them.
Urbanization decreases some costs and increases others.
Yes, these are the rural areas of which we speak. Everything gets spread out and then you're stuck travelling long distances to do anything, just like those who live in actual rural areas. There is no question that transportation is necessary in a rural area.
A proper urban environment, however, puts everything right there in a short distance. No need to ever travel beyond where your feet can take you. That's the whole reason for living so close to other people.
But it's clear that people want to live in (or pretend to live in) rural areas. It seems to be in our nature. As such, there is a lot of pressure to maintain the way things are. Hence the ill-conceived cries for better transportation to maintain the rural way of life instead of actually embracing urbanity.
If cars simply didn't exist, our cities would not, could never have, been designed the way they are, in any way.
Nah. Many cities long predate the car. They absolutely were designed in the same way they are still found now, aside from what are now roads were squares for people to walk in. Return the road back to being a square and nobody would be able to recognize that there was a car era. But, so long as the people want to live a rural lifestyle, good luck…
Back in the day, before cars were widespread, everything had to be close by.
You don't even have to sacrifice the backyard for that, you can have a city layout that puts the houses themselves fairly close to each other, and the yards can radiate outwards. Then you connect each cluster's main street with the other ones, but unlike suburbs, you make each "subdivision" mixed-use and you allow public transit , pedestrians and cyclists to cut across subdivisions for easy access everywhere.
If anything, small towns should be urbanism done right, because they don't (shouldn't?) have the money for sprawl and they don't have all the pressures for increasing density a lot, that big cities have.
My grandparents, and their parents and grandparents before them, all grew up on farms (as did the majority of Americans during that time).
No, everything did not have to be close by.
They certainly did appreciate cars when they became affordable though.
In most of the world villages have at least a cluster of homes nearby, since having other humans close is super handy when shit hits the fan.
That being said, to be clear, I don't think we need to make driving illegal or whatever. I think a TON of people would happily not be saddled with the expense of owning a car or the task of driving if there were reasonable alternatives on offer, which in the few pockets of the US that actually have decent mass transit, is broadly the case.
Visit or live in a major European city for a while and you are likely change your tune.
1. Time. For example, my commute is 25 minutes, but 2 hours ride and three mile walk by public transport.
2. Safety, intimately tied to the homeless problem.
3. Cleanliness. In my experience, related to #2, and the fact that government institutions are incapable of caring about user experience, because they get funding regardless. Matted, stained fabric seat cushions, and dried whatever caked on the floor.
There's nothing better or remotely alluring about public transportation for the vast majority of people (as shown by gridlock traffic).
As for safety, you’re orders of magnitude more likely to get into a car crash than have anything happen to you on the NYC subway. Yes, incidents happen but they’re dramatically inflated in the public consciousness.
Your objection (and most of the others I see) aren’t objections to the fundamental nature of public transit, rather they’re objections to shit public transit or to urban life in general (whole lotta city car parks that aren’t clean!). Which is entirely understandable. But there are plenty of examples of functional public transit serving millions of people in cities across the world. Those people aren’t all secretly wishing they were in a car.
Sure if I said public transport is strictly superior because I drive a car that breaks down constantly, you’d see the problems not cars, yeah?
They're not a great solution to transportation at scale, but they're pretty good at small volume point to point traffic.
There's not enough people going my way on most of my trips to make transportation at scale worthwhile. Ferries work well for part of many of my trips, but I can take a car on the ferry to deal with the lack of scale on either side.
I could sometimes take a bus to the ferry, walk to light rail and take light rail to the airport. But the bus only runs during commute times, so that impacts viable flight times, and the walk to the light rail got pretty sketchy in the past several years and light rail itself can be sketchy too.
Most of my cars run fine any time of day, although peak traffic is annoying, and I'm dealing with lighting issues on one so I can't take it out unless I know I'll be home before dusk.
https://thedriven.io/2024/05/03/are-evs-really-much-heavier-...
> full electric versions are only around 10% to 15% heavier than their direct ICE equivalent
I don’t think “much, much” should be used when we are talking 10-15%. This will mislead people. There are outliers of course.
Being heavy is actually a safety feature of sort (but just for the people inside the car, it increases overall fatality).
A lighter car requires less work from the crumple zone to decelerate the car into non-fatal territory than a heavy car.
EVs carry their weight lower to the ground. SUVs and pickup trucks are more top heavy. Passenger cars have a higher probability to rollover, but not that much greater than an EV.
And later in the study, “When two small cars collide the forces are equalized and both vehicles tend to hold up well. But if a compact hatchback and a full-size pickup truck try to occupy the same space at the same time, the smaller car always loses.”
However, most traffic fatalities do not come from direct collisions. They come from driver hitting immobile objects.
Smaller, lighter cars take less kinetic energy with them around corners, are easier to steer and avoid obstacles, and are more likely to stay upright when leaving the road.
Do you have a source on that?
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/RwD
Road departure fatalities are high because of head-on collisions, not because there is an epidemic of people crashing into trees along the side of the road. If you follow the links on the cited page, they clearly show that head-on crashes result in more fatalities than tree+utility pole crashes.
Can't wait for displays on pillars, to make them appear transparent.
They are wide enough that their horizontal angular width could be larger than the horizontal angular width of a pedestrian more than a couple or so meters away but due to their angle there is plenty of the pedestrian still visible.
I spent a while just sitting in a busy parking lot watching people go by and seeing how their visibility changed and I couldn't find any situation where I'd have trouble seeing a pedestrian unless they were far enough away that there was no chance I'd hit them even if I never saw them.
A car should survive a rollover. But when you make them big & heavy, those pillars have to be big and thick and you get large blind spots.
I drive a Tesla since 2019 and have never needed a touchscreen control for the driving itself.
I have to shift in my seat to crane around to see if there is oncoming traffic I have to give way to.
They're both 10+ year old cars.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=blind+spot+mirror
"Ludicrous mode."
> the top killer of drivers are trees on the side of the road.
It's actually alcohol and drugs. Which is the reason those drivers find themselves in the trees.
However, most of us understand that films etc are made up stories told for entertainment where if we based our expectations of people solely on that information we'd be grossly mistaken.
There are plenty of people that have their lives severely tilted if not turned upside down from a single DUI. There are also people of means that get off with a much less interruption to their day. I'm guessing it is the same on your side of the pond as well.
I do agree infras and density is a better option. But lack of infra doesn’t justify to drive drunk.
The data is really easy to get. I wish more people would avail themselves of it.
It's just a little funny you think California is unique in this regard. Pretty much all of the US is extremely underdeveloped when it comes to public transportation. Hillbillies in the boonies have to drive a lot too.
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/RwD
Indeed, people really under(over?)estimate how small a loss of attention has to be to become catastrophic.
I once wanted to know the name of a track that was playing while driving on the highway. I looked right to the stereo display and read it, that probably took a tenth of a second, but it happened right at the moment when something came into my lane and I had to veer off not to hit it, I did not hit it but also almost drove the car out of the road.
When you're distracted, even if you're looking straight ahead, coming back to reality, assessing the situation, reacting, ... takes at least a couple seconds and that's a lot of time in these scenarios.
Tesla - autopilot that really isn't, gets fooled in many situations, driver lulled into not paying attention, can't react quickly enough when the computer bails, and ends up driving into a bridge abutment at 75mph.
Kia - cheap cars built to minimum safety standards driven by young people who aren't very experienced drivers.
Buick - cars driven by geriatrics whose declines in vision and reaction speed probably should have resulted in their licenses being revoked five years ago but who still insist on driving themselves.
It takes until 85+ years old to match the accident frequency of the 16-25 years old cohort. Should we ban young adults from driving?
The reality is that the drivers tests should be MUCH more stringent for all cohorts. The reality is also that not having a car in the US is a horrible handicap.
So, we are stuck in a very suboptimal spot until self-driving cars come online.
You’re welcome.
A decade or so ago the Georgia Department of Transportation tried to do away with the trees between streets and sidewalks because of so many fatalities coming from collisions with trees. Clearing out an "automative recovery zone" as they called it likely would have saved lives of some people in vehicles but of course it would increase the danger to pedestrians, who might or might not be present at that moment. Lots of trade offs in these types of analysis and not all of them are always immediately obvious.
This is false. Your cited link (https://highways.dot.gov/safety/RwD) clearly demonstrates that head-on collisions cause more fatalities than tree+utility pole collisions combined.
While many says it's the ultimate meme stock, I also can't help thinking it's the ultimate manipulation stock - it seems some people desperately want it to go down while others desperately want it to go up.
Maybe not for the "reasonable person" but government data is available and if you are here you likely know some statistics, so go nuts:
https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
and
https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...
It's gotten better in the last few years, now that millions of people share the issues, it's harder to drown them out
Doesn't seem to matter whatsoever for their stock, so that doesn't seems to be too relevant
FWIW, I've personally owned three Teslas with zero problems, but none older than 2019. YMMV.
I also have a 2017 and 2023. It's a little early to declare success if your oldest car is 5yo
While the linked article is playing up the tesla angle (and so may be thought to be manipulative) the underlying study does not seem to be unusually focused on tesla, it's simply listing the results of a fairly straightforward analysis. I also have no reason to doubt it as I more or less expected tesla to have bad fatality rates compared to class (although I guess I wouldn't have expected them to be quite this bad - I thought they'd be bad compared to other luxury vehicles of similar weight size and price, not absolutely bad compared to most cars).
But you can find the underlying numbers and critique them if you have reason to think they might be wrong. E.g. if you believed the claims that autopilot was safer than human drivers and was saving lives, you might have expected to see a sign of that in this data (I didn't).
This is a data-based story. Follow the link(s) to review the data if one is unsure whether or not the reporting piece can be trusted.
... implication being that Tesla drivers are more likely to be driving like pricks and/or under the influence?
I wonder what the rates are like for specific models from other brands that are associated with morons. G-wagons, M3s etc etc
Or perhaps the large amount of power available instantly makes it easier to get into dangerous situations than an equivalent to combustion engine car. And as the largest EV brand with the most data available… they really stand out.
My own add-on is: Toyotas are for folks that have to drive.
Whats the temperament of the driver. Certain brands attract hot heads who will drive recklessly. I was kind of expecting more sports cars in the top 5. 2/5 is still a good score.
Given the amount of SUVs as well, no matter how safe you make a small car, if an SUV rams you, it is just not going to end well for the smaller.
How many of the independents caught that?
> Opel (General Motors) publicly demonstrated (while representatives from the TÜV Hessen were present) a Zafira that met the NOx emission limits. At the same time, Opel started clandestinely pushing an engine software update that limited NOx emissions in Zafiras that were already on the road.
> German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that US authorities investigating Mercedes have discovered that its vehicles are equipped with illegal software to help them pass United States' stringent emission tests. The claimed defeat devices include a Bit 15 mode to switch off emissions control after 16 miles of driving (the length of an official U.S. emissions test), and Slipguard which tries to directly determine if the car is being tested based on speed and acceleration profiles
> Dodge Ram 1500 and Jeep Grand Cherokee trucks, had software that allowed them to exceed NOx pollution limits, undetected by the usual testing methods.
> BMW was sued in 2018 when certain models were named as producing several times more nitrogen oxide emissions than laboratory tests indicated
With a dictator they'd just bribe him. Not like that's a solution, either.
Expect to see more of it.
Aside from that misuse and intentional misunderstanding of the FARS statistics is readily used by Tesla as a justification for their FSD system.
So let's see if a Trump with total immunity will really leave gracefully this time.
Even if Trump does not ruin the USA, I have forever lost my respect for its citizens.
I come to HN for substantial conversation, not this elementary unsubstantial conversation.
Basically a repeat of 2016.
this will be much worse than 2016.
And yet we not only want to revert any decision that was made that we think correlates with an unhappy situation, we also want to choose people who are as different as possible from the guys we think are responsible for the unwanted status quo. So if the current politicians are serious people who talk in an articulate way we conclude that seriousness is a problem, because it's two faced. We conclude that being articulated is a problem because it's judgemental, it's a symbol of being elites.
If you conclude that serious looking articulated people are two-faced lying elites there are many alternatives in a multidimensional solution space. You could desire honest serious elites, or honest serious commoners, or many variations on the theme.
But no, we obviously want to get exactly the opposite, because that's the monodimensional thing to do! It's simpler. Let's pick the exact opposite of the people we have. Current people are too serious? Let's pick an unserious person. The current elites are too educated? Let's pick people that don't have formal education and/or that actively denigrate higher education. Etc etc.
I understand the human urge to flip tables. But if I stop thinking about it for a moment, I don't think the strategy is good. In rare cases it might be the necessary strategy, but in most cases it's destroying something that has plenty room for improvement and replace it with something that is much worse and will take even longer to improve over the previous one
Tell that to gradient descent.
(Though the step sizes are a bit shorter than four years)
I had someone try to claim we had "complete lockdown for years", which is news to me. We had one year of sporadically enforced lockdown-ish measures. Although, we did go out to eat a few times.
Hell, I bought a house during end of 2020/beginning of 2021. By the time we closed, I was back in office, we weren't wearing masks, and people didn't seem too concerned.
Congrats on the house.
Maybe make any computer purchases in December just to be safe.
We watched four years of this already, including a rally with gallows being built in the crowd being told to march on the Capitol (he claims figuratively, and everyone just misunderstood, despite all the posts and planning and travel and tour groups). Last time it was absurd news headline after headline just to distract from the other things going on. We saw some bonkers stuff that would have disqualified other candidates in the past (or at least most candidates probably thought it would).
At this point I think his promises are easier to deliver on and he doesn't care about (and has been made immune from) the consequences that usually temper a politician's ability to deliver. Tariffs, no health plan, another wall (remember when he pardoned bannon for stealing the money they raised for the wall?), "stopping the war in Ukraine" but without a free Ukraine at the end, and decimating government regulatory agencies.
The weirdest part of this narrative for me is how the supporters say he wont do what he promises and the detractors fear he will. I don't know enough history to know if that is common but it sure feels backwards to me.
That's pretty common on all highly polarized topics. Happens all the time with stuff like democrat candidates and firearms seizures - supporters walking it back and detractors believing ever word.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Well, it cuts both ways. New administration should not be talking till they are in office.
It's gonna take a while before they're back to normal again. I've heard so many "office of government efficiency" jokes in the last week I am tired of it too. But, in their defense if all you hear is how this administration is going to be the fourth reich (lol), destroy the country (lol), introduce fascism (lol), kill people (lol), etc you're going to react in a sarcastic way to anything you can grasp onto.
Though tbf, again, "office of government efficiency" seems like an oxymoron.
You’re accusing the wrong side for making a mockery of government institutions.
edit: But then again P.A.T.R.I.O.T act etc is a thing so hard to tell if actual joke or just going with how US politicians like to be witty while naming stuff.
It's hard to tell which of these two options is more likely. 4d chess or simple billionaire egomania ?
I don't know man, my Occam's razor cuts another way.
On the other hand, if he had been forced to buy Twitter against his better judgement, he may have an axe to grind against the "overbearing" administrative state and use the tools at hand to achieve his ends. No evil genius required, just happenstance and humans seeing patterns in chaos.
To create a federal executive department you need an act of Congress which is not very efficient.
It's much more efficient to just use the name "department" and bet on the chance that nobody would care about words, meanings, facts and rules.
The USA is ~$36 TRILLION in debt. Interest payments are now consuming ~20% of tax revenue...more than the defense budget. That's insane!
Musk is also absolutely correct about over-regulation and government bureaucracy stifling innovation and economic growth.
Then there's the amazing incompetence often displayed by the current admin... Witness Afghanistan, among many other examples.
Given a two party system, I can only think this election outcome was better than the alternative!
It’s not exactly baseless speculation. People have things to base their guesses on.
If this were a thread about IBM machines of the 1930s, would it be playing “politics” to note that those machines were sold to Nazis and supported by IBM through sub-contractors even while we were at war with them? Is it crossing a line to mention they were used to facilitate the Holocaust?
People are going to have to deal with the presence of politics in regular life for the unforeseen future, because the luxury of avoiding politics is generally the sign of having good governance.
A non-trivial component to this election was this constant, smug nagging. "We know better, you're all so stupid".
If you turn out to be right, enjoy your smug "I told you so", but until then - these views are a minority and are very tiring to constantly see/hear/read.
We've been hearing how doomed democracy is for the better part of 10 years now. It's really old...
Maybe you're just really tired of hearing any criticism of blatant corruption and I'm sorry you're feeling that way. I bet that feels really discouraging and tedious and adversarial.
To me this comment reads as a callout of corruption, not fascism. The hitler criticisms you mentioned, in my experience, have been for things like the maga hats with the nazi font, the republican convention stage in the shape of the SS glyph, and the claim that immigrants are watering down the proper American bloodlines.
To your other request that people stop sharing their concerns: just because a lot of people vote for something doesn't mean it's inherently ethical nor does it mean people should be silenced. My assumption is most people don't want corruption or abuse or racism or fascism; if you think that too then you might have better success helping people understand why they are mistaken about what looks like corruption instead of telling people to just stop sharing opinions you're personally tired of reading.
https://www.newsweek.com/chart-shows-network-ratings-2024-el...
> “suggesting younger voters were either less engaged, or getting their election night information from other sources such as social media and at-home streaming, which are not tracked by Nielsen.”
Young people won’t watch tv unless there’s a game or tv series on they’re interested in. Even then, a lot of them will DVR it on Hulu or something. If you want those eyeballs, you’re going to need to be creative. And tv networks can’t be as creative as instaFaceSnap, Netflix and TikTwitGram.
Doesn't Fox News have the highest viewer numbers of any of the news stations? What fraction of local news stations are owned by Sinclair? I don't think you get to call "legacy media" out for being liberal when such a large part is not.
The vote was like 50.1 to 48.2 at latest (accurate) count. Which is terrible news to everyone. Because, unless my math is wrong, that means there were more people who were so unmoved by either party that they couldn't be arsed to go out and vote, than there were voters for either party.
And all those people are pissed off.
Personally, I think stuff like comments on HN and Twitter are gonna be a good pressure valve over the next few years. Maybe even some Onion, Saturday Night Live and Daily Show for those masses. Because if those people ever get what they perceive to be a reason? I mean, they've already shown fairly consistently that they're no longer interested in the whole non-violent democratic norm of voting thing. And if a guy like Trump can't even bring them out, that means they're not at all interested in anything either side is selling.
After looking at those numbers, I guess I just wouldn't be so sure that the people making these comments are liberals. Or even independents for that matter. Independents on the sidelines are, at least, reasonable and vote. What we have boiling outside the stadium, so to speak, is something different entirely. And if they'll satisfy themselves yelling insults at the people inside the stadium then we should all probably let them. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's a bad thing.
If a lion starts chewing on your football, let it have the football. Don't be foolish. Just back away and go get another ball to continue your game with the opposing team.
Here's an article that covers a lot of the factors [1].
[1] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2024/joe-biden-kamala-...
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/federal-spendi...
You are aware that no one in this thread has called anyone deplorable, irredeemable, garbage, a redneck, a hillbilly, or a bible thumper, right?
Your aggrievement and imagined slights is precisely how people like Trump and Musk manipulate you. And apparently the manipulation works really well.
Trump is not your retribution. Trump doesn't care about America. Trump doesn't care about Americans. Trump only cares about himself.
It was pretty much the WHO simply repeating the claims of the Chinese government, who had already tried to cover up the outbreak (with any warnings sent to the WHO coming from Taiwan instead).
It was about as believable as the completely baseless claims that the emergency use authorised vaccine was safe and effective.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/06/06/how-don...
Trump... dunno.
Is he, really? He recently announced that he supports Trump's position of getting rid on EV subsidies, stating that it hurts Tesla's competition more.
Please don’t ask me to fund anyone else’s EV purchase. It doesn’t matter to me one bit who’s in office to get rid of that evil policy, I’d still love it.
Paying people to vote for Trump
Manipulating the stock market
Manipulated the crypto market multiple times
Tried to force Tesla employees to go to work during Covid
Funnily enough, comments like yours are also what they’d love to see. Seeing leftists in tears over the policy changes we’re going to see is a great form of entertainment for many people.
Apparently not: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/15/trump-elon-musk-focus-group...
The joke was, when Putin invaded Ukraine everyone turned from epidemiology experts into geo-political experts. I wonder where the proper experts are now.
My guess is that we’ve witnessed the end of the post Cold War American hegemony. Welcome to chaos.
They are planning to appoint a nutjob who has publicly that he admitted cutting off the heads of whale carcasses with a chainsaw and dumping dead bears in the Central Park for "fun". Presumably he is also consuming those rotting animals carcasses that he keeps finding somehow (how else do you get brain worms?) to be the new US health secretary.
Seriously... what else do you need to know?
Educate yourself before someone else does and sells you short.
Fluoride can damage the liver in a number of ways, including: Liver function enzymes: Fluoride can increase the activity of liver enzymes like transaminases and phosphatases, which can indicate liver damage. Liver cell membrane: Fluoride can rupture the liver cell membrane. Mitochondrial damage: Fluoride can damage mitochondria in liver cells. Protein synthesis: Fluoride can prevent the liver from producing important proteins like albumin and clotting factors. Glucose metabolism: Fluoride can disrupt the liver's ability to regulate glucose metabolism, which can lead to metabolic disorders like diabetes. Histological changes: Fluoride can cause histological changes in the liver. Fluoride is a small, active molecule that can easily enter cells and cause damage to tissues and organs. Studies have shown that fluoride exposure can cause liver damage in a variety of animals, including rats, mice, goats, and cattle. To treat fluoride toxicity, you can try: Calcium chloride: Lavage with a 1-5% calcium chloride solution to bind the fluoride in the stomach. This is most effective when done within an hour of ingestion. Hemodialysis: For critically ill patients who don't respond to other treatments.
Regardless, this kind of straw man argument isn't very convincing. You can be against someone's stated policies while holding either supporting or opposing views on any particular topic; implying otherwise is baffling since it would require someone to PERFECTLY align with every opinion you have. Thinking RFK will be a good or bad leader has nothing to do with if someone opposes "moving away from seed oils".
Who knows ? Maybe it won't even be possible for the whole four years ?
These same people LEFT other groups dedicated to politics so presumably if others respond in kind by discussing their own politics, they will leave the last groupchats too. This is why a certain faction is such an echo chamber. Incidentally, I was just banned from r/Archaeology for arguing that a post arguing that archeologists should prepare to fight the fascist takeover was too political.
You don't do much towing, do you?
I think you've just made that up; however, I am willing to stipulate that 99.9% of Hacker News posters will never tow anything. I always forget how out of touch the audience here is.
We had to stop talking to them about the possibility of buying an EV because they kept bringing up irrational arguments like this one.
No matter how many times we reminded them that, in the two-plus decades we've been driving, we may have towed something maybe twice. Maybe.
One of our existing cars doesn't even have a towbar. The horror!
The irrational hatred / fear is real.
I'm not sure which of them are evs, but you could work it out fairly easily. Even if many of them are, it still looks to me like tesla is doing poorly by this metric.
The manufacturer can alter based on software, how much current the electrical system is capable of supplying, how powerful the motors are, etc.
But even “normal non-performance” EVs that aren’t designed for performance like a Chevy Bolt come off the line way quicker than an equivalent normal car, even if they’re full 0 to 60 time isn’t that much faster.
https://thedriven.io/2024/05/03/are-evs-really-much-heavier-...
> full electric versions are only around 10% to 15% heavier than their direct ICE equivalent
To put it into perspective, from the table, you could load an ICE with passengers and some luggage and it would weigh the same as the EV equivalent with just the driver.
We should also try to discuss “waiting time” rather than range so that people start to think in these terms.
My overall waiting time is much lower for my EV than my old diesel, despite the range of the EV being lower. Less time waiting to fill up on a weekly basis (0 mins while I sleep vs 5 mins filling up + journey time to the petrol station), less time defrosting in the winter (0 mins remote pre-heat vs 5+ scraping), less time waiting to fill up on long journeys (0 extra mins while I eat vs 5 extra mins filling up).
These are all situation dependent of course, but making people adjust their thinking will help them get a more accurate picture of EV ownership.
Jokes aside it would be interesting to filter by demographic too.
Sorry that clear observations violate decorum.
By definition, if the autopilot has disengaged it’s a more dangerous situation, so it is fair to place the blame on it. A relief pitcher doesn’t get charged with earned runs he inherits.
Technically the driver drove into those things, since autopilot disengaged .4 seconds before impact.
Autopilot was just there to ensure the trip to that last .4 seconds wasn't too draining.
Teslas can go fast real fast, so naively this is the result I would expect given how they have filtered the data. In other words, unless they controlled for this, this would be biased by natural selection playing out.
Having said that, as someone who had a couple of close calls with the autopilot. I would love to know what percent of those crashes was with autopilot enabled.
Explain to me why you would want to filter out fatalities caused by going “real fast”?
Even eco-shitboxes in the US have 160 hp. Sure, they get 0-60 times of 10 seconds, but I don't think there's been a car model in the US that cannot reach 100mph in decades
At least the data informs others that perhaps it's good to be cautious around Teslas, not very much if it's a safe purchase, and they state that it's a safe car so I don't see the hangup you had about it on position of a buyer.
Why should they control for it? It’s a natural consequence of Tesla’s design choices, not a total coincidence that Tesla had no control over.
Quoting what's easily the most important passage in that study.
The two Teslas on the list are the Model Y, right beneath the Porsche 911, and the Model S, right beneath the... Toyota Prius.
So yeah. No surprises here. It's a study where the lesson should be "a car is as dangerous as its driver" and everyone is going to read it as "Teslas are deathtraps". What else is new.
(Like, say, maximizing driver distraction by consolidating a bunch of essential controls and information displays into a touchscreen display that's really difficult to operate when it's sunny outside. Just to pick something at random, of course.)
Somewhat related, I was recently shopping for refrigerators, and fell down a data rabbit hole. If you just look at the overall style of fridge, French doors look like a terrible option from a reliability perspective. But then, digging in a bit more, it turns out that's kind of a spurious correlation. Actually it's the presence of bells and whistles like through-door ice dispensers that kill a refrigerator's reliability. And then perhaps on top of that the amount of extra Rube Goldberg machine you need to make a chest height ice dispenser work in a bottom-freezer French door refrigerator creates even more moving parts to break. But a those problems don't apply to a model that doesn't have that feature.
In the case of Tesla - and I cannot overstress enough how much lf this is purely subjective conjecture on my part and not a statement of fact - the image cultivated by the company and its Chief Executive is very much one of rejecting norms and expectations, fierce independence, and a hostility towards others (mostly from the Cybertruck unveiling onward). The people who relate to that brand would, I would think, be more likely to flout laws like speed limits, failing to use indicators for turns or merges, and drive more aggressively than a brand that emphasizes safety or enjoyment of experience (like Hondas and Toyotas). My purely subjective experiences bear this out, and I’m consistently rewarded giving Teslas a wider berth on the roads.
So as far as branding as an indicator of outcome, yeah, I can totally see that being a reliable indicator. I’d still be darn curious to see more research about it, though.
And BMW owners like German shepherds?
This data is interesting, but not really useful for decisionmaking if we can't isolate the extent to which the disparities are caused by features of the actual vehicle, as opposed to driver selection factors.
Is anyone making an argument that the Model Y has an actual safety problem in its design? I'd like to hear about which physical aspect of the car people think is making it 4x less safe than the average car? I don't see anything obvious. Its crash test performance is fine. I'd hesitate to blame autopilot, since we know that they crash less often with autopilot enabled than without (even if due to selection factors).
This is plausible on its face, and yet the Honda CR-V Hybrid ended up higher on the list than the Model Y. No idea how to explain that...
Though if I had to take a guess on the CR-V: big, cheap SUV, often seen driven by young drivers in my area. Could be lack of experience? I can only speculate, though.
This is quickly becoming fodder for car forums!
Would also be interesting to see which were the safest cars according to their analysis.
https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#v=2024
Since that’s the thing that always breaks on the fridges. And it adds like $500 to the price.
I dislike how tesla kills situational awareness. It is the central touchscreen.
The model 3 and y and cybertruck put everything there - both status and control. You have to look to the side to see the speed of the vehicle, and the gearshift is on the touchscreen.
The S and X both retain a dashboard in front of you, but most of the controls moved to the touchscreen.
And the removal of stalks from all models have moved turn signals to steering wheel buttons, and most of the rest to the touchscreen.
I think the cars are really well designed, it is just that these user interface choices make you worse driver.
By comparison, my older Prius has the speedometer at the base of the windshield super close to the road. It's simply better.
I haven't tried a heads-up display, though.
A small but well thought out safety future using the HUD is in the dark, when the car detects a pedestrian or cyclist on or moving into the road using the infrared camera it will show a yellow warning icon. Has shown me people walking in dark clothes on dark rural roads a few times far before I could see them myself. This is a video of the detection, mine doesn't have that spotlight, but shows the warning on the window instead: https://youtu.be/WpB8ZLGq7EE
From the actual study:
One fatal model Y accident might cause half a dozen gas fatalities, but a Porsche wrapped around a tree might kill just the lone driver.
https://hondanews.com/en-US/honda-automobiles/releases/relea...
...and the study only covered model years up to 2022. It would be interesting to compare the hybrid to the standard version. If there is a significant difference, I'd be suspicious of data quality.
I found a discussion of the 2019 report, which was the year before the CR-V hybrid came out, and the CR-V fatality rate was 2.7.
But he also said they have since improved that, and indeed, now samsung fridges come with a 20 year warranty on their compressor.
Can’t you drive a Tesla without it? I expect the screen was for radio, gps, AC…
I agree those are distracting through.
Less difficult but much more common:
Change the radio station / music.
Change the climate control.
Both of those require taking your eyes off the road and navigating through multiple touch screen-only modal windows. I have owned one for years and it is a distraction factory.
At least that’s what taught at driving school and written in texts I guess… too sad the distraction factory is so dangerous. I wouldn’t drive that.
After a while you "learn" to do it without looking at the screen too much. Nonetheless, it's far inferior to having tactile controls.
I think the number of people who can say that they have never needed to adjust mirrors while moving, even after having spent a few minutes adjusting them in the driveway, is very much next to zero.
You are complaining about having to look over at a screen however taking several seconds to look evem further from the front of the car while adjusting a mirror isn't an issue regardless of the controls?
Now I imagine one eye looking at the road, the other one doing active strabismus to check the mirror, one hand on the wheel and the other using muscle memory to operate the settings on a flat surface.
> The mirror's angle can change, while driving
Maybe a loose screw somewhere in the mirror or a manufacturing defect? It would be surprising QA and legal security standards don’t require mirrors to stay in the position set for a reasonable mileage…
That said, I hate the touch screen only UI of my car. There are times when I can't use voice or the scroll wheel and want (not so much need) to do something with the menus. In most cars, it's trivial to do most things by feel if you know where the buttons are.
Even if you could get really good at only touching the "right" place on the touch screen, one software update can change things enough to where it's now accessed differently.
Alternatively, you can use the AI gear selector from park which guesses what direction you want to go.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_eu/GUID-E9B387D...
I'm guessing that while the total accident rate declines with automation, that the serious accident rate is increasing, because a human driver drives in a risk adjusted way and takes less care to avoid minor accidents and more care to avoid serious accidents, but when a robot find itself unable to drive the errors are more evenly distributed or even more likely to result in a serious accident, because its doing things idiotically with no sense of self preservation.
It's possible to dig the airbag controller out of the wreckage and read out the last 30 seconds or so. Airbag controllers have a short but nonvolatile memory and usually survive crashes. That gets you speed, acceleration in several axes, plus steering, brake, and power inputs, and detailed info about what the airbag system did.[1] Those were originally created to tune the airbag algorithm, and, over the years, false airbag deployments have dropped almost to zero.
That's the basic info needed to analyze fatal crashes. Speed at collision? Speed 10 secs before collision? Accelerator and brake inputs? Maneuvering (side accel) before crash? That, plus the crash scene, tells most of what you need to know.
Law enforcement will sometimes read out those units, when it's not clear what happened. It's not done routinely.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/fmvss/EDR_QAs_11...
Nor does it count accidents where there was no airbag deployment because as you point out, modern airbag systems use a wide variety of parameters, not just "if speed > x and collision = true; deploy".
So you can hit someone obliquely at 30mph, and due to factors, airbags don't deploy, and Tesla says "great, not an accident".
Or you can be in such a serious collision or similar where the airbags CAN'T deploy, and Tesla? "Not an accident".
Now if there are more Teslas on the road vs other vehicles (note they excluded car model years earlier than 2017, another fatal (heh) flaw in the study), it makes sense they would have more fatalities.
So this should be normalized "per capita" to vehicle counts if we want to extract any brand-related causality, in the same way as the data is already normalized to miles driven.
I enjoy hating on Tesla as much as the next person, but come on.
I am suggesting that per mile driven and per vehicle brand on the road are not the same thing. Now that I think about it, miles driven per brand would be an interesting data point.
Just as an example of why per-brand might be useful, let's imagine that teslas are driven half the miles of the average for all other brands. so if that were the case and if the number of fatalities were equal, then that would result in tesla having 2x the fatality rate per mile. but at the same time, this doesn't let us appreciate the amount of time tesla spends on the road vs other brands. so miles might be half but time spent might be closer to 1 (equal time). and maybe that is because teslas are concentrated in urban-suburban interface environments in high congestion areas, whereas other brands are spread out across the country where for the same amount of time spent, twice as many miles are covered and congestion is less.
Data like that is needed to properly evaluate this result. And while I asked for per-vehicle-on-the-road, and my example didn't match that, you can still see how the simple per-mile-driven is insufficient.
They also could have noted the demographics of the drivers -- male/female and years of driving experience, things like that.
So again, I find the implications of this article to be very unfair.
It's interesting to think in that context about this. Could Tesla drivers be taking bigger risks because they think the car's software will save them from the negative consequences of their risky decisions? (As an extreme example, one such driver opted to drive in the back seat instead of the driver's seat. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patr...)
Or women's weaker musculoskeletal systems provide less protection against blunt force trauma?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/business/car-safety-women...
Cars were less safe for women because they were not designed to be safe for women.
2003, thirty years after they started using male crash dummies. And the NHTSA's female dummies were essentially male dummies shrunk to 4'11" and lightened to 97/108lbs.
What year do you think they mandated a crash dummy that was actually based on the female body?
Just guess. I think you might be surprised that they haven't done this yet. It's in the works (see THOR-5F), but it's crazy it's taken so long.
Now guess when they first put the 2003 female crash dummy in the drivers seat for the frontal collision crash test. They still haven't!
Lol. Lmao even: "According to a 2021 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, the average weight of women in the U.S. over the age of 20 was 170.8 pounds."
https://www.forbes.com/health/womens-health/average-weight-f...
I’m assuming the driver behavior also includes relying on the half baked auto pilot/FSD features.