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.
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.
... 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
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
Jokes aside it would be interesting to filter by demographic too.
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).
Being heavy is actually a safety feature of sort (but just for the people inside the car, it increases overall fatality).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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 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...
Explain to me why you would want to filter out fatalities caused by going “real fast”?
Can't wait for displays on pillars, to make them appear transparent.
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.
My own add-on is: Toyotas are for folks that have to drive.
If cars simply didn't exist, our cities would not, could never have, been designed the way they are, in any way.
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).
FWIW, I've personally owned three Teslas with zero problems, but none older than 2019. YMMV.
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.
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…
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.
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.
So let's see if a Trump with total immunity will really leave gracefully this time.
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.
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...
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...)
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.
The data is really easy to get. I wish more people would avail themselves of it.
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'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.
Or women's weaker musculoskeletal systems provide less protection against blunt force trauma?
I’m assuming the driver behavior also includes relying on the half baked auto pilot/FSD features.
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?
Basically a repeat of 2016.
this will be much worse than 2016.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/business/car-safety-women...
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.
Cars were less safe for women because they were not designed to be safe for women.
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
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.
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.
I come to HN for substantial conversation, not this elementary unsubstantial conversation.
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.
> 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
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.
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.”
You’re accusing the wrong side for making a mockery of government institutions.
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.
And BMW owners like German shepherds?
That said, I suspect they're regressing, like how they removed ultrasonic sensors which are a dime a dozen to only rely on computer vision. That's just plain stupid, IMHO.
For the money, I think you can do much better than a Tesla in many regards, but I'm not about to shame you for reading marketing and believing it either, especially if it was pre the current Musk hell and the general knowledge that he's essentially a fraudster given the perpetual 1 year away for autopilot and what not.
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).
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.
You’re welcome.
> 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,”
What is the nature of those miles driven by each brand? I've got to imagine that pure-EV companies like Tesla are predominantly driven in urban/city driving (shorter daily distances, more traffic, etc). In contrast to ICE cars which can rack up lots of miles on long trips.
1 billion Tesla miles I suspect looks different than 1 billion Ford miles.
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.
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 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.
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.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...
From the actual study:
Fatal Accident Rate Compared to
Rank| Model |(per 10^9 Miles) | Overall Average
----+---------------------+--------------------+-----------------
1 | Hyundai Venue | 13.9 | 4.9x
2 | Chevrolet Corvette | 13.6 | 4.8x
3 | Mitsubishi Mirage | 13.6 | 4.8x
4 | Porsche 911 | 13.2 | 4.6x
5 | Honda CR-V Hybrid | 13.2 | 4.6x
6 | Tesla Model Y | 10.6 | 3.7xThey 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?
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.
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.
* The FARS data is “normalized” by unpublished internal iSeeCars estimates of miles driven; the underlying “study” is a marketing blog post for their company.
* FARS data distinguishes between driver and occupant fatalities - the “study” looks only at occupant fatalities, which is not what most people would reasonably expect given the headline.
* One might reasonably suspect Tesla’s long history of touting 5-star safety ratings and advanced safety tech could lead to passengers being lulled into a false sense of security, and being less likely to use seatbelts.
Driver fatalities and seatbelt use are right there in the FARS data - one wonders why these weren’t considered and incorporated in the “study”.
Anyhow, a note to the HN user: don’t upvote FUD-sowing headlines based on blog posts about unscientific “studies” that are really just submarine PR; they carry none of the credibility of the underlying studies, and are a disservice to the scientists and public servants who rigorously and faithfully collect and analyze this data.
HN used to be better than this…
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.
Tell that to gradient descent.
(Though the step sizes are a bit shorter than four years)
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.
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 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...
A significant aspect is that Telsa, as a harbinger of "progress", by this measure is making cars less safe. That's a surprising development as it's contrary to the promises and prognostications for the devices.
It's expected that the distribution of harm from cars would change with increasing automation, but the promise of the automation is to make the devices safer overall. So is this a key metric by which we find that the progress is actually a hazard, or is the changing distribution part of an overall trend of improvement with some hazardous edge cases?
All we have with this article is yet another headline with no useful information.
> “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.”
What does "focused and alert" mean for a robot? Does arriving safely allow a wake of carnage?
The Trump administration figures as a harbinger for such questions in that he is a well-known champion of disinformation in favor of his self interest, as are all of his cabinet picks and advisors. But this is in keeping with the modern history of the GOP.
> 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. “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.”
Ok so Tesla's aren't less safe than any other vehicle in this lineup. It's just that Tesla drivers are more likely to be careless.
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.
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.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
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.
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".
> 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.
> “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.
Teslas are faster than many sports cars, but in the case of the Model Y and Model X lack the preferred low profile of a true sports car. In the case of the Model S, the acceleration is so great that it is frankly surprising it doesn’t rank higher. I wonder how many new Model S owners have gotten themselves killed within a few days of owning the car?
I myself purchased a Model 3 last year and drove it quite foolishly for the first few months I had it. The acceleration was so amazing to me coming from a Honda Accord that it was hard to resist the temptation to weave and corner like a mad man. Model S would have been even worse. The Model S also has a long body like a full size sedan, not ideal for sports performance either, compared to the Model 3’s short length, more comparable to a Corrola or Toyota BRZ.
So I suspect that speculations about “Tesla drivers being morons” and “distracted by the screen” (almost all new cars have shiny screens!) are nonsense.
Another frequent remark is that Teslas’ high weight is a disadvantage. This is not as straightforward as they assume, because weight actually has benefits for traction. Light cars are much more likely to lose grip and slide around. On the other hand, a heavy car with worn out tires or brakes is much more difficult to stop than a light car with worn out tires or brakes. So weight is probably a wash.
But I do agree with some commenters that the autonomous features, and particular misuse of those features, are probably a contributor to these statistics as well. If you’re new to them you assume they are safer than they really are. With more experience you realize you still need to be watching the road the whole time.
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!
I don't know man, my Occam's razor cuts another way.
* having the ratio of fatalities organised by sized and power of cars. My understanding is that Teslas have a bit more horsepower than other cars, so maybe an apple-to-apple comparison needs to compare them to a slighly smaller share of the overal pool
* having the ratio of fatalities involving the so called "autopilot" feature. I'm not necessarily going to blame Tesla for making fast cars that reckless people use to get into accidents when running too fast.
However, if it's your average joe getting an accident because of a software glitch in the driving assistance system, because they assumed something called "autopilot" was able, to, you know, pilot on its own...
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.
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.
Urbanization decreases some costs and increases others.
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.
Congrats on the house.
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.
So people who drive Tesla are arse, got it.
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...
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 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!
I do agree infras and density is a better option. But lack of infra doesn’t justify to drive drunk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting, my initial mental concern was: "So, why IIHS ranked cars highly involved in crash with Top Safety+?" Didn’t they though using statistics could help prevent accidents in praxi?
Would also be interesting to see which were the safest cars according to their analysis.
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.
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.
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.
On a more somber note, in one of the accidents an AP/FSD-driven Tesla crashed into a motorcyclist. The motorcyclist survived (or at least, the news did not report a fatality on the 405 that day), but there was a lot of blood on the road and the Tesla that crashed into him.
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?
Maybe make any computer purchases in December just to be safe.
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.
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.
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.
The joke was, when Putin invaded Ukraine everyone turned from epidemiology experts into geo-political experts. I wonder where the proper experts are now.
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!
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
Educate yourself before someone else does and sells you short.
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https://www.newsweek.com/chart-shows-network-ratings-2024-el...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
Even if Trump does not ruin the USA, I have forever lost my respect for its citizens.
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.
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.
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…
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.
The only driving aid I use (rely on) on is ACC (Automatic Cruise Control), to keep my speed and distance (maximum) to the car in front of me. I almost always stay in the rightmost lane doing the speed limit.
Without a doubt Tesla drivers consistently stood out as the most "strange". Drivers of all brands can be stressed and drive too fast, but Tesla drivers were janky, couldn't stay in their lanes, and very often didn't keep a safe distance to the car in front of them.
Worst part, they didn't seem aware of their surroundings. They would merge in the most insane situations/positions or dangerously try to pass other drivers.
I don't know if they relied on their hardware to guide them, this autopilot thing, or whatever else they have, but it puckered me up good.
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.
> “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.
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.
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.
Here's an article that covers a lot of the factors [1].
[1] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2024/joe-biden-kamala-...
Apparently not: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/15/trump-elon-musk-focus-group...
Sorry that clear observations violate decorum.
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...
They assume every car drives the average number of miles. Of course a CR-V is going to score high, since they likely drive more than an average number of miles.
A 911 on the other hand probably drives a small fraction of the average.
This study is fairly low quality. The IHHS list 13.3 fatalities per billion miles as the actual number.
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/federal-spendi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/06/06/how-don...
But he also said they have since improved that, and indeed, now samsung fridges come with a 20 year warranty on their compressor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I also have a 2017 and 2023. It's a little early to declare success if your oldest car is 5yo
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.
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“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” [1]
“The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities.” [1]
- Karl Brauer, iSeeCars Executive Analyst
[1] The 23 Most Dangerous Cars On The Road
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