It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.
Teslas marketing is genius though, preventing them from being known as death traps by regular people.
> It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.
What are the stats you're referencing here? I find this difficult to believe, as modern cars are generally much safer than cars from the 1970s and Teslas seem to perform well in crash tests. They'd need to be incredibly dangerous relative to other modern cars to be as dangerous as a typical car from the 1970s.
> An analysis published Thursday by the auto news website FuelArc found that, in their one year of existence, the approximately 34,000 Cybertrucks on the roads had five fire fatalities, giving them a fatality rate of 14.5 per 100,000 units. That’s 17 times the fatality rate of the Ford Pintos, whose famously flawed gas tank design on the car’s rear end led to 27 reported fire fatalities in its nine years on the road, resulting in a fatality rate of 0.85 per 100,000 units, according to FuelArc.
The Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred between 1970 and mid-1977 (so not the full 9-year period) in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.
This is not comparable to the total number of fatalities involving fire and a Cybertruck (regardless of the impact type, or lack thereof, e.g. the Las Vegas fatality was due to the guy shooting himself in the head). Not a single one of the three Cybertruck incidents would have been included in the Ford Pinto statistic because none of them were rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So we'd expect the total fire fatality rate to be about 6.5x the fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions that resulted in fire.
And of course, saying "Teslas are more dangerous than Ford Pintos" is very different than saying "the Tesla Cybertruck has a higher rate of fire fatalities than the Ford Pinto." Even the latter statement would be incorrect but the former is simply absurd.
A single Cybertruck weighs as much as three Ford Pintos. We should be sure to include Newton's second law in our evaluations of which is the more dangerous vehicle.
This article is a great example of motivated reasoning. It's comparing two wildly different numbers: the Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire. The Cybertruck number is the total number of deaths from all incidents involving fire and a Cybertruck.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So as a back of the envelope calculation, we'd expect the total number of Pinto fire fatalities to be about 6.5x the fire fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions. Even then, I doubt that statistic would include incidents like the Las Vegas case where the man shot himself in the head while detonating an improvised explosive in his Cybertruck.
This doesn't even get into sample size - the Tesla numbers are based on only 3 incidents and 5 fatalities:
- one, a single-car accident in which 3 people died,
- two, a single-car accident in which 1 person died, and
- three, the driver shot himself in the head
If, say, the first driver hadn't had any passengers and the third driver had not been included in the sample (because it's not a collision), the Cybertruck's rate would be 60% lower. With such a small sample, it's very silly to make confident assertions about the relative risks here.
Finally, both articles are only talking about fire risks, not overall safety record. I would definitely bet that the Cybertruck has a significantly lower fatality rate per mile than a 1975 Pinto purely based on changes in vehicle safety testing and engineering since the 1970s.
They literally added the suicide where the driver died with a self inflicted gun shot wound after loading it with explosive fireworks outside Trump tower as if that was Tesla's fault just to juice the numbers and fool people.
This non-stop propaganda misinformation attacks against Tesla and all the people that believe it is out of control and very sad to see.
It's actually not at all sad to see. Ever since the 'pedo' comment, I am personally very happy to see attacks against Tesla. There is a reason CEOs stay out of the spotlight when it comes to politics and social media. Someone wanted to be a trailblazer, so we're helping him drive it home.
There are legitimate reasons to not like Musk or Tesla, no need to resort to misinformation. If there are no such reasons then it's a bad thing to try and make things up.
Because the recalls on 95% of the cars Tesla has sold (Model 3 and Y) are basically all software updates that users never notice, and evidently don’t cause tons of car crashes.
When millions of people use a car day in and day out and don’t even notice a recall, I wouldn’t expect them to care.
As an example of why recalls are not the end all-be all either, Subaru lost a phantom power draw class action lawsuit due to faulty design of their Starlink head unit, and they didn’t even have to do a recall, even though it cost me thousands to fix.
And because I fixed it myself before the lawsuit, I’m not eligible for any compensation, even though Subaru knows every VIN with the faulty design.
I still can't believe people continue to pay a premium to a brand that has (one of?) the highest recall rates in the industry.