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.
NHTSA gives a 1-5 star rating for vehicle safety and both the Model 3 and Model Y score 5 stars in all 3 categories:
A 2023 Toyota Prius gets: Chevy Bolt: Mercedes E Class: