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Originally Posted by Dadhawk
First, these are Tesla statistics so they are automatically suspect (and I would say that if it was Toyota releasing Toyota statistics).
Second, at least to me, this is only significant if you are comparing like vehicle and owner classes. If you compare this to ALL cars, that means you are including everything for $2,000 cars driven by teenagers to supercars driven by rich, self-absorbed I own the road you just get in my way types.
I'm guessing, but do not know, that people who buy in the so called "luxury sedan" and other ranges the Tesla are in are most likely less accident prone than the overall population anyway. I'm basing this on the anecdotal evidence of 20 to 50 accidents I see per year while commuting (I drive a lot) and rarely is it this class for car is involved in an accident of substance.
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This is why I qualified Telsa vehicles
or Tesla owners, which gives room for causality being linked to the car or to a subclass of owners being more responsible. I have seen people try to analyze and compare data to other luxury brands with data that really doesn't exist yet (kinda like you said above--it is coming from Tesla), and the conclusions are vague at best. There is definitely a relationship between income and traffic accidents:
https://www.herrmanandherrman.com/bl...car-accidents/
Even if musk is exaggerating the safety of their vehicles related to other luxury cars and owners, do we really believe he is lying about the safety of the Autopilot system being safer than not having it engaged? This is a stretch. The fact is that only he has the data for this statistic. His company is running simulations in every Tesla that is on the roading, pitting its AI against the driver. It is comparing what the AI would do with what the driver chooses to do, so it learns, and when the driver crashes into someone, there is a simulation of what the AI/Autopilot would have done, so Tesla not only has data on how safe the Autopilot system is based on actual crashes, but it also has data on how many crashes the Autopilot avoided or could have avoided. This puts it in a very unique position to make a truth claim that can't be substantiated. That doesn't mean that they should be blindly believed, but it is just something to consider.
What do we know? Tesla's do really well on crash safety tests. In fact, they do so well that their performance is often off the charts, so they may achieve a 5 out of 5 when their likelihood of injury is closer to a 6 out of 5.* There are videos of the Model X doing rollover tests, and it couldn't be rolled over. Of course, Musk being Musk isn't without controversy (see the link below).
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-...-test-results/
*A 5 could be 15% of injury or less; a 4 could be 20% or less; a 3 could be 25% or less; etc. Tesla could have a chance of injury of 4%, but still gets a 5 when it should get a 7 because 5 is the max.