Why the Tesla Vehicle Safety Report is extremely misleading

Tesla claims to build “the safest cars in the world” and publishes the Tesla Vehicle Safety Report quarterly as proof. However, nothing can be derived from this report!

Tesla posts its vehicle safety report on miles driven per accident. In other words, every how many miles is the average car involved in an accident?

Tesla vehicle safety report

According to the latest vehicle safety report, the average American car travels 670,000 miles between collisions. This number comes from the American RDW, the NHTSA.

Tesla gives two different numbers for its own cars: 1 million miles (autopilot off) and 5.4 million miles (autopilot on). Based on this, the brand claims that Teslas are ten times safer than other cars.

Conclusion makes no sense

We can be brief about this conclusion: It really doesn’t make any sense at all!

Why? Because the periodic Tesla Vehicle Safety Report is (perhaps intentionally) so limited and vague that it is impossible to draw any conclusions from it.

Only when the airbag deploys

First of all: Tesla only records incidents in which the airbag was deployed, so these are mainly the more serious collisions. Does NHTSA do that too? You won’t find out at Tesla, so let’s just check for ourselves.

According to NHTSA, an accident is: “an unintentional event resulting in injury or damage involving one or more motor vehicles on a publicly maintained roadway open to public traffic.’

No word on airbags, so NHTSA’s data set (probably) includes many more incidents than Tesla’s. And in this case that suits Tesla quite well.

Unfair age comparison

Second, Tesla makes an unfair comparison between its own models (which are relatively young and full of semi-active safety systems) and the average American car (which is 12.5 years old).

Autopilot, especially on the highway

Thirdly, the controversial Tesla Autopilot, a collection of level 2 semi-autonomous driving assistants, is primarily used on the highway, where the risk of accidents is already lower.

The NHTSA does not break down its accident data by city, secondary road and highway, so the comparison with Tesla Autopilot statistics is very skewed.