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(1) A remarkable example of a private agency that has pushed safety standards beyond what the government would do own its own, and
(2) An organization that has persuaded Americans to buy larger vehicles than they would have otherwise with all the associated costs (e.g. the “affordable car” crisis) and risks (to pedestrians.)
The IIHS is an organization of insurers so they are particularly concerned about quantifiable monetary costs. And when it comes to that much more of the benefit of larger vehicles is in avoided minor injuries such as broken bones which are more common than death and life changing injuries. The public focuses on the latter and the psychology is such that some people will spend another $50k on some German vehicle and spend the rest of their days at the dealer getting it fixed or subject their children to the trauma of riding in a minivan. (To generation X the minivan is like the toxic PFAS GenX)
IIHS claims that compatibility has improved between large and small vehicles but that large vehicles are still a menace to other road users
The danluu article also mentions an iSeeCars report at the bottom that says that Teslas have a high amount of fatalities per mile driven [2]. However, while they claim to be using official US estimates of fatalities data, they normalized it with estimated mileage using unknown proprietary iSeeCars data:
> iSeeCars analyzed fatality data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Only cars from model years 2018-2022 in crashes that resulted in occupant fatalities between 2017 and 2022 (the latest year data was available) were included in the analysis. To adjust for exposure, the number of cars involved in a fatal crash were normalized by the total number of vehicle miles driven, which was estimated from iSeeCars’ data of over 8 million vehicles on the road in 2022 from model years 2018-2022. Heavy-duty trucks and vans, models not in production as of the 2024 model year, and low-volume models were removed from further analysis.
Some numbers are also surprising, such as the Model Y having almost twice the fatality rate (10.6 per billion miles) as the Tesla average (5.6) --- suggesting that there's a wide gulf between it and the Model 3 in terms of fatality rates, which seems difficult to explain. Ultimately, iSeeCars is a small VC-funded startup with very few people and so it is unclear if their methodology is actually good or not.
For a better blog post about whether Teslas are safe, here's a post from Brandon Paddock [3] from a year ago, which seems more or less objective and unsurprising. Here is the conclusion that he drew upon analyzing the FARS data:
> Tesla’s fatal accident rate is nearly identical to that of the Audi A4 series, and far lower than a standard Ford mid-size sedan. In this case, the Ford’s accident rate is more than 4 times higher than the Tesla Model 3.
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-aces-safety-tests-ch...
[2] https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study
[3] https://brandonpaddock.substack.com/p/are-teslas-the-most-or...
We can also observe that,
in the IIHS analysis, many
factors that one might want
to control for aren't [...]
One way to see that the numbers
are heavily influenced by
confounding factors is by
looking at AWD or 4WD vs. 2WD
versions of cars. They often
have wildly different fatalty
rates even though the safety
differences are not very large
(and the difference is often
in favor of the 2WD vehicle).
Some plausible causes of that
are random noise, differences
in who buys different versions
of the same vehicle, and
differences in how the vehicle
are used.
A typical AWD will have a transfer case, front driveshaft and other front drivetrain components v.s. a sister car in a 2WD configuration. The overall weight and distribution will be different.
One might e.g. suspect that in a crash the front driveshaft might fold upwards and assist in structurally compromising the passenger cabin.