That’s shady, 
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The agency’s main contention was with Tesla’s claim in a blog post that month that NHTSA tests showed the Model 3 has “the lowest probability of injury of all cars the safety agency has ever tested.”
I swear that somebody was using that exact statement to argue for Tesla in another thread I was reading here yesterday.
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But Musk said it was, so it must be true.
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Anyone feel like digging into the injury probability data from NHTSA?
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Why would anyone do that? Tesla said so in a blog post, therefore it musk be true!
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These MSM articles are so poorly researched. It takes 5 mins to look. I’ll do it later…
I was just kidding.
Clearly, the NHTSA is in the back pocket of big oil, and lobbyists, and wants to see Tesla fail. They have no idea what they are talking about. Tesla is in the process of overtaking the world.
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It wasn’t yesterday, but I think this is the post you are referring to:
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I know. I’m just saying that it’s appalling that “journalists” can’t do this simple task.
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They can only look at past press releases, they’re unable to do any actual research
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The “article” posted here is just a post really. They seem to get paid by quantity not quality so actual research is not required. Let us know what you find.
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Reuters is reporting that Tesla is standing by their blog post. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-safety/tesla-stands-by-safety-claims-despite-us-probes-subpoenas-over-crashes-idUSKCN1UX0LZ)
Electric carmaker Tesla Inc stood by its Model 3 safety claims on Wednesday in the face of regulatory scrutiny, while documents showed the top U.S. automotive safety watchdog issued at least five subpoenas since last year seeking information about crashes involving the company’s vehicles.
…
Saying it was “not the first time” Tesla had disregarded its guidelines in a manner that could confuse consumers and “give Tesla an unfair market advantage,” the agency also referred the issue to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which investigates unfair or deceptive acts within commerce.
However this doesn’t mean Tesla is out of the woods yet. It looks like their “autopilot” (which isn’t really autopilot but is advertised as such so it’s easy to see how people get duped into the claims) is under more scrutiny. Tesla Subpoenas May Presage Formal Probe, Ex-Official Says - Bloomberg
The agency has issued at least five subpoenas since April 2018 for information about Tesla vehicle crashes, according to NHTSA correspondence with the electric-car manufacturer released Tuesday by Plainsite. The legal transparency group obtained the documents through a public records request for communications regarding Autopilot.
[…] “I think what this shows is that NHTSA has concerns about Autopilot performance,” Frank Borris, a former director of the Office of Defects Investigation at NHTSA, said after reviewing the documents. He said the subpoenas could mean the agency “is gathering information that would be supportive of a formal investigation.”
NHTSA doesn’t have an active defect probe into Tesla, and the agency may not open one. The regulator declined to comment directly on whether it will, saying in an emailed statement that it’s “committed to rigorous and appropriate safety oversight of the industry and encourages any potential safety issue be reported to NHTSA.”
“Any regulator like NHTSA would be interested in new vehicle technologies and how they make our highways safer,” Tesla said in an emailed statement. “We routinely share information with the agency while also balancing the need to protect customer privacy. Tesla has required subpoenas when customer information is requested in order to protect the privacy of our customers.”
You would think Musk and co would shut their mouths and back down to the NHTSA. Why open yourself up to that headache? This could backfire on them bigly.
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I’m over 12 years removed from my vehicle dynamics/crash safety classes so I’m a little rusty, asugmenting myself with google.
https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=NHTSA-2017-0037
The crashworthiness calculator gives the individual injury critieron and relates them to the AIS, abbreviated injury scale, where 3 is a ‘serious’ injuy.
I’m just going to look at some individual categories of frontal crash injury to start with. I remember HIC15, that’s head injury critierion from a frontal collision. Googled and found the injury risk solution;
Tesla Model3 HIC15 for driver/passenger is 80/234.
For driver it’s #1 out of 99 cars tested in 2018. For passenger it’s #32/99. So technically Elon is correct only looking at the 99 vehicles tested in 2018 and only for the driver. And only for head injury, in this particular test
NIJ is neck injury.
Tesla ranks #23/99 driver and #30/99 passenger
There’s soooo much data here but I want to look at the compiled ratings for AIS 3 that the actual star ratings derive from. I just used color scaling where dark green will be the best and dark red the worst.
Tesla really good in driver frontal crash injury risk! But only 'the best for head injury.
How about the passenger?
Also really good, but same story.
Combined rating for frontal crash injury?
Only #5 for driver…
Passenger?
Also #5 (how about the 'Stang being a good place to ride shotgun during a head on collision?!)
Average of driver+passenger? Mustang again!
Side Barrier; the 3 isn’t particularly close to the top;
Pole to the driver side door?
The test that the Model3 really cleans up is the rollover. Makes sense, considering it’s got a billion panasonic batteries strapped to the bottom of it.
So anyway, all of these injury probabilities are converted into RSS which is Relative Risk Score (basically the same as the excel color scaling - it normalizes against ‘average’), which is then converted into one ‘VSS’ score.
VSS = (5/24) RRS(Frontal, driver)
+ (5/24) RRS(Frontal, passenger)
+ (1/30) RRS(Pole, driver)
+ (2/15) RRS(Side, driver)
+ (1/6) RRS(Side, back seat)
+ (1/4) RRS(Rollover)
Of the 99 vehicles tested in 2018, The Tesla scored like this;
That’s really good!! What exactly did Elon say that p*ssed NHTSA off so much?
https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/model-3-lowest-probability-injury-any-vehicle-ever-tested-nhtsa
Well they made up a graph. NHTSA does not publish an ‘overall probability of injury’;
And then in small print at the bottom…
The Vehicle Safety Score represents the “relative risk of injury with respect to a baseline of 15%,” according to NHTSA. Model 3 achieved a Vehicle Safety Score of 0.38, which is lower than any other vehicle rated in NHTSA’s public documents. By multiplying the Vehicle Safety Score by NHTSA’s 15% baseline figure, we arrived at an overall probability of injury for Model 3 of 5.7%. Applying the same calculation to each of the vehicles rated in NHTSA’s documents, we found that Model S achieved an overall probability of injury of 6.3%, and Model X achieved an overall probability of injury of 6.5%, making them the vehicles with the second and third lowest probabilities of injury, respectively, based on NHTSA’s publicly-available data and records.
So basically they just made up some serious sh*t 
What they did makes absolutely no sense.
They also made some false statements like this;
The agency’s data shows that vehicle occupants are less likely to get seriously hurt in these types of crashes when in a Model 3 than in any other car.
This appears to be true in specific tests and specific criterion, but as I showed above, in some tests and some criterion the Model3 was not the best (or even close to it).
What is wrong with this cult??
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They must be following the “any publicity is good publicity” mantra
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Must be the same marketing folks that added an arbitrary gas cost to the overall price of the car.
I must’ve missed the math class where the price of gas that you’re saving lowers the overall sales price you pay when you sign the deal.
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The issue here is that I took only two crash safety classes as part of my BSME, and as soon as I read this my head almost exploded.
The VSS is derived from injury probabilities, but the VSS is not an injury probability. It’s a relative rating based on the injury probability and compared to other vehicles tested. Basically what they’ve done is multiply a ham sandwich by a thunderstorm and come to the conclusion that THE MODEL 3 IS THE FASTEST CAR IN THE WORLD.
And the VSS is most heavily influenced by the rollover test, which the Model 3 destroyed everyone else at (as you’d expect). Exclude the Rollover test and there are safer vehicles than the Model 3 in the NHTSA tests.
Nice work. I saw all this data posted by a different source and it’s in line with yours. The car is solid…but that graph, which was posted a few months ago, is a bit misleading. I don’t have a problem that they made a graph based on the data but with its base cut off it shows sleaziness. It’s sad since the results were great and was no need for it.
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