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??