Cybertrucks Are Deadlier Than Infamous Ford Pintos

I was confused on if they meant deadly to drive, or deadly to other people/vehicles that they hit. It appears that the article is about deadly to drive (I suspect that they are also very dangerous to those they hit, but that's just a gut feeling).

As much as I detest Cybertrucks, this study seems pretty flawed.

>the approximately 34,000 Cybertrucks on the roads had five fire fatalities

Is how they calculated it. Except they don't know how many are sold. And one of those five fatalities was actually a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Three of the remaining four fatalities occurred in a single incident. No information about how much these were driven, either.

Not sure I like the definitive sounding headline of this article, or the report ("the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto") given the unknown variables, caveats, etc.

The analysis is quite lackluster because it only compares vehicle quantity where as fires are more a function of quantity and usage, so you should really be comparing vehicle-years or vehicle-miles.

For the Tesla Cybertruck, we can overestimate the vehicle-years by counting the quantity at at the end of the year for the full year for a total of 34,438 vehicle-years.

For the Ford Pinto, we can underestimate the vehicle-years by only counting the quantity at the start of the year for the full year only until the recall halfway through 1978 (e.g. we count 1971 production starting in 1972 until 1978.5 for a total of only 6.5 years). In that case, we count a total of 10,125,030 vehicle-years.

Excluding the controversial fatality for the Cybertruck, so we only count 4 fire fatalities, that is 1 fire fatality per ~8609.5 vehicle-years versus the Ford Pinto at 1 per ~375,001 vehicle-years; making the Tesla Cybertruck ~43.5 times higher than the excess fire deaths of the Ford Pinto.

Comparing against overall fire fatality rate [1]. In 2022, there were 650 confirmed deaths in vehicles where a fire occurred over ~232,000,000 household vehicles. That is a rate of about 1 fire fatality per ~350,000 vehicle-years; making the fire fatality rate of the Tesla Cybertruck ~41.4 times higher than the average vehicle.

Note that the Ford Pinto is just excess fire deaths attributed to the gas tank defect rather than the total fire rate which is not well reported which is why it might be comparable to the overall fire fatality rate of today despite higher fire safety on most modern cars. All fires for the Ford Pinto is likely a higher number than the 27 fire deaths directly attributed to the specific defect.

[1] https://content.nfpa.org/-/media/Project/Storefront/Catalog/...

This analysis claims someone that detonated a bunch of fireworks and then shot himself in the head as a "fire fatality" and acknowledges it.

While I would never voluntarily get into a Cybertruck, the infamy of the Pinto is mostly based on myth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...

A Rutgers Law Review article by former UCLA law professor Gary T. Schwartz, examined the fatality rates of the Pinto and several other small cars of the time. He noted that fires, and rear-end fires, in particular, are a very small portion of overall auto fatalities. At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions. When considering the overall safety of the Pinto, subcompact cars as a class had a generally higher fatality risk. Pintos represented 1.9% of all cars on the road in the 1975–76 period. During that time, the car represented 1.9% of all "fatal accidents accompanied by some fire". This implies the Pinto was average for all cars and slightly above average for its class. When all types of fatalities are considered, the Pinto was approximately even with the AMC Gremlin, Chevrolet Vega, and Datsun 510. It was significantly better than the Datsun 1200/210, Toyota Corolla, and VW Beetle. The safety record of the car in terms of fire was average or slightly below average for compacts, and all cars respectively. This was considered respectable for a subcompact car. Only when considering the narrow subset of a rear impact, fire fatalities for the car were somewhat worse than the average for subcompact cars. While acknowledging this is an important legal point, Schwartz rejected the portrayal of the car as a firetrap.

This analysis is flawed in many ways:

1) Sample size - there have been a grand total of 3 cybertruck fires that resulted in a fatality 2) Flawed data - they admit that they're including a suicide bomber in that count of 3 incidents 3) Sample size again - they admit they don't actually know how many cyber trucks have been sold

Given any of the above, let alone all of them, anyone would realize that there's not enough data to make any conclusions here.

And despite all that, apparently the DOD just awarded Tesla a $400M contract to produce armored Teslas. That will somehow charge up at the local war zone charging station? https://www.yahoo.com/news/musk-wins-400m-us-government-1413...

Sounds like a total deathtrap.

If something is touted as indestructible, it probably means it will destroy everything else it encounters.

Ironically, the only reason the Ford Pinto is infamous is because of a Mother Jones hit piece in the 70s that vastly overstated the number of deaths from the Pinto.

Attributing the causes of observed vehicle incidents is a tough task. The Pinto clearly had a design flaw, but risk encompasses more causes than simply design. Vehicle models often target or appeal to certain subset of buyers and those buyers don't have evenly distributed driver risk.

The market that these vehicles appeals to almost certainly skews towards riskier than average, which will also be a contributing component of the observed risk.

Please don't allow partisan blog spam on the site. Liberal or conservative.

Even if it's true, don't use a partisan blog as a source.

motherjones is not a credible source of analysis and they are reposting from a blog that has "hot takes" in its mission statement.

this is not worth posting on this site, it's clickbait garbage