MarcusMaximus
Active Member
Sure those were assumptions, but 65 isn’t really as much a problem. It’s 75+, where it gets tough. The safest years are actually 30-74.
Statistically the cars you are going to have the highest rate of accidents in is your first and your last. Both will probably not be a Model S and X right now.
But in general I just wanted to give some reasons why fatalities might be lower. Not all of them might have to be true, but I think it’s safe to say that even w/o AP the cars would have much lower fatality rates, than the average car.
Sure, maybe somewhere out there there is a 16 year old guy doing drunk street races in his Model X with totally worn down brakes and tires, busted headlights and halve the airbags torn out, but probably not.
Fortunately, we have something close to an apples-apples comparison on this. There was about a 1 year gap between when cars with AP1 started being shipped and when the system was actually turned on. NHTSA found that after the system was activated, accident rates dropped by 40% for the same cars. That’s the rate of accidents per mile driven, regardless of whether AP is even turned on(suggesting it’s an underestimate of the true rate drop) and before the nags were instituted.