Or maybe it's not the type of car but the type of person who buys these cars :)
Two days ago:
I was walking down the road, beside me a young man with airpods on. He was walking on a side lane which is intended for parking lots. Suddenly, a Tesla was driving behind him with about the same speed, but at a distance of less than 10cm behind him.. forcing him off the street. He didn't hear or see the car.
So, how stupid a driver must be to drive that close behind a walking one?
It's Tesla drivers. In Germany I saw that kind of behavior more than once.
If someone could drive "less than 10cm behind" a pedestrian without them noticing, my reaction is to be impressed with such astonishingly precise driving.
Astonishingly precise driving should be reserved for a closed circuit, not a public street, where there are a million other variables you can't control.
That's why a good driver in public is a smooth and predictable one, not one who can just parallel park with 2 cm space in one go every time.
We're veering into the pew pew topic territory. It is the cars :)
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> So stop buying heavy/fast vehicles if you care about fatalities.
The report makes precisely the opposite claim. It says small cars have a higher rate of fatal accidents. From the report:
"When broken out by size, small cars have the highest fatal accident rate while midsize and full-size cars are both below average. While modern small cars benefit from the latest engineering and safety tech, they still have a size and weight disadvantage in accidents with a larger vehicle."[0]
Perhaps you are right and weight is a critical factor, but then you'll need to explain why the heavy Model S was lower in their rankings than the Toyota Prius. It should also be noted that Tesla vehicles are generally lighter than most comparable EVs, and typically 0–10% heavier than comparable ICE cars.
I contend that this report is junk data. The authors haven't published the statistics (or methodology for collecting the statistics) used to normalise the raw NHTSA FARS data. Without it, its conclusions are as useless as you might suspect when looking at their top 23 list. (I wonder... if we knew what the 24th car was, would we know more about the motivations of the authors?)
That the only automaker name in the headlines stemming from this report is Tesla is proof that there's no intellectual integrity associated with its dissemination — it's just vibe, and an opportunity for people to push their pet explanations, even when the report itself contradicts them. Or when the pet explanation doesn't make sense of literally any data point.
[0] https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#v=2024