Most of the "teslas are safer than other cars!" stats are severely biased because:
1)Teslas are "luxury" vehicles, much higher-end than the average US car. A base Model S, or average model 3, costs twice the average US car cost. They are as a result significantly better equipped with safety features and have better crash engineering. In terms of driver assistance, the auto industry was pretty belligerent about backup cameras being mandated, just to give one example.
2)Teslas are on a whole significantly newer than the average US car. The average age of a car on the road in the US is twenty years old. Of course a Tesla with safety features not available until ~10 years ago (or less) is safer than a 1999 anything.
If people said "my electric Mercedes is significantly safer than the average car, so Mercedes should be allowed to beta-test their software, which despite after many years of development is proven to randomly slam on the brakes, or drive into the back of emergency vehicles, and is shown on numerous videos to violate traffic laws, suddenly veer at poles and barriers and pedestrians and cyclists"
...they'd be laughed out of the room on a number of points.
One more big one related to your first point: the demographic driving Teslas is hardly a random sampling of the population, which probably impacts driving behavior _but also_ implies the driving done (e.g., where) is probably quite different from the population as a whole.
1)Teslas are "luxury" vehicles, much higher-end than the average US car. A base Model S, or average model 3, costs twice the average US car cost. They are as a result significantly better equipped with safety features and have better crash engineering. In terms of driver assistance, the auto industry was pretty belligerent about backup cameras being mandated, just to give one example.
2)Teslas are on a whole significantly newer than the average US car. The average age of a car on the road in the US is twenty years old. Of course a Tesla with safety features not available until ~10 years ago (or less) is safer than a 1999 anything.
If people said "my electric Mercedes is significantly safer than the average car, so Mercedes should be allowed to beta-test their software, which despite after many years of development is proven to randomly slam on the brakes, or drive into the back of emergency vehicles, and is shown on numerous videos to violate traffic laws, suddenly veer at poles and barriers and pedestrians and cyclists"
...they'd be laughed out of the room on a number of points.