this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Electric Vehicles

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Electric Vehicles are a key part of our tomorrow and how we get there. If we can get all the fossil fuel vehicles off our roads, out of our seas and out of our skies, we'll have a much better environment. This community is where we discuss the various different vehicles and news stories regarding electric transportation.

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Volkswagen’s US EV Sales Explode — 231% Growth Year Over Year (cleantechnica.com)
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[–] proudblond@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I am honestly, truly not trying to start a fight. I did ask for stats regarding safety ratings because you used the words “safety ratings” in your original comment:

Here Tesla is by far the cheapest to maintain under warranty, but it also had by far the worst safety rating of ALL brands, both in Germany and Denmark.

I get that the cars are in the most accidents. When I read “safety ratings,” I thought that meant crash test ratings. Indeed, this site even uses the term “safety rating” when giving a number of stars. This is the car I currently drive and they give it a 5/5 ranking. I have a vested interest in knowing whether or not my car manufacturer is lying to me about crash test ratings. I personally don’t use autopilot because I don’t trust it, and I don’t trust the company, and I will likely never buy a Tesla again, but for now it’s what I have.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

I thought that meant crash test ratings.

No I meant what I wrote above that, they they where the worst when tested in Denmark and Germany.
Those tests are just about everything mechanical about safety, like breaks and steering. In Germany 17% failed after 2 years, and in Denmark 30% failed after 4 years, which is the first safety check in Denmark.

AFAIK Tesla does well in crash tests, except the Cybertruck which is a deathtrap in that regard too, but that's only one parameter of many regarding safety, and that's not tested individually for EU countries, that would be ridiculous. That's part of assigning a model of car as road legal for all of Europe.
The "rating" in Denmark is that 3 out of 10 cars have serious safety issues after 4 years! A completely unheard of bad score here in Denmark.

I personally don’t use autopilot because I don’t trust it,

This was not what was tested either. Tesla autopilot has been determined to be legal for some reason. IMO Tesla shouldn't be street legal at all here, autopilot and FSD are clearly bugged, but there are many other issues which are mechanical, and those are the ones the Tesla fails at the mandatory safety check, because Tesla cars are garbage. Here the 3 most common flaws were Brakes, steering and suspension. All very significant parts for safety, and they were not within margins, and often 1 car had more than 1 flaw.

A small thing like Blinker on the steering wheel is a safety issue, and should not be allowed IMO. EU is moving to make it illegal, but we will see what happens.
In Norway you can't use Tesla with blinker buttons on the steering wheel for learning or to get your driving license.
But there are many other issues with how the "piloting" of a Tesla works, and it is only optimal for saving money on production, not for safety.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Still, not trying to be pedantic here but terminology is important. Seems like you’re talking about quality or reliability.

Generally

  • safety ratings are government or independent tests on newly manufactured cars. The goal is to detect design issues. Tesla has always had very high safety ratings
  • quality or reliability is how these cars hold up over time. The goal is to detect manufacturing issues and places where too many compromises are made. There are many places attempting to do this and one source may be annual safety inspections. Teslas used to have some very well publicized quality issues that would show up here. Early model s and model X were effectively hand made, and they took a couple years to stabilize model 3 manufacturing. As far as I know they are similar to other manufacturers now (except of course the Cybertruck), but I’d certainly expect historical data to not be as forgiving.
  • accident data is real life results in how they’re used. In this case we have way too many streamers misusing teslas self-driving feature, convincing others it’s more capable than even Tesla claims, that probably contributes. But I believe it’s also the sheer acceleration. It used to be the Mustang that was stereotypically more acceleration than drivers can handle, but we may have that here as well. Every Tesla has outstanding acceleration and of course you’d try it. It will be more than you expect: can you handle it?

Edit to add

  • insurance data generally determines repairability. We see that for a variety of reasons teslas are expensive to repair. Some of it’s the design, some the materials, some the plethora of tech, and some is availability of parts, and the lack of third party parts
[–] saimen@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Recently my wife started driving our Model Y, after not driving at all for over 10 years. One time she "accidentally" did over 200 km/h on the Autobahn because she didn't realise how fast she got.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Looking into the Denmark thing I see

So this was once, for model 3, because it’s old enough. This is absolutely the same as the very well publicized quality issues from back when model 3 manufacturing was ramping up. They certainly had problems and took 2-3 years to straighten it out.

Since then they’ve had much better quality and the model y had very few problems from the start, so I’d expect a significant change in results as these newer cars get old enough to undergo those tests.

My take is these tests correlate with quality problems from four years in the past and Tesla certainly had those