Elon Musk on automotive safety: what the evidence says · JRE #1169

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Musk's claim echoes Tesla's own October 2018 blog post, which used NHTSA's published crash-test data to calculate a 'Vehicle Safety Score' and argued the Model S, X, and 3 held the three lowest probability-of-injury scores of any vehicle NHTSA had tested. NHTSA disputed the framing: its Chief Counsel sent Tesla a cease-and-desist letter calling the claim misleading, noting NHTSA's public rating system stops at 5 stars and does not itself rank vehicles beyond that, and referred the matter to the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection to assess whether the statements were an unfair or deceptive practice. Tesla did not retract the claim and maintained its statements were based on 'actual test results and NHTSA's own calculations for determining relative risk of injury and probability of injury.' NHTSA did not allege the underlying arithmetic was fabricated, only that presenting a derived, unofficial ranking this way could mislead consumers since NHTSA does not endorse cross-model probability-of-injury comparisons as an official ranking. So the claim is a real (Tesla-derived, NHTSA-data-based) calculation that the regulator itself publicly called misleading and referred for further review, rather than a claim with either clean confirmation or outright debunking on the numbers.