The Institute’s results also demonstrate the exceptional strength of Model 3’s all-glass roof, which is supported by a very strong metal body structure and helps protect occupants in roll-over crashes. During testing, the car’s roof was able to successfully resist more than 20,000 pounds of force – that’s more than if we placed five Model 3s on top of the car’s roof at once. And, the roof earned a higher strength-to-weight ratio score than any other fully electric vehicle that IIHS has ever tested.
> The Institute’s results also demonstrate the exceptional strength of Model 3’s all-glass roof, which is supported by a very strong metal body structure and helps protect occupants in roll-over crashes. During testing, the car’s roof was able to successfully resist more than 20,000 pounds of force – that’s more than if we placed five Model 3s on top of the car’s roof at once. And, the roof earned a higher strength-to-weight ratio score than any other fully electric vehicle that IIHS has ever tested.
It's not like browsing the internet on a phone is a new concept any more. Little ridiculous how nothing has been done about its frequent use.
It's marketing speak and isn't supported by anything in the IIHS's actual public announcement on their most recent vehicle safety ratings. Tesla has received flak in the past for misstating the results of IIHS and NHTSA testing.
The whole Mars thing + no 30k electric car after all these years have me immune.
Tesla and musk are simply not trustworthy.
But that's not what it says at all. No where does it say the glass won't shatter.
The Model 3 roof has two roll bars, one links the A pillars and the other links the B pillars. That's what's strong.
See pictures of a rolled over Model 3 here: https://electrek.co/2018/07/15/tesla-model-3-rollover-crash/ The glass is broken but the rigid metal frame clearly protected the occupants from harm.
When I open TFA, I can't even find the word "glass" when I search for it.
Must have been moved from the Tesla press release to the institutes website press release.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/videos/a5238/watch-the...
To really answer your question, I've arbitrarily picked a few common vehicles with metal roofs.
The IIHS says the Civic roof withstands 13,195lbs of force: https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/honda/civic-2-door-coup...
A Subaru Outback: 18,533lbs of roof strength: https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/subaru/outback-4-door-w...
A BMW 3 series has roughly the same roof strength as a Model 3: https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/bmw/3-series-4-door-sed...
An Audi A5 is only 16,327lbs of roof strength: https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/audi/a5-coupe-2-door-co...
You get the idea!
Just about every family sedan on the market does >5x body weight.
Sure how many Gs one typically pulls during a car crash. 5 doesn't strike me as a lot, but of course this is specifically about force applied to the roof. I guess you have to not just roll but actually fall on top of it somehow. At any rate, some actual data would be great instead of being amazed at this marketing statement.
Yes, the roof can hold 5 teslas stack one on top of the other, but this doesn't tell you much.
More practical knowledge would be at what speed the car will fall on the roof before the roof collapses? 50km/h 70km/h 100km/h?
I am not sure tests of such an event would be still so favorable.
Or to put it differently - that's an impressive achievement of a situation that will never happen to a Tesla driver. What about performance in crash situation that might actually happen?
There have been some pretty insane examples of this, such as this one: https://www.autoblog.com/2016/05/06/tesla-model-s-crash-germ...
Especially when there are car manufacturers who try to hide flaws which can lead to catastrophic malfunction or had been caught with cheat devices for emissions test.
Also one more thing which is less talked about is Tesla's autopilot being useful for people with disabilities although Tesla hasn't added any specific features for people with disabilities AFAIK.
Tesla's car safety features are not a major selling point compared to its EV features, and moreover are generally features common to EVs (i.e., additional crumple zones, floor rigidity).
Tesla's autopilot still struggles to identify white trucks against a blue sky, and highway dividers, and can't seem to tell when the driver is asleep and has his hands off the wheel. So crash safety features take a back page to known dangers of Tesla cars that make Teslas more likely to crash than other vehicles.
Especially when there are car manufacturers who try to hide flaws which can lead to catastrophic malfunction or had been caught with cheat devices for emissions test.
Literally every newspaper and news organization in the US and Europe covered the VW emissions scandal. People went to prison over it. Billions of dollars in fines were paid. The stock price was downgraded by analysts for months. Ford and GM's stock prices are also down significantly despite near-record profits due to missteps in the sedan market. Analysts aren't biased against Tesla, they're biased against any company mis-executing.
IIRC, Toyota was eventually successfully sued because they did not follow industry best practices in developing the sw for the ECU. Any idea if Tesla's software is following, say, ISO26262?
Citation needed. Which other vehicles? Tesla's overall safety record is quite good. Every car has things it does well and things it does badly, and every other manufacturer gets judged on the safety record on balance.
I mean, do you regularly post on HN about, I dunno, Toyota's safety record given the high center of gravity of its SUV offerings that make them "more likely to roll over than other vehicles" and claim that "crash safety features take a back page" to that problem?
Do you have any stats on this?
Autopilot isn't solution for disabilities. If you aren't able to drive car without AP, you cannot drive one with AP - you have to be able to intervene and take over at any point of AP operation.
Don't get people killed by spreading misinformation.
Diability can be of various nature, affecting accessbility in various manner. Iam myself disabled, Tesla is not available in my country; I hope to drive one when available and so I keep track of experience of disabled people with Tesla.
That said you can find numerous videos of disabled people testifying Tesla autopilot is easier to use[1].
Other cars like Chevrolet Volt and Toyota Prius scored better.
Tesla went for years trying to make the _sticker price_ include "four years of gas savings: $3,500", bringing the 3 to $31.5K.
Of course you couldn't buy one for that price. That was fairly deceptive. Then Tesla fans tried to spin it as "trying to bring honesty to the market by looking at TCO"... except while they were happy to mention savings from gas, they didn't mention the cost of installing 240V, and their electricity costs were somewhat... absent.
I am by no means saying Tesla is less safe, in fact I do believe these claims, I am just not sure if they are truly thorough.
For a while there certain vehicle manufacturers were putting design aesthetic above functional headlights, and even some that didn't had mediocre headlights.
Since IIHS started dinging vehicles for having bad headlights things seem to have genuinely improved in a noticeable way. As a driver that has to drive on the same road as these vehicles (glare/etc) I am happy.
I would guess this is not the real reason. EV's have a much bigger crumple zone and can therefor absorb more energy. Since "nobody" wants to hear that EV's are saver than combustion engine cars, lets put them into another category...
It's worth remembering that modern cars are very highly optimized for the tests they have to pass. I'm not saying the M3 or any specific car is good or bad, just take the results with a grain of salt because these metrics are very much targets.
In terms of the "firewall deformation", from what I understand this is exactly what is supposed to happen in a collision: there is a "crumple zone" [0] in modern cars as a safety feature to absorb impact.
Edit: Is the firewall is structurally irrelevant in modern cars or is reality not convenient today? The inability for people to disagree without trying to silence each other is why people complain that HN is turning into Reddit.
The survival rates for collisions on highway speeds are in single digits no matter what you do. It's just laws of physics.
Modern luxury sedans have 1m+ crumple zones, and those only make for few percents extra chance at speeds above 60km/h.
Extending crumple zones beyond that is self defeating, as it will only lead to further increase of average car mass, leading to even more violent collisions
Preventing crashes from happening in the first place is far more economically efficient. EU is just few years away from making some forms of ADAS mandatory, and China is realistically talking about centrally controlled "autopilot" being introduced.
As in what, a head-on collision between vehicles traveling at 70mph? Yeah, that's not likely to end well. It's also a highly uncommon event and not what the safety ratings are testing for, nor is it what anyone is realistically expecting their car to protect them from.
The small overlap front test is reasonable. It's a 40mph along the outer edges of the vehicle, like if a passing truck on a local road drifts over the center line.
Most advances past that level just got cars getting unreasonably heavy, and more lethal, as a result, in car to car collisions, which in turn results in even higher expectations being placed.
That's why "safety marketing" tells only one side of the story.
The process is essentially this: the IIHS looks at the most common crash scenarios which involve fatalities. They replicate the the crashes in a lab to gather data on the forces exerted on occupants during the crash. Then a test scenario is formalized and future vehicles will be scored based on the forces exerted on occupants during the crash and whether such forces are survivable.
Auto manufactures are supplied information about the tests are are given an opportunity to design their vehicles to perform well in crash testing.
Note, that the IIHS is a independent scientific organization dedicated to reducing fatalities and injuries in motor vehicle accidents and is supported by car insurance companies. These companies wouldn't be funding the IIHS if it didn't have a measurable payoff (humans are expensive to fix).
So far, the only variable that I've found that is predictive of driver mortality is curb weight, and the relationship is not linear. There is a mortality minimum between 4000 - 5000 lbs of curb weight.
Again, this is just for trucks and SUVs, and just those 37 models that offered both 2WD and 4WD versions. Maybe the ratings work better for sedans or for other types of vehicles.
Airbag, seatbelt with pretensioner, rigid cabin, and some crumple zone is all it takes to survive a crash below that speed.
For a healthy, non overweight person, below 40, survival rates already close to 85%-90%.
The reason I'm ringing an alarm here is that survival rates began to slide back since mid naughties exactly because of the trend for more heavier cars being marketed as "safer" resulting in more violent car to car collisions, and more cars going through road barriers.
If we can stop these kinds of deaths, we've made incredible progress.