Tesla
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2022
4:29 · 1M views · Oct 12, 2021
A short Tesla promotional video touring the company's Crash Lab. It describes using data from the fleet and replicated real-world crash scenarios to engineer vehicle safety.
Cited in car-safety threads as evidence that Tesla optimizes for real-world crash data rather than just standardized crash tests.
5 comments from Hacker News
For those who don't have the time, the video this article is summarizing ( this video ) shows a very cool approach to safety. Tesla takes real-life crash data from their cars, charts the various ways in which collisions take place, tunes crash responses (like airbag deployment and seatbelt restraint) for each situation based on simulations, and produces a more optimally safe car as a result. They also are able to validate safety of passengers virtually using this method. This video includes a crash test they did of a non-standard crash that isn't covered by regulatory bodies but isn't uncommon in real life driving, and they use it to prove that their simulation approach works. My only concern is that Tesla builds all this on a vast body of data they collect from their drivers. This feels like a privacy problem, and I wish they would make this type of program opt-in.
Sure, [LINK] this video Tesla roll out cars in generations. So just take a $40k Model 3/Y platform was introduced in 2017 and compare it with any car been introduced that year. My friend bought a BMW in 2019 for similar money, it doesn't have half of that. Maybe you can have them but you have to buy extra packages for extra money. Tesla don't sell safety features for extra price. The only extra feature is Autopilot. But hardware, camera's , lane departure avoidance, blind spot collision warning etc in every car. You can even take such a simple feature as forward collision warning system. When you drive it is super accurate it uses the same data and models from Autopilot to predict when there is a crash. If your slowing down dynamic is not good or the car in front/back change it dynamics it will warn you immediately. Only this feature saved me several times from collision. I'm not a good driver. As I said in 2022 there are many car brands that catching up in some cases they doing better. And this is good. Human is a bad, constantly distracted driver. Technology is the only way to make our life safer.
You're probably imagining something like the ID4 test: [LINK] or how the Model 3 fared in 2019: [LINK] They seem to have improved this scenario while not lowering any of the other test scores, hard to consider it 'cheating'. The XC40 has a very similar result with the car skipping the barrier (and also earned the highest mark): [LINK] Volvo and Tesla are the only two automakers that have their own crash labs. They've release a video recently talking about their safety program: this video
Its the opposite. Tesla actually specifically does not design for Tests only. They literally have data and video of every crash and update their cars to deal with real world crashes. See for example: this video Teardown of the cars have reviled that they are very sturdy built, maybe even overbuilt at points.
A month ago Tesla published a video showing their Crash Lab: this video What they claim to do there is to use their real world data to try to optimize for real crashs and not for crash tests.