The NHTSA has called into question a recent claim by Tesla that its Model 3 is engineered to be the safest car ever.
Oct. 11, 2018
October 11, 2018—The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is taking exception to Tesla Inc.’s characterization of the agency’s safety ratings, reported Bloomberg.
According to the report, on Sunday, Tesla Inc. released a lengthy blog post saying that it engineered the Model 3 to “be the safest car ever built” and that NHTSA’s tests show that it has “the lowest probability of injury of all cars the safety agency has ever tested.”
NHTSA said that its crash tests combine into an overall safety rating and that it does not rank vehicles that score the same ratings.
Tesla’s Model 3 received five-star ratings in frontal and side crash tests, rollover prevention and overall. NHTSA guidelines for the use of its crash test results in advertising and communications warns that using terms such as “safest” and “perfect” to describe a particular rating or an overall score are misleading, reported Bloomberg.
