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It's Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto

We now have a full year of data for the Cybertruck, and a strange preponderance of headlines about Cybertrucks exploding into flames, including several fatalities. That’s more than enough data to compare to the Ford Pinto, a car so notoriously combustible that it has become a watchword for corporate greed. Let’s start with the data...

49 comments

  • I think this research needs extensive peer review. We can't be certain till at least 99% of all cyber trucks have been 'tested'.

  • “We have the… most, explosive car ever on planet earth. Heh, heh.”

    I can sadly hear his voice.

  • When people see a Pinto, they smile and laugh. When people see a Cybertruck the flip the driver off.

    More Pintos please.

  • I’m all for shitting on Elon, but it seems premature to declare the issue “officially” settled. Who’s the official anyway? This smells to me like enshittification of the internet, of journalism, and maybe even rational thought.

    5 deaths from presumably 3 vehicles ablaze. The one which killed 3 of the people (60% for those who love statistics), the main battery pack did not catch fire. So, was it smoking, or something else?

    Sure you can use statistics to say it has a higher fire rate than the Pinto. But without knowing the root cause of each fire, it cannot be deduced whether we should expect the rate to continue. I would suspect it should end up similar to other Teslas, unless a specific design flaw is identified. Another thing to keep in mind is that Tesla changes production on the fly, so if there is a design flaw, it may not persist into the next units.

    Finally, the Cybertruck is stupid and I hope it fails. But that’s just like, my opinion.

    • Sure, sure. The "official" just means that the first year of results are measured. Felt too early to look at before we had a full year of data.

      The statistic for the Cybertruck wasn't intended to determine cause, just effect. Maybe you're right and they'll wind up about as safe as other Teslas, which are the most lethal brand of car to drive based on NHTSA data. You can see why the DOGE effort is closely scrutinizing the NHTSA.

      Totally hear you and agree to the broad sentiment if not the specifics. I really hope you're right, I hope they fix it and it becomes safer. The door emergency release designs in particular feel antagonistic to the lives of rear seat passengers.

      Also, just my opinion. I mostly tell jokes, I just stumbled into a joke where I was like "wait that can't be true, can it," and then a couple hours of research later, it looked like it was confoundingly true.

  • it's like the 3rd repost of this Cherrypicking galore: They literally took 27 which is the fire deaths from rear-ending only (vs 41 fire fatalities from a 2.5 year period instead of the 9 years they mention They conveniently did not use the 1,626 pinto fatalities from those 2.5 years. They used the total number of pintos produced, not the number of pintos on the roads at the end of the analysis, which would be less than 2.2M. At least they did get your clicks.

    • The whole premise is that the pinto was known for being a fire hazard. Deaths due to lack of airbags and piss-poor seatbelt usage is the 70s has nothing to do with fire-related deaths.

      And given they're also using the number of cyber trucks produced, that is also an apples to apples comparison.

      It takes some olympic-level mental gymnastics to look at a story about exploding cars and try to rope in non-fire-related deaths.

      • The whole premise is that the pinto was known for being a fire hazard. Deaths due to lack of airbags and piss-poor seatbelt usage is the 70s has nothing to do with fire-related deaths. And given they’re also using the number of cyber trucks produced, that is also an apples to apples comparison.

        So you choose a single metric responsible for about 1.6% fatalities for the Pinto from 25% of the timeframe it was produced and at very best 66% of the ever existed pintos on the road and then you compare that metric to what appears to be 125% of ALL deaths in the CT and then you call it apples to apples?

        Talking about mental gymnastics...

    • I see 41 fire fatalities in that image. Out of 2.2M, that's 1.86 fatalities per 100k units. Still much lower than 14.52 for the Cybertruck.

      • That's still an overestimate because the miles driven needs to be taken into consideration, time to fire, etc and on the CT's side we should never include the suicide case in the stats...

        But an honest analysis would compare the CT to EVs as their fire rates are inherently higher, which doesn't mean at all that EVs are less safe in general than ICE vehicles.

    • You're back! I've seen this article posted a couple different places (not by me), and you keep finding it! And posting an image of one of the many data tables from the same study.

      So, after seeing it a couple times, I do have a couple of ideas about it:

      • You should also include a screen grab of the page of the report that specifies the 27 deaths due to the notoriously fatal design flaw in the Pinto that is included in my article.
      • If you read my article, I'm specifically comparing the fire death rate due to the notoriously fatal design flaw. It's specified in plain English in the methodology section. If you don't like the clearly stated methodology, re-run the study with a methodology you do like, IDGAF.
      • The reason for that methodology: 100% of the Cybertruck fires involved ONLY the Cybertruck. Which is weird, single car fire accidents are not common. The Ford Pintos, I could only verify that SOME of the fires were caused ONLY by the Ford Pinto. I wanted an apples-to-apples comparison as best as I could make it. If you don't like any aspect of this, like the vehicle totals or whatever, you can always re-run the numbers like I told you to in the original article.

      People often ask about me including the Las Vegas case, so maybe I answer that concern, too. That's the methodology - I set out to count every fire death for the Cybertruck that I could confirm through reliable news sources. And I struggled with that one. I worried if I didn't include it, I'd be open to the opposite criticism - folks would say "wait these stats suck, I literally saw a guy die on the news in a flaming Cybertruck, and y'all didn't count it, so these numbers can't be right." So, sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. It was controversial, I knew it would be, so I flagged it in the article so folks could make their own decision about it. Ultimately, it didn't meaningfully change the final findings. I've run the numbers with and without it, and the story is fundamentally the same either way.

      Like, I'm a comedian who tells pickup truck jokes most the time. I've linked in the original article to a very credible scientist who re-ran my numbers more rigorously and they came to the same conclusions, with the added benefit of confirming the sample sizes were statistically significant. Take their word for it, not mine. Or hell, run the numbers yourself, you got all the same sources I do.

      • You’re back! I’ve seen this article posted a couple different places (not by me), and you keep finding it! And posting an image of one of the many data tables from the same study.

        1. I'm posting this response because shitty analyses like this keep feeding people's confirmation biases while making us dumbder given the poor bases in reality.
        2. I'm referring to this table because that's the main data table this very "analysis" refers to.

        You should also include a screen grab of the page of the report that specifies the 27 deaths due to the notoriously fatal design flaw in the Pinto that is included in my article.

        That's not how a real analysis is done. On the Pinto's end you're OK with them selecting 1.6% of the deaths that occurred due to evidently passive accidents (rear-ending), deflate the rates of these by using clearly false production numbers (60% less than counted) and timeframes within these events happened (4x shorter than counted).

        If you read my article, I’m specifically comparing the fire death rate due to the notoriously fatal design flaw. It’s specified in plain English in the methodology section. If you don’t like the clearly stated methodology, re-run the study with a methodology you do like, IDGAF.

        So on the CT's end you find it acceptable to include ALL causes and further inflate the death rate by 20% with the inclusion of the suicide guy?! Seriously?:)

        The reason for that methodology: 100% of the Cybertruck fires involved ONLY the Cybertruck. Which is weird, single car fire accidents are not common. The Ford Pintos, I could only verify that SOME of the fires were caused ONLY by the Ford Pinto. I wanted an apples-to-apples comparison as best as I could make it. If you don’t like any aspect of this, like the vehicle totals or whatever, you can always re-run the numbers like I told you to in the original article.

        **No, if you want a real "apples-to-apples" analysis and not meme-shit like this, you compare the fire rates to a contemporary vehicle of a comparable class. Either a gasoline/diesel F150 or even better, a Ford Lightning. Now that would be something we could learn from. **

        Like, I’m a comedian who tells pickup truck jokes most the time.

        This definitely makes a good joke, but people confusing jokes and reality is the issue.

        I’ve linked in the original article to a very credible scientist who re-ran my numbers more rigorously and they came to the same conclusions, with the added benefit of confirming the sample sizes were statistically significant.

        The first step in a real analysis is formulating a relevant question. One can make ANYTHING "statistically significant" For example, I can guarantee you that I can find a singular metric for most cars from the 70s in which would make them look safer than a modern EV. What would we learn from that other than making memes?

    • Speaking of cherrypicking....the report also counts that Cybertruck in Las Vegas loaded with fireworks and gas canisters, where the driver died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    • Oh you! Stop with the facts. We're here to bag on Elon, reality be damned.

49 comments