With the launch of the new Tesla Model 3 sedan rapidly approaching, analysts are already jumping the gun to claim that this car may be up to 10 times safer than the average car on the market today. A recent study shows that customers’ number one determinant for car purchases is the provided set of integrated safety features. For this reason, analysts also speculate that this new technological advancement will be a huge contributing factor to a major sales increase for Tesla Motors.
“The Model 3 will feature hardware and software that provide a level of active safety that could significantly lead all other cars on sale today and could, if the company achieves its goal, be an order of magnitude (i.e. 10x) safer than the average car on the road,” stated Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas.
New Autopilot System
Jonas’ claims are based on the technical ability that is engraved within Tesla’s new autopilot system, which is set up in all HW2 vehicles, as well as the company’s aptness for collecting extensive driving data from each of its customers.
“They’ve rolled out a new architecture which uses a very different sensor strategy,” says Tim Dawkins, an autonomous car specialist at automotive tech research company, SBD. “They needed to spend a little time building up their base data before they were able to release the same level of functionally as they had with hardware version 1.0.”
Each day, Tesla collects about five million miles of road data and has collected more than 1.3 billion miles of data to date. Jonas believes the amount of data that can be collected per day will double over the next 15 months thanks to the Tesla Mobility ride-sharing business that is set to increase the daily mileage to 400 million by the year 2025 or 2030.
Are they really safer?
The safety of Tesla’s vehicles has been challenged and debated due to the history of fatal accidents they’ve been involved in. One of the most recent incidents, which started a media uproar, was the fatal accident that occurred in Florida last May while a Tesla vehicle was in Autopilot mode.
However, after the investigation of the crash was concluded, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that no safety defects from the Autopilot feature contributed to the crash. The NHTSA also added that data shows crashes in Tesla cars dropped by almost 40 percent after the company installed the Autosteer feature in its vehicles.
When asked by how much he believes the crash rate will go down with the help of the new Autopilot system installation, Tesla CEO Elon Musk answered, “Our target is a 90% reduction with HW2 as the software matures,” in a recent tweet.
The new Tesla Model 3 is set to release later this year.