Active safety features
I am not at all sure what you are looking for in safety features? The Tesla Model S is already the safest automobile ever made.
The subject is
active safety features, and that's where the Tesla is sorely lacking. With some of them, it's not just a matter of safety but of convenience, and standard equipment on peer vehicles. Tesla has
no safety record when it comes to active safety features. The so called "safest automobile ever made" claim is based on the assumption that you get into an accident anyway and would have done the same in another vehicle. I'll put any vehicle that avoids an accident against a Tesla that gets into one and I'll find the other vehicle safer.
The one thing that kept me from ordering a Model S sooner was the lack of any form of adaptive cruise control. What tipped the scale is that my other vehicle got totaled and I didn't have the option of waiting to see what Tesla does in the future. Ironically if my vehicle had more active safety features, the accident might not have happened. I wasn't driving and the driver lacked experience. If you take a vehicle that goes from 0-60 slightly faster than a Model S and put an inexperienced driver in it, it can be destroyed in seconds without active safety features.
I like adaptive cruise control. It's not just the convenience of being able to set the speed and leave things alone. It's not just the ability to go on long trips without absentmindedly going way above the speed limit. And it's not just about having the car slow down on its own when traffic slows down. It's about safety.
One time, I was driving and there were two cars in the lane next to me. I couldn't see that one was tailgating the other within a few feet at high speeds. All I could see was that I was being passed on the right. The lead vehicle obviously wanted to get away from the reckless one. So the driver wanted to change lanes in front of me as soon as there was a safe distance between us. But being a car length ahead of me gave the reckless driver enough room to cut me off within inches, ending up in the other car's blind spot in the process, and ending up with its front bumper about three feet ahead of the rear bumper of the other car when it finally started its lane change. So the result was that I was cut off at high speed within about a foot and the driver immediately slammed on his brakes full force.
In those circumstances, Tesla would boast about its safety, its crumple zones, and how I was able to walk away from the accident. It might even have made the news. Instead, my seat belt immediately retracted to restrain me. The vehicle applied its brakes before it was humanly possible for me to get my foot over to the pedal. And when I did get my foot there, the brakes were pre-pressurized to have a hard feel since braking was already in progress, so the force of my foot counted immediately.
You don't hear about these things in the news. Nobody reports that some guy was cut off on the freeway and he had to slam on his brakes to stop. Nobody lets you know when the beep from a lane departure warning let a person know to look up from his giant display because he is drifting toward the white line. Instead you hear about how that person who drifted into the next lane in a Tesla got off unscathed because of the brilliant safety features. That's backwards.
After the accident, my daughter wanted me to find her the safest car. It won't be a Tesla. It might be a Subaru that's barely over $20k. It monitors the road with two color cameras. It will stop if the vehicle in front stops, even if its driver doesn't. It will track the red tail lights of the vehicles in front, just as a camera tracks faces to keep things in focus. And in addition to judging distance as such systems did in the past, it will have more data points to predict changes in highway speeds. It will know what's next to you and whether you are drifting. And if you look away for a second to glance at your map, and it happens to be the second when a reckless driver cuts you off, it will prevent an accident.
The irony is that you are already paying for the safety package. You aren't paying Tesla though. You are paying your insurance company and your body shop. These days, the slightest dent can cost $1000 to fix. Over the life of a Tesla, chances are the extra insurance premiums will be far more than what it would have cost for a tech package with a couple of extra cameras and something that senses distance behind vehicles for the next five or so car lengths. The rest of the system is already there. Tesla has the computer so there wouldn't be any other hardware costs. It would just be a matter of programming it so it could compete with a $20K Subaru in terms of safety. I don't think that's asking too much.
When people ask if I would have missed the feature had it not been on my previous vehicle, the irony is that the answer might have been no. I couldn't miss it if I didn't survive an accident. My only wish is that the person who totaled my other car had been driving my wife's Acura instead. That one might have stopped, or at least slowed itself down enough that the car would have been repairable.
:redface: Sorry...couldn't resist.
