Tesla and NHTSA fight over what safety scores mean

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Tesla advertised that the Model 3 is the safest car ever based on NHTSA's tests. NHTSA wrote them a letter saying, "stop saying that, you can't compare these scores across different weight classes."

Here's some analysis of who is right and why Tesla wins in the end at NHTSA and Tesla spar over safety claims

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It doesn't look like NHTSA has any jurisdiction over this. All they did was refer Tesla to the FTC.

If the FTC ordered Tesla to stop, it'd be a whole different matter.

The NHTSA refers to it's guidelines being broken. Are those guidelines actual regulations that have to be followed?

Lawyers will have to dig that one out. Again, Tesla will revel in it. It's fantastic publicity to have a big public debate over whether the Tesla is best safest car ever made, or the safest car ever made buy NHTSA regulations forbid saying is in that specific way.

The letter was sent 10 months ago. It's only coming out now because someone filed a FOIA request.

"NHTSA doesn’t want Tesla saying those claims because it declares that the numbers can’t be compared between cars that are very different in weight."

That would be a pretty legit reason, but your article is the first one I've seen that says NHTSA has stated this reason. Could you please provide us a quotation and the url where you found it? Thanks.

The first link in the story points to the document dump, and it's right in the NHTSA letter, 2nd page of it, found on page 8 of the dump. One of the first things you come to so I didn't point in detail.

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