[enoch_r]

This article is a great example of motivated reasoning. It's comparing two wildly different numbers: the Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire. The Cybertruck number is the total number of deaths from all incidents involving fire and a Cybertruck.

According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:

> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.

So as a back of the envelope calculation, we'd expect the total number of Pinto fire fatalities to be about 6.5x the fire fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions. Even then, I doubt that statistic would include incidents like the Las Vegas case where the man shot himself in the head while detonating an improvised explosive in his Cybertruck.

This doesn't even get into sample size - the Tesla numbers are based on only 3 incidents and 5 fatalities:

- one, a single-car accident in which 3 people died,

- two, a single-car accident in which 1 person died, and

- three, the driver shot himself in the head

If, say, the first driver hadn't had any passengers and the third driver had not been included in the sample (because it's not a collision), the Cybertruck's rate would be 60% lower. With such a small sample, it's very silly to make confident assertions about the relative risks here.

Finally, both articles are only talking about fire risks, not overall safety record. I would definitely bet that the Cybertruck has a significantly lower fatality rate per mile than a 1975 Pinto purely based on changes in vehicle safety testing and engineering since the 1970s.