Yesterday the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) awarded the Tesla Model Y a Top Safety Pick+ status, the highest possible accolade from the non-profit that crash tests vehicles.
On Wednesday, the Tesla Team shed some details on its Model Y award and reiterated the company’s ethos when it comes to safety.
Tesla says aside from the Model Y garnering a 5-star safety rating in 2020 from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the latest IIHS award has helped achieve its goal of making the compact crossover SUV “one of the safest vehicles available.”
In the spring of 2021, Tesla shifted its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in North America over to Tesla Vision, a camera-only based system for Autopilot, along with the company’s neural net processing system.
Tesla says the IIHS also looks at crash avoidance technologies and Tesla Vision was able to gain “superior” ratings—the highest possible–from the IIHS for both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian crash-avoidance tests.
“Model Y’s large front and rear crash structures are designed to crumple more efficiently than traditional vehicles, optimizing the deceleration during a crash event to minimize occupant injury risk. In these crash tests, Model Y achieved the highest possible score in each occupant injury criteria. Additionally, assessment of the safety cell – the rigid structure that surrounds the passenger compartment – returned top ratings for crashworthiness in every test conducted,” explained Tesla.
Like all of Tesla’s vehicles, the Model Y also has “energy-absorbing side sills that act as side-impact crumple zones, a fortified battery pack mounted low in the vehicle to reduce rollover risk and a metal body structure that can withstand many times the car’s weight,” to aid in safety.
“Safety isn’t just the starting point for every Tesla, it’s also a part of our iterative design process in which we introduce new features throughout a vehicle’s life via new safety hardware and over-the-air software updates,” concluded the company, linking to its recent video detailing how it continues to make its cars safer over time:
Elon Musk said on Wednesday, “Pure vision, especially when using explicit photon count, is much better than radar+vision, as the latter has too much ambiguity – when radar & vision disagree, it is not clear which one to believe.”
Pure vision, especially when using explicit photon count, is much better than radar+vision, as the latter has too much ambiguity – when radar & vision disagree, it is not clear which one to believe
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2021
