This week, Telsla announced they’d received yet another great safety rating for the Model 3. This time the impressive safety review came from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) who named the Model 3, the 2019 Top Safety Pick (it’s highest award).
Model 3 met the criteria for this top rating, with IIHS sighting the car’s crashworthiness, occupant protection, crash avoidance, and headlight systems as all key metrics for the decision.
This builds on 5-star safety ratings from North America, Europe and Australia.
Electric cars already have a huge leg up when it comes to safety, thanks to the batteries being far safer than petrol or diesel and instead of a petrol tank, you have a battery pack that’s placed as low as possible to help bring the center of gravity way down, making rollovers almost impossible. When you layer on the software from Tesla, the traction and stability control systems, as well as emergency braking, all help to make this basically the safest car you can buy.
To commemorate the safety wins of the Model 3, German-based student and aspiring product designer Viv, has combined footage of multiple crash tests into one, artfully created video that is basically a great ad for the company.
Check out the video below.
I think the reason I love the video so much is that it reinforces why safety ratings matter. There are literally tens of thousands of people who die on the road every year. Leveraging Tesla Autopilot and soon FSD technologies, the risk of an accident full stop is dramatically reducing, but the chance of dying is extremely unlikely.
This highlights why its incredibly important that regulators work with companies like Tesla to find out how to enable the technology on our roads soon, rather than later.
More info at Tesla.