Safety report compounds bad week for Tesla stock
In Tesla’s Model S, a crash could still smack the driver’s head against the steering wheel despite the car company’s effort to fix the problem, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The crash-test results compounded Tesla’s bad week. The automaker earlier had said it was running into production snags with its luxury Model X and Model S electric cars. And Wednesday, Volvo announced that starting in 2019, all its new cars would have electric motors, a decision that heralds more competition for Tesla.
Tesla’s stock closed at $308.83 on Thursday, down 5.6 percent for the day and down more than 14 percent for the week.
In the small overlap front test, which simulates the kind of crash in which the front driver’s-side corner of the car hits another vehicle, a pole or a tree, the safety belt in the Model S let the dummy’s torso move too far forward, the institute said Wednesday.
That movement let the dummy’s head “strike the steering wheel hard through the air bag,” it said.
This was the main reason the Model S received an “acceptable” rating for the small overlap front test. In all other crash-test categories, the Model S was rated “excellent.” But the headlights received a “poor” rating for “inadequate” visibility on curves.
Tesla pushed back against the report, assailing institute’s credibility.
“While IIHS and dozens of other private industry groups around the world have methods and motivations that suit their own subjective purposes, the most objective and accurate independent testing of vehicle safety is currently done by the U.S. government, which found Model S and Model X to be the two cars with the lowest probability of injury of any cars that it has ever tested, making them the safest cars in history,” a Tesla representative said in an email.
Tesla’s vehicles have scored well in tests conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, but IIHS has a different perspective.
“Our view is that to be considered a top-tier performer, a vehicle should earn the highest safety ratings across the board in IIHS tests as well as those conducted by the federal government,” Russ Radar, an IIHS executive, said in an email.