U.S. safety agency disputes Tesla claim

WASHINGTON — The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is taking exception to Tesla Inc.’s characterization of the agency’s safety ratings.

On Sunday, Tesla Inc. released a lengthy blog post saying that it engineered the Model 3 to “be the safest car ever built” and that the federal agency’s tests show that it has “the lowest probability of injury of all cars the safety agency has ever tested.”

Tesla says the overall Vehicle Safety Score for Model 3 is the best such score of any vehicle in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s public records.

But in a statement Tuesday, the agency said that its crash tests combine into an overall safety rating and that it does not rank vehicles that score the same ratings.

“A 5-star rating is the highest safety rating a vehicle can achieve,” the agency said in the statement, which did not name Tesla. “NHTSA does not distinguish safety performance beyond that rating, thus there is no ‘safest’ vehicle among those vehicles achieving 5-star ratings.”

Tesla’s Model 3 received five-star ratings in frontal and side crash tests, rollover prevention and overall. The 2018 Ford Mustang, Honda Accord, Subaru Impreza and Legacy and Toyota Camry also scored five stars in those categories in the most recent batch of agency testing.