Comment Re:NHTSA pushed a 5 star rating (Score 1) 627
Or you could read the article and see that in the areas considered for the tests, many of the common safety tests wouldn't even work, they couldn't roll the car over with standard techniques, they couldn't crush the passenger compartment with a standard crusher, and they had a HUGE crumple zone.
Also, for the roof crush test the crushing machine broke before the roof did.
The Tesla Model S is an extremely well-engineered machine. It's expensive, yes, but in most respects it's simply superior to equivalently-priced luxury cars. I'm really looking forward to their next generation, which is intended to be priced more mid-market (probably in the 30s).
As the price comes down, I wouldn't expect these testing results to stay the same. The safety far exceeded the ratings by quite a bit and extremely exceeded minimums required. There is a cost to overengineering, which is likely to get trimmed when building down to a price.