I disagree.

Which other vehicles on the road actively steer your vehicle away from an imminent collision when it's safe to do so?

Tesla's blind spot monitoring doesn't just detect what's in your blind spot, like other vehicles, it also detects whether a vehicle is slowing down or accelerating into the "blind spot" adjacent to your vehicle.

Their autopilot or automated emergency braking doesn't just brake when a vehicle in front of your slams on it's brakes, it slows down when someone in front of that vehicle hit the brakes.

There's a lot of intelligent engineering there, and a lot of improvements that are pushing the industry to be safer and more responsible. There's a lot of negative press out there, but much of it is not based on fair statistics.

My Model 3 did exactly that this morning. I was in the act of changing lanes, expecting the car behind me in the target lane to either maintain speed or slow to avoid hitting me. Instead it sped up, my car alerted me, and as I glanced in the side view to see the car approaching, the steering wheel gently tugged me (us??) back into our lane, avoiding collision. I’ve never felt so grateful to an object before.

Similar situation happened to me few days ago, my Model3 brake for myself to avoid a collision

Whereas, i presume, in your previous non-Tesla cars you were regularly getting into pileups?

How reductive. Let's try looking at it as getting closer to accidents before managing to fix the issue. So now with this system, one-in-a-million odds of that type of accident might become one-in-ten-million odds.

My point, ill-made, is this is anecdotal data and therefore useless in evaluating anything.

To be better understood, you could try directly stating your point instead of making a snarky remark that requires interpretation. :) as far as anecdotes, that’s all I have to offer on this topic. Feel free to ignore them if they don’t help you in evaluating something.

Uhh, my Audi did exactly that. Blind spot monitoring was adaptive to the speed differential. My current car uses brake light detection to assist with braking. These are not features unique to Tesla.

A Tesla has a radar with 160m range, plus an entire camera vision system with something like 70TFLOPs of computing power. Comparing that to simple brake light detection is disingenuous. Did you car also autonomously steer away from the incoming vehicle?

> Their automated safety systems aren't anything special compared to what most manufactures offer.

When I'm trying to figure out which of two really vocal, opposed camps might be more right on some issue, I look for the really hyperbolic statements that are easily refuted but still repeated.

2016: A Tesla's Forward Collision Warning System warns the driver about an impending collision he can't even see yet and starts applying the brakes. https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/28/watch-teslas-autopilot-sys...

2016: A Tesla automatically alerts the driver and swerves to the right to avoid a collision. https://www.inverse.com/article/14393-tesla-autopilot-avoidi...

2018: A Tesla's automatic emergency braking system makes it the only car in an intersection that isn't hit by a someone running a red light. https://insideevs.com/news/342781/watch-this-tesla-model-3-s...

2019: A Tesla gets rear-ended and then swerves around the vehicle in front of it and pulls safely off to the right. https://electrek.co/2019/05/06/tesla-autopilot-maneuver-avoi...

2019: A Tesla avoids a stopped vehicle on a busy road in icy conditions with extremely poor visibility. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-automatic-emergency-...

There are so many different reports like this that searching for them is boring.

So which manufacturers do you have in mind when you say that "most" of them are offering comparable safety systems?

You'll find that indeed most manufacturers offer AEB, forward and rear collision avoidance, many of them offering side collision detection. Subaru, Volvo, Toyota, Audi, Mercedes, for ones I know for a fact. I'm more unsure as to why you think other manufacturers don't do these things.

Someone who hasn't bought a new car in the last couple of years probably wouldn't be aware of these features. Also for some reason car dealers, at least in the US where I've been buying cars recently, don't seem to highlight these features too much. Perhaps because they're not a way for the dealer to make more money. It can also be quite hard in my experience to get a straight story on exactly what the safety capabilities of a given car are. E.g. will it just warn of an impending collision or activate the brakes? Does it drive the steering system on lane departure or just warn? When buying a car recently for my new driver son to drive I had to pretty much try driving it into things to verify the features were implemented as expected and in one case (active steering on lane departure) I didn't know the car had the feature until after taking delivery.

I think a lot of car sales people are tech-averse and simply not interested in, or prepared for dealing with the faster consumer cycles of cars.

I recently did a test-drive and the guy maneuvered the car out of the dealer lot by driving backwards and looking out the rear window, completely ignoring the fantastic surround camera and sensor view that popped up on the huge display in the car... Great job selling that feature, buddy.

One reason is that other manufacturers are extremely conservative when it comes to the marketing of these capabilities, in comparison to Tesla who is overpromising a lot.

Another reason is that Teslas are "cool", and get a lot of press in non-automotive circles, which means that a lot of people think they were first with a lot of technology, which simply isn't true.

And a possible third reason is that quite a lot of tech people have been researching and toying with the idea of getting a Tesla, but those same people have never researched similar vehicles from other manufacturers, so they have no idea how they compare.

I had a 2014 Mercedes E-class, its self-driving capabilities was on-par with a 2014 Tesla. However, Tesla offers over-the-air updates of their vehicles, so existing Teslas got better, while my vehicle stayed the same, so that's a point they should have credit for and something they actually do better than most other manufacturers.

Individual reports are not data.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/advanced-driver-assistance

"study found that systems with forward collision warning and automatic braking cut rear-end crashes in half, while forward collision warning alone reduces them by 27 percent. The autobrake systems also greatly reduce rear-end crashes involving injury."