Uzza
There is two cars, car A and car B. Each driven by 1000 drivers each year.
Car A: The drivers drive a total 10000 km each year, and 20 people get into one accident each, averaging one accident every 500 km.
Car B: The drivers drive a total 1000000 km each year, and 40 people get into one accident each, averaging one accident every 25000 km.
Which car is safer? According to this opinion piece it's car A. But anyone that has even surface knowledge about statistics would realize that it's car B.
It would take only 500 km in car A for someone to have gotten into an accident on average, while for Car B it would be 25000 km. Drivers of car A are therefore on average 50 times more likely to get into an accident. Statistically, if car A was driven as far as car B, every single driver would have had two accidents each.
Conclusion: It is impossible to reach the conclusion in the title given only accidents per total number of drivers. More data is needed.
They do cost more than commercial launches, but that is because they have extra requirements that commercial customers don't, and that adds a bunch to the total cost to fly those missions.
https://spacenews.com/40006spacex-says-requirements-not-mark...
The reason for that is the folding contraption. And the sunscreen. And the very delicate instruments. And the requirement to be extremely lightweight.
All those things combined is what led to the decades long development timeline, and the incredible cost. If you instead have 150 metric ton of payload capacity to orbit, you don't care that you could shave 100 grams of one component. Not even several metric tons of extra weight would be an issue, when you have so much spare capacity you could just add an extra 10-20 metric ton of fuel to compensate.
Starship allows a paradigm shift in spacecraft design where weight is no longer your most important target. Nor your second or even third. Instead you can use off the shelf components that might be twice the weight, but 1/10th the cost.
If JWST was designed today with Starship just around the corner, the final cost would have been a lot lower. Yes, the cost would probably still have been much higher than the launch cost, but it would probably have been a lot closer $1-2 billion than the $10 billion it costed in the end.
Starlink is not intended to replace terrestrial connectivity. It is intended to provide service to everyone on the planet that can not get terrestrial connectivity, and those areas that can never get terrestrial connections, like oceangoing vessels and airplanes.
But let's crunch some back of the envelope numbers. SpaceX currently are allowed to launch 7500 Gen2 Starlink satellites. A Falcon 9 can fit 22 of them in one launch, requiring ~341 launches. The satellites have a planned lifetime of 5 years, meaning the entire constellation would have to be replaced in that time frame. So costs then. Musk has given out $15 million as best case marginal cost for Falcon 9 back in 2020. But let's be conservative and say $25m per launch currently. That's $8525m in total for launches. The satellites themselves are estimated to cost between $200-300k each for the original v1, but the v2 probably costs a bit more, so let's say $500k each. That adds up to $3750m for the satellites.
So the totals then is $12275m over the span of 5 years, or ~$2.5 billion yearly. The subscription cost is currently $110, but it fluctuates depending on the capacity in an area, so let's just use $100 as a simple round number. Each subscriber would bring in $1200 a year in revenue, so that means SpaceX would need ~2.1 million subscribers to cover the cost of replacing their currently allowed 7500 Gen2 satellites. It doesn't include the SpaceX operated ground stations that connect to the rest of the internet, but they're probably a smaller part of their total costs. The user terminals are now being sold at a profit.
As of last month, SpaceX announced they had over 2 million subscribers, and reports from earlier this year indicated that they have passed the operational break even point for Starlink, which means my conservative numbers are much higher than the real numbers. There's also a lot of countries where it's not available yet, and given that it's a global system, the marginal cost for connecting a new country is very low, only requiring ground stations to be built.
So to conclude, yes, the numbers add up and they're in a good spot right now. Once they get Starship operational the numbers should change dramatically though, since launch costs are the main cost right now, and Starship would reduce that significantly.
Many models coming out now are on new dedicated EV platforms, so you'd really have to check them to see what connectivity features they might have.
Nothing about EVs require connectivity though, it's just Tesla that have caused a shift in direction in many other automakers.
The primary reason why all those Tesla cases lack those details, is that they're reported basically immediately when they happen, because all Teslas are connected to the mothership and report back when it happens.
The NHTSA page even explicitly points it out under the data limitations section, under "Incident Report Data May Be Incomplete or Unverified".
> This means that a reporting entity with access to vehicle telemetry may quickly become aware of an air bag deployment incident subject to the General Order, but it may not become aware of all circumstances related to the crash, such as surface conditions, whether all passengers were belted, or whether an injury occurred.
This is also the reason why Tesla are so overrepresented in the data. Almost no other automaker has connected cars, or are like the GM On-Star a subscription service that not everyone has.
All other reports have to come in manually though actual crash investigations, which can take time. Or not happen at all if nobody thinks those systems might have had been activated/relevant. For example, a car using driver assist technology getting t-boned by a manually driven car at an intersection will likely not raise any alarms about automated systems during crash investigations. But for Tesla they're reported, because they immediately know those cars were in a crash.
So in conclusion, as NHTSA has said, none of the data has been normalized, and lacks important contextual information to properly analyze it, and should thus not be used by itself to draw any conclusions.
https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/energy-consumption-electr...
Electric cars being heavier have an impact in that it causes more wear and tear on roads. But they're absolutely dwarfed by the wear semis cause. Even when the electricity comes entirely from coal, electric vehicles are more efficient than ICE vehicles, so every EV deployed reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
> and rockets
Rockets impact on emissions is a rounding error on the global scale. The number of launched would have to increase by 1000 times to start approaching the airline industry, and with the move to methane fueled rockets it's possible to synthesize the fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere using carbon free energy, creating a closed loop.
> Tesla should help the US build public transports
It doesn't work like that. You can't just say "let's build more public transport" and it will magically happen tomorrow. There are a ton of barriers to expanding many forms of public transport, primarily public funding, which they do not control. And when it comes to thing like rail, that's compounded even more by right of way. The fact of the matter is that the US is a car heavy society, and building EVs is the fastest way to reduce transport emissions without (ignoring incentives) directly having to rely on public funding.
As an added bonus, building up an EV production line allows you to relatively easily export them to other markets around the world. You can't export a rail line to another place.
Case in point, Case 312.1 is a pickup truck that ran a red light at an intersection and hit the Tesla, killing its driver, according to the archived new report. The stats on that page shows it as death in "TSLA+cycl / peds" column, even though there were no vulnerable road users involved.
Any reasonable individual would see that this has zero fault on the Tesla, but since it involves a Tesla and a death, it's included.
Involved in an accident does not mean the Tesla is at fault.