The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has criticized Tesla’s latest ad video where it positions its Model 3 as ‘the safest vehicle to have ever been tested by the NHTSA’. The organization has called upon Tesla to revoke the ad and never advertise the battery car like that again.
NHTSA has put the Model 3 to a series of crash tests last year and ended up awarding it 5 out of 5 maximum stars for safety. Nonetheless, the all-electric car manufacturer took liberty in interpreting this value, claiming that the Model 3 passengers had the lowest possible odds of sustaining injury in road accidents. The administration contradicted this by pointing out that it did not discriminate among cars with the same safety rating, considering them all to be equally safe.
This is not the first time Tesla and NHTSA clash over marketing-driven data interpretation. In 2013, the EV manufacturer advertised the overall safety rating of its Model S as ‘5.4’, despite it having received the same 5/5 stars from the organization.