this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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In the western world, deaths from bananas to cyber trucks to rocket ships are tracked. And believe it or not for many of those things there is a threshold of deaths per month or year that is required before any safety concerns are invoked.
They have charts with actual numbers to decide on how many people need to get hurt before a stop sign at a street intersection gets installed. And how many deaths need to occur before those stop signs are upgraded to stop lights.
While I don't own a cyber truck or anything Tesla and never will. 5 deaths out of however many miles driven by the over 1/2 million cyber trucks that have been sold, is barely statistical noise.
*****Annual deaths from bananas is statistically insignificant. But strangely PubMed did have a German paper about a woman that evidently committed suicide by eating a very large number of bananas. Hyperkalemia is a real thing and there are people at high risk of it. But man, kidney failure is a very painful way to choose to die.
The one thing you are forgetting... Is that Tesla lobbies the regulatory agencies.
For another comparison, the cyber truck is 17 times more likely to burn you to death than the Ford Pinto, a car that is practically synonymous with fire.
They all lobby the regulatory agencies for the same things. Tesla ain't special there. Every auto manufacturer has formulas that they use to determine how many deaths cost them more than doing nothing does.
That is not how it works in the EU. The Cybertruck has never been street legal here, for a reason.
And that's fine that in the EU, Your roads, your choice.
Only 60,000 Cybertrucks have been sold. Not "half a million."
While the total number of deaths from fire may seem insignificant to you, it is a far greater death rate than major auto manufacturers usually tolerate.
In the 1970s, Ford had to recall the Pinto over 27 deaths out of 1.5 million units sold. That's 18 deaths per million units.
Cybertrucks are sitting at five known fire deaths per 60,000 units sold. That would be a ratio of 83 deaths per million units.
I see people make this point a lot but it's not about the number of deaths. It's about the manner in which they die. It's horrifying.
I won't argue with you over that. As an old retired medic, there are a great number of ways to die that are horrifying. And I've seen some of them.