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Investigation

A Thousand Experts Just Named Your Car’s Best Safety Feature Its Biggest Threat

Rex Driverton • Clautomotive Desk
July 18, 2026

Brembo, the Italian company that makes brake pads, paid the Economist Group to survey a thousand transport specialists about what scares them most on modern roads. Thirty percent named driver-assistance technology misuse as the number-one safety risk. Two-thirds said automakers exaggerate what these systems can do.[1]

0.63 vs. 13.75
Tesla vs. Chevrolet: deaths per 100M VMT in FARS

Now run that alarm through the body count. In FARS data from 2014 through 2023, Tesla posts a fatality rate of 0.63 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled while Chevrolet sits at 13.75, a 22-to-1 gap.[2] Subaru, which made EyeSight standard across its lineup: 3.80. Kia, riding a fleet of mostly post-2015 models with forward collision avoidance: 3.77. Brands that bet hardest on the technology these experts distrust produce the lowest death rates in the country.

The comparison is unfair, and that unfairness is the point. Tesla has no vehicle older than about fourteen years; Chevrolet's fleet includes 1988 Suburbans that predate airbags. Fleet age dominates everything in FARS, and nobody can cleanly separate what ADAS contributes from the passive safety improvements in every car built after 2012.

50
Special NHTSA investigations into Tesla crashes since 2016

Meanwhile, NHTSA has opened roughly fifty special investigations into Tesla crashes involving driver-assistance systems since 2016, documenting about two dozen deaths.[3] On July 15, the NTSB confirmed a driver in Katy, Texas overrode Full Self-Driving at over 70 mph on a 30-mph street, killing a 76-year-old woman in her home.[4] Days earlier, Tesla recalled 363,000 vehicles because FSD might roll through stop signs.[5]

Both realities coexist. Tesla's fleet-wide rate of 0.63 means roughly 28 deaths per year across 3.7 million vehicles, and fifty investigations over a decade means five per year, already inside that 28. But those five generate congressional hearings and Reuters surveys, because a car driving itself into a house at highway speed produces a different public horror than a twenty-year-old Cavalier wrapping around a telephone pole at 2 a.m.

One disclosure: Brembo manufactures mechanical braking components, and commissioning a study whose headline finding is that digital driving aids are oversold is convenient for a company whose products are the analog alternative.

What this means for buyers: do not shop by brand reputation or survey headlines. Check the vehicle's specific IIHS rating and verify it includes standard forward collision warning with automatic braking, the single feature most consistently linked to lower crash rates.[6] Read the owner's manual on whatever your car calls its lane-keeping or adaptive cruise system. The experts are right that most drivers misunderstand the limits. They are wrong about what that ignorance produces at scale: not more death, but a more visible kind.

Sources & References

  1. Reuters, “Misuse of driver-assistance systems biggest risk to road safety, survey finds,” July 14, 2026. reuters.com
  2. NHTSA, Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), 2014–2023. nhtsa.gov
  3. NHTSA, “Investigations into Tesla crashes involving driver-assistance systems,” ongoing. nhtsa.gov
  4. Reuters, “Tesla driver accelerated into house in fatal Texas crash, NTSB says,” July 15, 2026. reuters.com
  5. NHTSA, Tesla FSD recall, 363,000 vehicles, July 2026. nhtsa.gov
  6. IIHS, “Front crash prevention ratings,” iihs.org

Source: NHTSA FARS 2014–2023 for brand-level fatality rates. Brand rates aggregate all models and model years for each manufacturer; fleet age is a dominant confounding variable and these rates should not be interpreted as isolating the effect of driver-assistance technology. Survey data from Economist Enterprise / Brembo, July 2026. See methodology for caveats.