If there’s one thing Tesla owners love, it’s daydreaming about a time when their cars will ferry them from point A to point B without a single bit of driving in between. Unfortunately for us all, it seems those owners are doing that daydreaming behind the wheel as, according to a new study, they’re the worst drivers in the U.S. of A.
LendingTree, an insurer out of North Carolina, looked into insurance claims by brand for 2024 to see which automakers had the worst drivers. The insurer examined speeding tickets, citations, DUIs, and crashes, and found that all those factors added up to finger Tesla as the worst-driven brand.
Tesla had 36.94 incidents per 1,000 drivers, beating out Ram in second place with 33.92 and Subaru in third with 32.85. The same ranking held true for accident rates, though not for DUIs — of all brands, Pontiac won out there, presumably due to a preponderance of Pit Viper-clad mullet-haired dudes with Keystone Light in the cupholders of their Trans Ams. Among current automakers, though, Tesla came in second for drunk drivers after BMW.
LendingTree’s analysis specified certain types of citations to count towards the worst driver championships, but oddly didn’t specify whether it only accounted for at-fault collisions under the “accidents” section of the study. That makes it unclear whether Tesla drivers are actually the worst, or whether every other driver on the streets is whipped into a frothing, violent anti-Musk rage upon seeing a Cybertruck out and about. The frothing rage is a given, really, it’s just a matter of whether or not people act on it.
It’s interesting that two of the top three worst-driven automakers — Tesla and Subaru — make a lot of noise about how safe their vehicles are. One has to wonder whether these cars are driven poorly because drivers select cars based on advertised safety knowing they’ll wreck sometime or another. Maybe they trust their cars more, or, perhaps, the reasons are entirely divergent: Maybe Tesla owners really are just relying on “Full Self Driving,” and Subaru drivers are just distracted by all those dogs in the car.
