How a “Fact-Checker” Helps Tesla Play the Same Statistical Shell Game That Let Ford Hide Pinto Deaths

In the 1970s, Ford tried to normalize Pinto fire deaths through statistics. Everyone was horrified. Today, we’re watching the same corporate playbook unfold with Tesla, yet this time they are running the play through supposed fact-checkers.

A recent Snopes article, under the guise of innocently examining a viral meme and not the actual deaths, provides masterclass in how to hide mounting safety concerns behind a wall of statistical manipulation.

Misleading Meme Compares Ford Pinto and Tesla Fire Fatality Statistics

The parallels from Snopes numbers game to Ford’s defense of the Pinto are chilling.

Here’s what should shock you: Tesla’s CEO screamed at reporters that his cars are “the safest on the road” and every death matters. Meanwhile, their death count from fires keeps climbing while they seem to be getting less safe. After fifty years of automotive safety advancement, Tesla isn’t just failing to demonstrate dramatically better safety than the Pinto – they’re racking up more deaths faster.

Let’s examine how Snopes is helping obscure this truth.

Look at other modern EVs like the Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt. Where are their mounting fire death tolls? They don’t exist. Because proper EV design CAN be safe. But instead of asking this obvious question, Snopes sets out a weird shell game with global fleet sizes and production numbers, as if somehow having more cars on the road makes each death more acceptable.

How many Boeing 737 are in the air? How many were made? Nobody really knows or cares when a 737 crashes. Yet when Tesla keeps getting called out as a death trap burning dozens of people alive, Snopes appears more than ready to recite production numbers as some kind of excuse.

The manipulation goes deeper. Snopes ironically attacks tesla-fire.com, a fact-check site that simply collects news reports about Tesla fires, implying some hidden agenda. Their crime? Making facts and thus patterns visible for proper understanding by gathering local news stories in one place. It’s the same way early Pinto deaths were initially dismissed as isolated incidents until journalists connected the dots.

But here’s where Snopes truly fails public safety: while questioning the motives of fact-checking safety trackers, they never once examine Tesla’s agenda in fighting against investigations, using NDAs after accidents, blaming drivers after crashes, or disbanding their PR department to avoid questions. Snopes is so skeptical of news reports, and then swallows biased corporate safety claims as wholesome and delicious.

Most dangerously, Snopes completely ignores an accelerating death count behind static numbers. Tesla fire deaths aren’t just continuing, they’re rapidly increasing. Arguably the local news reports reveal Tesla incidents rise as nearly 5X the production rate of Tesla. But you wouldn’t know that from Snopes’ analysis, which buries this crucial trend beneath its bizarrely strained comparisons to a 50-year-old car model.

We’ve seen this before. When Mother Jones investigated the Pinto, they were attacked as anti-business. Now Snopes suggests that modern safety journalism simply recording Tesla facts is somehow less legitimate than historical investigations. The difference? Ford was eventually held accountable. Tesla is apparently being coddled and shielded by supposedly investigative fact-checkers.

The truth is simple and stark: after fifty years of safety advancement, we shouldn’t be debating whether a modern vehicle is marginally safer than a Pinto. The fact is 27 deaths were far too many in the 1970s! There is no world where it should be acceptable for the “safest car on the road” boasting CEO to be clocking in nearly 100 fire deaths so far, expected to grow worse every year, and be let off the hook. Cars today should be dramatically, unquestionably safer, with death rates approaching zero, which is exactly what Tesla keeps insinuating in their marketing. Musk literally just said Tesla AI will have zero crashes in 2025 knowing full well that is a bald-faced lie.

Here he is January 9th, 2025 saying Tesla driverless could hit 10X safer than humans this year and then he pumps that to 100X and it “just won’t crash”… also this year!

Sound familiar? He boasted back in 2021 that Tesla driverless “now” was 10X less likely to crash than the average vehicle.

10X was a done deal in 2021, which means 10X maybe happens in 2025. Obviously 100X being soon after just seals that absurd take on safety. They are made up numbers by Tesla. He’s misleading investors and lying about the future. What’s the actual Tesla driverless crash trend you ask?

Worse than cars used for domestic terrorism.

It’s like promising in 2016 he’d colonize Mars by 2022 and then after being awarded billions of dollars, announcing in 2024 he was thinking more like 2028 would work… or later, with no guarantees about people making it there alive.

Who really counts anything properly anymore? How does he get away with it?

The answer is layers of protection – from captured regulators to compromised media to, yes, fact-checkers who seem more interested in statistical gymnastics than the mounting body count. When Snopes spends more time attacking a website that documents Tesla fires than questioning why those fires keep happening, they’re not just missing the story – they’re helping bury it.

The supposed fact-checker bizarrely helps normalize an increasing fire death toll with statistical sleight-of-hand.

This isn’t actually fact-checking. It’s corporate defense masquerading as analysis. And it’s making us all less safe by helping hide serious safety issues behind a veneer of statistical sophistication meant to bury the news about Tesla sending so many people to an early grave. When fact-checkers prioritize defending corporate reputations over exposing mounting safety concerns, their disinformation facilitates the problem they’re supposed to help solve.

The next time you see a fact-check that reframes real human death tolls into a spreadsheet of margins, dates, fleet sizes and production numbers, remember: we’ve seen this playbook before from Ford.

The only question is how many people will die before we stop falling for cars made unsafe at any speed.