Tesla has made a change to its Safety Score, releasing a new version 2.1 this week. While the formula itself has not changed, the company has updated the Late-Night driving metrics used in the calculation.
Tesla uses its Safety Score tool to help determine how safe a driver based on several real-time metrics, like Forward Collision Warnings, Hard Braking, Aggressive Turning, and more. The tool has been used to determine eligibility to become a Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta tester, at first requiring a perfect 100 Safety Score to have the software downloaded to your car.
More importantly though it is also used to determine monthly premiums for Tesla Insurance (except in California). In March last year the company released Safety Score version 2.0, introducing two new metrics, Excessive Speeding and Unbuckled Driving, but also updating their Late Night Driving metric, which had been controversial since its introduction in version 1.2 the year prior.
In version 2.0 Tesla updated the metric to take into account how much time you spent driving in each hour between 10pm and 4am, resulting in more of a negative impact on your Safety Score the later in the night you were driving.
Despite this change, there was still a lot of criticism that the 10pm start time for Late Night Driving was too early, resulting in customers paying higher premiums. Tesla has heard this feedback and pushed back the start time to 11pm with the release of version 2.1, according to the Safety Score page on Tesla’s website.
“Updated Late-Night Driving to be risk weighted based on driving from 11 PM – 4 AM (previously 10 PM to 4 AM). The impact of late-night driving on your Safety Score will depend on the proportion of time spent driving in each hour from 11 PM – 4 AM.”
Tesla says this is the only key change with the release of version 2.1. Unfortunately there has been no change to probably the most controversial metric, Forward Collision Warnings.
This metric is extremely sensitive, and can often be triggered when there is no actual risk of a collision. For the average driver this results in nothing more than an annoying warning sound in the car, but for drivers with Tesla Insurance it can lead to higher monthly premiums.
The sensitivity of the Forward Collision Warning metric has even led to a lawsuit. In 2022 an Illinois driver sued State National Insurance Co., claiming his insurance premiums are being improperly raised as a result of false warnings.
