At the current rate of horrible fiery deaths, FuelArc projects the Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto’s 0.85. (In absolute terms, FuelArc found, 27 Pinto drivers died in fires, while five Cybertruck drivers have suffered the same fate, at least so far.)
And the answer is"What is the Poisson Distribution" Alex.
There is literally a distribution that describes the occurences of low probability events in large populations. It was developed to study deaths by horse kick in the Prussian army. So confidence intervals never come into it. You’re applying Stats for Communications Majors reasoning to an adult problem.
Well, the problem is, even if I take the single case where this one guy exploded himself with his truck and compare it to the Pinto data, the poisson distribution difference will probably be statistically significant, yet the measure would be absolutely useless from a real-world perspective, because it has nothing to do with the vehicle’s design.
I’d also argue that many of these events might not even be entirely occurring independently from each other (i.e., some of the key assumptions of Poisson are incorrect here) when people do all sorts of stupid shit with these rolling garbage cans like shooting at them, submerging them, etc. in a meme-like fashion for Tiktok views. So 4 events might very well be influenced by non-design-based, non-random human factors, which applied to other vehicles could generate similar results, and if the analysis were serious, they would have individually reviewed how these whopping 4 events happened, accounted for reporting bias towards EV fires (especially Tesla) and compared it to the F150 or the Ford Lightning as an analogous vehicle.
And I know the internet tends to conflate condescension with competence, but seriously, you should understand the above-listed things as a stats teacher.
edits for clarity
edit 2: also, in the times of the prussian army they did not have to account for stuff like people suddenly starting to pull the horses’ tails for social media views.