New Update to Tesla Safety Score Eases Late-Night Driving Requirements

Tesla uses Safety Score to assess driving behavior and, based on that, estimate the likelihood of a future collision. The software analyzes several real-time metrics, including Forward Collision Warnings, Hard Braking, Aggressive Turning, Excessive Speeding, and others. Initially, the tool was used to determine eligibility for the FSD Beta program. Only those with a perfect 100 Safety Score were allowed to download and install FSD Beta software.Later, Tesla also started using Safety Score to determine monthly premiums for Tesla Insurance in all states where it’s available, except California. As you can imagine, people with lower safety scores will pay more for insurance. This is a powerful incentive to drive carefully, as bad driving behavior will literally cost you. However, not everybody was happy with the way Tesla assessed driving behavior.

Specifically, the Late-Night Driving metric has been controversial since it was introduced with the Safety Score 1.2 in November 2022. The reason was that Tesla considered late-night driving between 10 PM and 4 AM. This disregards crash statistics, which show that driving between 2 PM and 10 PM is much more dangerous. Tesla didn’t care that many people drive home from work after 10 PM or that Supercharger rates are lower in that interval.

Tesla made adjustments to the way it calculated the safety score with version 2.0, which launched last March. With this update, the software takes into account how much time you spend driving each hour between 10 PM and 4 AM. The later in the night you drive, the more it affects your Safety Score. However, people were still unsatisfied. Thankfully, Tesla heard them and is now rolling out a fix with version 2.1.

The most important change the new software update brought is delaying the Late-Night Driving interval by one hour, until 11 PM. According to the release notes on Tesla’s website, Late-Night Driving is now risk-weighted based on driving between 11 PM and 4 AM. As before, 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 to 4 AM. Late-Night Driving hours are weighted differently to better reflect the amount of risk associated with driving at those times. This means that driving before midnight would not affect your score as much as driving after 3 AM.

Although delaying the hour when Late-Night Driving begins is a welcome change, many Tesla owners would also like to see changes in how Forward Collision Warnings are assessed. These warnings would often trigger out of the blue even when there was no collision risk. When it happens, it’s more than just an annoying alert: it affects the Safety Score and the insurance costs. This led to a lawsuit in 2022 after one owner complained that false Forward Collision Warnings caused a significant rise in insurance premiums.