Advances in computing had made it so that small car companies could sometimes punch at the same weight as the giants of the industry. Years ago, automakers would have needed to make a fleet of cars for crash testing. Tesla could not afford to do that, and it didn’t have to. The third Roadster engineering prototype went to the same collision testing facility used by large automakers, giving Tesla access to top-of-the-line high-speed cameras and other imaging technology. Thousands of other tests, though, were done by a third party that specialized in computer simulations and saved Tesla from
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