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Third Tesla Fire Means Feds To Begin Review
cartechboy writes "In early October, a Tesla caught on fire in Washington state — and that created a little bit of a stir. Then just before Halloween a second Tesla caught fire. Yesterday, a third Model S caught fire in Tennessee. With the third fire in the books, all happening in similar fashion, today federal investigators are saying they are going to take a look at the situation more closely. As electric car maker's stock shares continue to tumble, some are saying the fires aren't a big deal."
Model S fires are extremely photogenic, but as far as I can tell, all three of these fires involved debris (or firefighters) puncturing the battery shield and hitting the battery, rather than something spontaneous. I'm not an expert by any means, but I'd hazard a guess that the results would have been similar with a gasoline powered car.
Whats the rate of regular cars catching on fire vs. Teslas?
Anyone have any statistics handy?
Found my own answer: 21,500. From later in the same Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/uciliawang/2013/11/05/tesla-makes-record-delivery-of-model-s-promises-a-pioneering-approach-to-servicing-its-cars/
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Maybe he can get the Boeing engineers to help him figure it out.
In the UK there are only 15,000 car fires per year (discounting arson).
The important metric is not "car fires per year" but "car-fires-causing-serious-injury-or-death per mile(or km)-driven".
100% of internal combustion engines catch fire, somewhere within the car.
signature is pants
15000 fires / 28700000 gas cars =0.000523
3 fires / 21000 Teslas = 0.000143
The third accident link is nothing more than some incomprehensible Twitter gibberish rather than a real article, but for the first two fires, each one involved a serious, high speed collision, which in most gas cars probably would have resulted in injuries for the driver or worse. In both cases, the driver walked away even though the battery pack caught fire (which did not spread to the passenger compartment).
This is much ado about nothing.
I remember back around 1991 or so a friend of mine was looking out at the parking lot from our building at a burning car. It was over a half mile away and he said "some poor son of a bitch is going to have a bad day." About 30 minutes later the security police turned up looking for him, he was the poor son of a bitch. The electrical system on his Ford Bronco had caught fire and it burned to scrap in a few minutes. It turns out it wasn't an uncommon thing either, a lot of them did that. We had fun telling him his Bronco was really a Blazer.
The bad wiring, the large amount of flammable materials, and 100% O2 environment was obviously an exercise in bad judgement. But the inward hatch design itself, though dangerous in hindsight, was to originally used improve safety for modules landing in the ocean. IIRC an outward opening door design almost got one of the gemini pilots killed.
But that's besides the point. The government didn't build the Apollo 1 command module, that was contracted out.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Go to Youtube and watch the video of him taking a camera crew on a tour of SpaceX. He litterally walks through saying what components are and what their function is in the big picture. I doubt any other CEO or the head of NASA could do that. Best part is none of it is patented. So yeah, he probably knows more than you about hydrogen. Besides, you'd still have to get around the problem of hydrogen making steel brittle.
To be fair, they did test the flammability of the materials. They just didn't do it right... in a pressurized O2 environment. After the fire, they did the tests correctly, and to their horror, found several things to be "highly flammable". (the glue on the back of the massive amount of Velcro for one)
The inward opening hatch was to improve safety in space, where, under no circumstances do you want that door to have any way of accidentally opening.
As opposed to a country without a government agency to review poor product designs and force recalls in the interest of public safety?
You want small, decentralized government? History already shows us what a shit show that was.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I really don't understand why every fire in a Tesla car is so news worthy. According to the NFPA (http://www.nfpa.org/safety-information/for-consumers/vehicles) there were an average of 152,300 car fires between 2006 and 2010. That's the same as 417 per day, and about 17 car fires per hour.
Cars catch fire. There have been somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 Telsa Model S's on the road. (3/15000) * 100 = 0.02% failure rate.
Meanwhile there are about 250 million cars on the road in the US last I looked. (152300/250000000) * 100 = 0.06% failure rate for cars on average.
So even with there being 3 fires, they are below the average. Additionally, there have been zero injuries in the 3 fires so far.
So... why is this news?
This is true. If you eliminate all the nitrogen from the air what is left is about three pounds of oxygen. Trouble is, they didn't use three pounds. Normally they used five pounds on space flights but apparently it was normal to flush out nitrogen by overpressuring with O2 before launch.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe