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Tesla Fires and Firestorms: Let's Breathe and Review Some Car Fire Math
cartechboy writes "There are about 150,000 vehicle fires reported every year in the U.S. — about 17 every hour, on average. But when that vehicle fire is a Tesla, the Internet notices. There have now been three fires among roughly 20,000 Tesla Model S electric cars on the road so far. The stock is down, the Feds are asking questions and the Internet is swimming in Tesla news. It may be time to check the facts and review some math (hint: we're looking at roughly one fire for every 33 million miles driven so far) and then breathe. Then look at what we know, what we don't know, and what we should know."
... catch fire more than Japanese or European cars. Its got nothing to do with fuel type. Its down to poor engineering.
Number of fires per vehicle model?
Always a pleasure to get a submission from you, Mr. Musk.
Your's sincerely,
the slashvertising dept.
It is not useful to simply compare the rate of vehicle fires. That is important, but it is only half of the question.
What would be useful would be to also compare the rate of non-Tesla car fires originating from the battery, with that of Teslas.
It would not be advantageous for Teslas to have 'essentially eliminated" the risk of fuel fires, if doing so also include drastically increasing the risk of battery fires.
How many ordinary cars would catch fire if they contained no gasoline? That would be the better comparison.
According to the US Bureau of Transportation,there are over 250 million cars on the road in the US. There are 150,000 fires in those vehicles a year __according to the OP__.
There are 20,000 Tesla cars, with 3 fires.
Relative risk = ( 3 / 20000 ) / ( 150000 / 250000000 ) = 0.00015 / 0.0006 = 0.25.
Get a Tesla, so as to avoid vehicle fires. Maybe? Depends on whether the reported stats are correct.
In all 3 cases, it seems like the fire was caused by severe damage to the car from an outside source rather than a fault in the car. In all 3 cases the car's design prevented injury to the driver from the fire rather than contributing to the fire. And, let's face it, if we investigated every conventional model of car that was involved in 3 fires in a single month, every single model would be under investigation continuously. So, the people panicking over this and getting rid of Tesla stock, and the people pointing to this to impugn Tesla, need to get a grip. There's other reasons not to like Tesla, but it's not because their cars are in any way unsafe (or at least nomore unsafe than ~2 tons of steel barreling along at between 80 and 110 feet per second carrying between 10 and 30 gallons of highly flammable fuel (which forms explosive vapors under normal environmental conditions) in a thin sheet-metal tank with no armor or other protection against penetration).
So well under 1% caught fire. (3 out of 20k is about .015%) Yes, we should apply math to this like we do with crime stats before acting irrational. Nope, it's news, so it's statistically irrelevant, which is why it's news. We should punish all Tesla owners and the company for the 3 that caught fire. That's what we do elsewhere *cough* gun control *cough*.
I was looking to purchase some TSLA, here is my opportunity.
The "all car fires" stat includes dropped cigarettes that smolder, cars intentionally set on fire, etc.
How many regular cars light on fire on the highway after running over a debris such as a hitch?
Also, how many do you want to have on fire? How many would ignite if there was a shield that would flex rather than puncture?
It is no surprise that the oil lobby is jumping on this. Even when in reality it is more dangerous to be in a car that runs on oil or gasoline than lion batteries. While batteries are not risk free, they are considerable lower risk than using oil and gasoline cars.
1. Stored energy is a hazard
2. Humans are fragile
3. Therefore create barriers between humans and stored energy.
Any self-powered vehicle with useful range needs a lot of stored energy. This can be in a form that drips and pours out of any opening in can find, like gasoline, or it can be chemical energy in a solid battery.
Tesla engineers implemented point 3 so well that the guy in Auburn opened the door and walked away from the uncontrolled release of energy happening in front of him.
Complete non-story, until they start catching fire spontaneously on the road like my neighbor's New Beetle.
You know, it is a good thing the NHTSA ( or whatever branch of the federal government ) is looking into these Tesla fires.
Electric vehicles are new ( again ), and regardless of Tesla supposedly superior design, or it's mathematically "fewer fires per mile" or whatever statistic someone wants to throw down on the table as proof of this or that, there is tremendous benefit in having qualified engineers investigate these fires.
They might find some design improvement, that makes them even safer, you know, like they do with every airplane crash ?
Should we trash Tesla for bad design ? No, not yet.
Should we defend Tesla and consider them beyond insvestigation ? Pfft, no.
Should we get a hard look at exactly what is happening in an attempt to make it stop ? You bet.
Carry on slashdotters, carry on.
The post has two completely irrelevant numbers: 1. fires "about 17 every hour" (why the rate of fires in the whole country important? Many cars -> many fires per hour). 2. "one fire for every 33 million miles" - useless number without providing comparable stats for gasoline cars, and normalizing to the car age, adjusting for causes of fire, etc. C'mon editors and writers, don't be lazy bums - there is enough of this stupid garbage in "mainstream media".
Tesla down, Bitcoin down, what's Slashdot going to push when they fold?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
-T
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Other than the owner having a weird, slightly dirty-sounding name, who cares about Tesla? Why does Slashdot masturbate furiously in its parents' basement about anything related to Tesla?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Very few, on the other hand there are quiet a few would catch fire when hit hard on the sides, where the gas tank is, which wouldn't happen with this Tesla Model.
The fact is these cars were only hit because the drivers were speeding too much and failed to avoid the collision, and in all cases the cars took considerable time to catch fire, warned the drivers in advance and the drivers escaped unscathed.
Here's the real math. If your car gets 35 miles per gallon and gas costs $3.50 per gallon, driving 200,000 miles costs $20,000.
IF YOU EVER EVEN CONSIDER BUYING A TESLA, YOU'RE MENTALLY RETARDED COMMUNIST SCUM
How many would ignite if there was a shield that would flex rather than puncture?
Flex where? If it's up against the battery, when it flexes it will compress the cells, causing exactly the kind of damage that causes fires...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The "all car fires" stat includes dropped cigarettes that smolder, cars intentionally set on fire, etc.
Exactly.
How many regular cars light on fire on the highway after running over a debris such as a hitch?
NFPA report. Same source as the other stats cited in the article, not mentionning the causes was a simple oversight, right ? I didn't check the full PDF reports yet.
So, three fires for Tesla vehicles, one of them caused by "collision or overturn", and the two other by... malfunction ?
There is also bias as "older vehicles were more likely to have a fire caused by mechanical or electrical failures.".
I'm surprised arson counts for "only" 8 percent of reported fires.
Anyway, Musk and the writer's stats are meaningless, especially the "no one's been killed" when we have 3 cases and the rate for gasoline vehicles is 0,1%.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Google solves everything!
>. Flex where? If it's up against the battery, when it flexes it will compress the cells, causing exactly the kind of damage that causes fires...
Intuitively, you'd think to make a car safer, you'd make it stronger. In fact, you reduce G forces by designing it to crush - crumple zones. How can the shielding or battery positioning be improved? I don't know, but I hope Tesla's engineers are asking those questions.
At Texas Transportation Institute (part of the agency I work for) they're still crash testing gas cars to figure out how safety can be improved. The same needs to be done with Tesla cars, that's all.
If the market is so stupid that it would devalue their stock, they should take advantage of it and buy some shares back. They know that fires are just blown out of proportion but media outlets that have nothing better to report on anyway.
" There are about 150,000 vehicle fires reported every year in the U.S. â" about 17 every hour, on average. But when that vehicle fire is a Tesla, the Internet notices "
What is the real intention behind the above quote?
Was the author getting any financial supprt from the Tesla car company ?
The piece is nothing but a naked attempt in fraudulently abusing the statistics to make Tesla cars look better than they really are.
True, there are over one hundreds thousand car fires per year, and that shouldn't even be any surprise, for they carry HIGHLY COMBUSTIBLE HYDRO-CARBON FUEL, - such as gasoline or diesel, - in them !
On the other hand, Tesla cars, being electrically powered, do NOT need gasoline, or do they??
Comparing the big number of hydrocarbon-powered vehicles which caught fire with the 3 cases of Tesla cars is, to put it very mildly, totally misleading !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Since the biggest factors in car fires (mechanical failure, electrical failure, being in another fire and arson) all are active not just when the car is moving but when it is still.
The number of fires expected for Teslas in collisions at this point in time is about 1.25. We're looking at 2 or 3 right now (depending on whether you count Mexico).
This is above average and thus a valid reason to investigate.
Some math:
99.7% of collisions do not result in fire. About 11M cars are in collisions per year in the US, out of 250M cars. So about 4.4% of cars are in collisions per year on the road and 0.0132% of cars will catch fire due to collisions in a year on the road.
Tesla has about 20,000 cars out there, for about 6 months (on average), or about 10,000 car-years so far on Teslas. You would expect thus 1.32 car fires so far due to collision.
We have 2 or 3 depending on whether you count the Mexico fire. There is a case for not counting it, since all the other stats I list are US-only.
Given that car fires of all types rise with the age of the car since the fire prevention mechanism age and become less effective, having 2 or 3 car fires due to collision in 10,000 car years is perhaps alarming.
Either way, despite what greencarreports says, this rate of collision fires seems high enough to warrant an investigation, even with the small sample size.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
the two other by... malfunction ?
Striking something hard enough to punch through a 1/4" steel plate is not called a "malfunction", it's called a car accident.
I drive a Ford Pinto. These fancy pants EV death traps need to be removed from the roads before somebody gets hurt.
Some car fires are caused not by accident or defect. Uncle burns leaves, later that night it snows. Cousin comes home in the dark and parks with tire over smouldering coals.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Lithium cells like to 'vent with flames' when overcharged. They burn like highway flares; I tried it. Good times, crack open an old laptop pack. Do all this outside!
So now we have many kilograms of stuff that can light up due to a charger defect. Do you park your Tesla in the garage? And plug in the charger? What could possibly go wrong?
Much less likely to be oil industry, and much more likely to be financial institutions shorting the stock.
The threat to oil industry is slow and decades away---to them the problem is access to high quality oil fields currently held by nations and capital costs for fracking.
By contrast a 2 week hype/whinge cycle is perfect for a hedge fund.
The "all car fires" stat would then also include Tesla cars in the cases where fires were due to cigarettes or intentionally. Even disrgarding that considering Teslas alone having burned vs these stats is unfair to Tesla cars; They still come out on top. I had a car fire after just parking it on the side of the road in autum -- there were leaves. I checked, and my gassoline tank is still on the bottom of my car, so what is your point about the debris bit, mate? Are you trying to leverage confirmation bias on purpose?
Had this happened to a mere handful of Toyotas or Hondas or Nissans, every politician would have been clamoring for somebody's head and lawyers would have been filing lawsuits right and left.
Sure, car fires aren't rare, but when they happen amongst so small a group of cars you have to take notice. What percent of Teslas are burnt toast now? I bet it's a higher percentage than burnt Nissans.
Got yer Citation right here!
Seems Citations had a little fire problem themselves, at least according to Jalopnik. Wiki does say they had shitty brakes and steering issues but no mention of fire.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say there.
I asked a couple of questions:
How many gas cars light on fire as opposed to being lit on fire?
How can electric cars be made safer?
It's not clear what you're trying to say, so tell me if I have this right:
You have no idea what the answer is to either question, but "Tesla comes out on top". Why? Because Tesla man! Fuck yeah Tesla motherfucker! Tesla kicks ass man!
Do I have that about right?
It won't matter that it's an isolated, rare, or user caused issue. I own a Pontiac Fiero, and although there have been 260 fires reported out of a total 370000 cars made, and even though about 75% of those were 1984 models in which the owner ran it out of oil, every time I drive mine, all I hear is "Woah buddy, careful. You may die in a horrible fiery death any second!" Works for me both ways though, as used models drop in price.. :)
The auto industry regularly uses claims of cars catching fire to take down their competition. Remember the Fiero? Almost everyone associates them with engine fires, when very few actually succumbed to the problem (which was a very rare case on just the first model year). The Fiero went down after 5 model years despite being an incredible piece of kit that was way ahead of its time, and having top notch safety ratings.
If this is their attack strategy on the Tesla, then Tesla willl need to do more than just defend themselves against the overblown myth. They need to develop ad campaigns centered around their incredible safety ratings, and spend every penny that the competition does again them. The Tesla needs to become known as a safety fortress, and not just another electric car.
I've personally frantically tried to waive down an interstate driver that had 10' flames running along the bottom of his car (he had no idea he was on fire because gas fires in the early stage are nearly smokeless). That driver barely survived, the car was almost fully engulfed before he could even stop. IIRC he has first degree burns to his legs. The car was a smouldering ember that was 95% burned out before the fire department even got there.
If you haven't seen a gas car burn you are either ignorant of what's going on around you, live in a small town or just got your license.
Out of these 150,000 vehicle fires, how many are less than, say, 3 years old?
On the other hand, ICEs and their gasoline tanks have been through much more real-world testing, many more iterations of safety refinement based on real world experience. Perhaps a more fair comparison is to look back to the 1920s and see how often new luxury cars from that era experienced fires.
Tesla is obviously aware of this problem and has a strong incentive to make their packs robust. Gas tanks in race cars have things like rubber bladders, honeycombs, and perhaps other things I've never heard of. I bet Tesla engineers are brainstorming on all kinds of ideas to keep fire isolated to single cells and/or suppress it once it starts in the pack.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I asked how many cars get lit on fire (arson, smoldering cigarettes, etc.) versus how many light themselves on fire.
You think I claimed cars can't burn. Only on Slashdot.
http://www.locomotivegeneral.com/generalparts/images/CowCatcher.jpg
68% of the electrical power in the USA is provided by fossil fuels. While it's true the oil industry might be afraid of their product being devalued by a large uptake in electric vehicles (petroleum represents a paltry 1% in fuel for electrical generation), coal and natural gas (frack, baby, frack) will pick up the slack. Unlike petroleum, which can fluctuate in price based on demand, an increase in peak demands for electricity (as in, some point in the future when everyone gets home from rush hour and plugs in their damn car) means more plants will need to be built and they have to be paid for, regardless of how much the load on the grid fluctuates. Hell, here in Florida, Duke energy is jacking up their rates just because they feel like it.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people here have raging hard-ons for Tesla, as if each one was personally assembled by Captain Planet himself. The sad fact is, our addiction to fossil fuels doesn't stop at the pump. The fact that lithium ion cells are an overall shitty way of storing electricity and they sometimes go up in flames, is just the icing on the cake (and the cake is a lie).
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
apparently the Tesla is the Concorde of the car world.
Roughly 21,500 Model S cars have been sold. Apple has sold over 500 million iOS devices.
If Apple's iOS devices were as likely to catch fire as Tesla's car, there would have been roughly 69,767 fires since Apple released the iPhone.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
have not got much or any time around the auto salvage business.
Burnt vehicles abound, many of recent vintage. The idea that Teslas represent a worse hazard than conventional vehicles can be dispelled by a walk through a salvage yard or dealer auction (which is where salvage yards get most of their inventory).
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
A car fire is a car fire, whether its caused by outside conditions or manufacturing/maintenance , and other cars are subjected to those same driving/road conditions.
How many people have had dead ipods/iphone because of a little bump/drop? What about hitting some road debris at 55mph or so? Punching holes through the case and into the battery? lol, such a silly comparison man. IPhones don't need seatbelts and airbags for a reason. They are fairly safe to own and operate.. even while intoxicated.
It is an interesting statistic though! It just made me laugh
I thought I might be the only one who realized this the way the internet reacted.
In the US, 56.49 billion potatoes are sold per year. If potatoes caught fire at the same rate, we would all be dead.
sic transit gloria mundi
No, the 187,500 highway car fires last year don't include cars in storage, cars abandoned and destroyed, etc., they include only highway incidents reported to the police. So the answer to "how many regular cars light on fire on the highway" is 187,500 last year.
Likely the details of how the accident played out could have been different. A chunk of metal coming up through the floorboard of a gas car would likely have killed passengers, but might not have hit the gas tank. In contrast, in the Tesla the chunk of metal made it through the quarter inch of plating but was stopped by the batteries, so the passengers made it out safely.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Then look at what we know, what we don't know, and what we should know.
Where have I heard that before... Fox News... Rings a bell... They talk a lot about things they don't know :)
Which is easy, especially if the author of TFA is too lazy to do any real research, then obviously, there's a lot the punk doesn't know...
It's all FUD - talking about arbitrary concerns without any substance to support claims, is FUD and very easy to do... tsk tsk, move along..
Which only seemed to affect the elderly, and juvenile males.
...seems to be as real as Rearden Metal, and to have found yet another target in Tesla after writing Segways to shreds.
but didn't find any that was specifically discussed. Disappointing article, much at stake so twitter.
A chunk of metal coming up through the floorboard of a gas car would likely have killed passengers,
What?
but might not have hit the gas tank.
What? The gas tank is on the bottom of the car, too. The gas car might not have hit the obstacle at all because the Tesla would have got there quicker and someone else might have moved the obstacle. Might-have-beens are zzz.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If this is the worst that could happen with a Tesla, sign me up! The idiots have sold the stock, so maybe it's time for me to move in and buy it while it's on the lower side. Elon has designed so many safety features with the existing design that no one has gotten hurt. Imagine what he will do with the next iterations.. You KNOW he's holed up somewhere with the design team so that the next new models will NOT have even this kind of problem. Batteries are inherently safer than gas. As you say, it has taken DECADES for the ICE vehicles to reduce the occurrence of severe fire related occurrences. Elon will do it within a couple of years.
Gas tanks can explode when hit with the right force. Lithium batteries sizzle, warn the driver to leave the car, and then rather slowly burn up. They don't explode. Any driver and their family would have time to escape the car, and I would rather be in a Tesla about to go on fire than a Camry any day.
Toyota's Killer Firmware
... a jury verdict found Toyota's ECU firmware defective, ... software defects uncovered by a plaintiff's expert witnesses ... Although Toyota had performed a stack analysis, Barr concluded the automaker had completely botched it. Toyota missed some of the calls made via pointer, missed stack usage by library and assembly functions (about 350 in total), and missed RTOS use during task switching. They also failed to perform run-time stack monitoring.'
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/29/208205/toyotas-killer-firmware
http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/vehicles/vehicle-fire-trends-and-patterns
In it, it cites 90 fires per billion miles driven. That works out to about 1 fire per 111.1 million miles, roughly 3x worse than what Tesla has experienced to this point. So yes, I do think it needs looking into, but at the same time, it's not drastically worse.
Anecdotally, I only know one person who has ever experienced a vehicle fire, and that one was spontaneous while driving.
When a new expensive electric vehicle catches fire, it is news. Maybe not stop-the-presses news, but news nonetheless.
Yup. Comes down to observer bias, just like nuclear energy. A nuke plant has an accident that results in a tiny leak of radioactive steam (resulting in exactly 0 deaths)? OH NOES!! THE WURST THING EVAR!!!!! But if a coal power plant spits out literally TONS of CO2, ash, soot (and even radioactive isotopes that were in the coal!), and that's a "Meh".
THere are two differences here:
Diff 1:
The punctured battery pack has all three built in, but they will stay put.
The fuel tank has fuel, but it can leak out.
Diff 2:
The battery pack covers a larger percentage of the car bottom.
So the odds of the object hitting something fire causing is more.
Aside from kevlar armoring of the pack, I'm not sure what they can do.
The pack needs to be low for a low CG.
As batteries get smaller and lighter, they can better protect the packs.
But we need a car market to get these.
If Ford had to meet the current car standards, we would never have had a car.
The NTSB could do something nanny or something intelligent. Hopefully the later.
Stepping back and looking at the overalll situation, it's a great car in a direction we eventually have to go.
When was the last time you heard of a gas powered car with a punctured fuel tank asking you to calmly pull over and get out?
I really hate to be the one to pose this question, but how many casualties are we willing to accept as a society for X in order to avoid Y? In the last decades, the answer in the US and much of the western world has been ZERO.
How many airplanes downed by terrorists can we tolerate before we strip any ounce of privacy and dignity from the travelers. Never mind that it's the safest way to travel even including 9/11 and all of its victims in the air and on the ground. The answer is NONE, bring on the department of fatherland security.
How many pedophiles peddling online child pornography are we going to accept, for the freedom not to be monitored 24/7 by an anonymous system that is designed to ultimately be a tool to instantly arrest or at least discredit ANYONE and ANY TIME. NONE, bring on the NSA.
How many school shootings are we going to tolerate for private persons having access to firearms that was granted by the constitution (please let's not demean the Founders by debating what the 2nd amendment intended in this thread), to engage in sport and have the means to defend themselves when law enforcement cannot (or will not). The answer is NONE.
So yes, if we are going to continue on our present course, the inevitable consequence will be self-driven cars with no option for manual control, made by 3-4 companies that are approved by the government to go a maximum of 25mph. The future is bright, ladies and gentlemen. Once we don't have any rights, have shut down all scientific research, and eliminated any ability to EARN wealth by work, rather than steal it, we will surely all be 100% safe.
> So the answer to "how many regular cars light on fire on the highway" is 187,500 last year.
You would think. If you read the reports, you find the term has a non-intutive meaning. NFPA says:
92% of vehicle fire deaths involved highway-type vehicles such as cars, trucks, buses, recreational vehicles, and motorcycles.
The term “highway vehicle fires” is used to describe the type of vehicle, not the location of the fire.
It goes on to say 8% of highway-vehicle fires are intentionally set and 5% are from exposure to some other fire such as a house fire.
I didn't read how many were unintentionally set. My brother unintentionally set the contents of my car on fire once.
History has proven repeatedly that the only thing that matters is shaping & controlling the message and swift and effective damage control. /. is full of technophiles who are willing to examine the numbers and make buying decisions accordingly. Joe Lunchbucket seeing "another Tesla on fire on the 6 o'clock news" isn't. "THEM ELECTRIC CARS CATCH FIRE!" is the only message that sticks.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
To me it's about whether or not any car would survive the circumstances; we've already established the drivers survived.
If one is a stock investor, money is made in the churn. The corporate-dominated media trumpets each failure and then investors can buy stock at a lower cost. Then they make money after it recovers. I wish I could buy a significant amount if the stock is down, eventually it will be like IBM and Xerox.
Five people have their iPhone screen crack for random reasons, and it's international news. 5,000 Razr Maxx crack their screens when charging due to a design flaw, and no one cares.