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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."
[citation needed]
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.
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).
You're welcome Mr. Exxon.
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.
... catch fire more than Japanese or European cars. Its got nothing to do with fuel type. Its down to poor engineering.
Or simply decades of relentless improvement.
The first automobile patent in the United States was granted to Oliver Evans in 1789. (google search)
The first gas powered car was invented by Karl Friedrich Benz around 1885 to 1886 in Germany....(google search)
Woops before gas power there was steam and electricity.
Still this is interesting and important if you are an engineer but
it is clear the industry is 'after' Tesla. The real threat to the auto industry
is the Tesla distribution model that has all the dealers in the US up in arms.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Nope, Italian cars (Ferrari, Lambo) are the top car for catching fire! I know because I heard it on Jalopnik!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
-T
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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
Ya know, I feel real bad for the folks at Tesla, I'd like to volunteer my help to them. I'm offering to test drive a fully equipped Tesla to work, every day just so that Tesla can get some hard evidence of how their cars hold up under I405 traffic conditions. I see one to two car on semi accidents a day, my commute would make an excellent test environment. I will also offer to bring a fire extinguisher just in case something unforeseen happens. I know that the Tesla folks would want to see the initial damage without other damage occurring.
The vehicle carries energy. It's pretty much irrelevant whether that energy is stored as gasoline or inside a huge battery -- whenever there is a large amount of energy around, there is the potential of shit igniting.
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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 "
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 !!
Most car fires are the result of defective or worn wiring. Gasoline catches fires as the result of a collision. Diesel generally won't catch fire since it's the same as home heating oil, which only burns when sprayed as an aerosol. When a new expensive electric vehicle catches fire, it is news. Maybe not stop-the-presses news, but news nonetheless.
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.
Was the author getting any financial supprt from the Tesla car company ?
Really, you're going with that? Who paid you to post that? (So sick of people claiming anyone with a different opinion must be paid to post. I'd be rich if I had a hundred bucks for every time I'm accused of being Paid by X, only to be accused of being paid by X's competitors on the next post, often in the same thread.). You've been around here long enough to know better.
What the fuel source is has nothing to do with the statistics at hand. Fires per mile traveled is as good a measure as any other.
The fact remains that every self automobile has a combustible substance on board. Some burn less than others. Comparing power sources for safety is a perfectly normal thing to do, and when you do it, electricity looks way safer than gasoline.
Why is that so hard for your to see?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The real threat to the auto industry is the Tesla distribution model that has all the dealers in the US up in arms.
Exactly.
Every dealer is gunning for Tesla, even while the big US automakers and the Japan automakers are secretly hoping Tesla can prove
this distribution model works. They would all secretly love to sell direct.
But dealers are going to point out every flaw with Tesla to everyone who will listen.
In the meantime The Volt, Leaf, and Tesla will probably all add Kevlar battery protection, thermal breaks between battery segments and go about their business just as Boeing did.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I think you've missed the point as I predicted others would. /. would. /.er is equipped to take in his mouthful, but I'm afraid he lost the mildly interested, the fanboys, the wannabees and the skimmers. Outside of /. his logic would be lost without an editor.
I can see the authors point, but I doubt that his target beyond
The average
Essentially "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 !!" is kind of his point, sideways. His fear is that the recently , highly scrutinized by media, Tesla will be unfairly characterized by its ratio of burning contrasted to the burning ratio of infernal combustion agony wagons. Therefore he would like to see a fair reporting of the situation in order to satisfy his fan-boy security blanket.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
" 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 ?
Well, what is your intention? Are you getting any financial support from the oil industry? while there is no evidence one way or the other, some people have been saying that Taco Cowboy is being paid by Exxon. Even more so, some people have been claiming that Taco Cowboy may even have secretly donated to the Obama campaign.
All of that just kidding, I have no reason to believe that you are anything but honest and upstanding.
So now that we have gotten the thinly veiled accusations of paid shilldom and nefarious scofflawism out of the way, what might be reasons?
The reason is, that just like any other form of non-standard transportation or energy, every non-perfect outcome is trotted out and displayed as the utter failure of the technology. A Tesla catches on fire, showing that we need to abandon the technology. Just as Germany is more successful with solar power, because Germany is sunnier than the USA. Fox News told me so.
At the very least, how many gasoline vehicle fires have been posted and argued on Slashdot as indicative of the utter failure of gasoline powered engines?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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"?
To a first approximation, the most dangerous thing under the hood of a gasoline or diesel powered car isn't the engine, it's the battery. It's fuel and oxidzer packed together in very close proximity.
Unlike fires, sudden uncommanded acceleration and crashing is not a common occurrence in cars.
Not unless the gas tank was moved to the front of the vehicle. And even then, if it didn't catch fire, it likely would have only leaked. The batteries actually create heat and catch fire.
I know people are scared of gas but gas cars actually have a few safety system built into them specifically because there were problems with fire in the past. This is no different so I do not understand why all the fanboyism trying to but but but everything. When gas cars went to electric fuel pumps, the fuel kept pumping with the key on and engine off so they put inertia sensors in them to cut the pumps if an impact was detected. There is also a circuit in most electronic fuel injected cars that will not allow the pump to run unless the motor is running. It measures the spark and if it is not present, outside of energizing when the key is first turned on, it will not pump the fuel. When we went to electronic fuel injection, the head pressure was at one point actually increased so a fuel line leak would cause the car to either stop or run so poorly the driver would pull over. The fuel tanks are designed to contain spillage in the vast majority of collisions and are tucked away so that it takes a serious impact to damage them. There are even anti siphon valves on the fuel line in order to prevent the fuel from flowing if a line is cut and and the car is off.
Most of these safety features were designed and implemented due to the small risk of fires over several dozen years. So we have primarily one manufacturer of EVs and it happens that there are some fires when specific problems happen. The solution is not to say, well, other cars can do it to, but to find a way to prevent it from happening or determine if it is such a rare position that it doesn't happen often. Maybe something as simple as replacing the aluminum shielding with a stronger composite material or perhaps steel and biting the weight disadvantage is the answer. Perhaps using rubber bushings in the plate in order to allow some of the impact energy to be displaced instead of all being absorbed is the answer but we will not know unless we understand the mechanisms causing the fires first.
I will repeat The investigations should not be seen as an attack but rather as a way to improve safety.
When a car randomly ignores the driver's controls and accelerates and kills people, that's a design flaw.
When a car is in a major accident, suffers severe damage, and the driver can pull over and get out safely, that's not an obvious design flaw. Any car will fail given sufficient damage, so the question is how the car handled the damage, and how the passengers came out. So far, the Tesla looks pretty good.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
When Toyota's had problems I didn't see an article on /. saying there are 30 million Toyotas on the road and only a few of them happen to randomly accelerate and crash and burn their occupants, so it's not such a big deal.
Nobody is suggesting tesla's catching fire is ok. Point is when you compare tesla's fire catching statistics to other cars, there is nothing remarkable about them. But i bet you no( or few) other cars happen to randomly accelerate and and crash in comparison to the toyotas.
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".
Most car fires are the result of defective or worn wiring. Gasoline catches fires as the result of a collision. Diesel generally won't catch fire since it's the same as home heating oil, which only burns when sprayed as an aerosol. When a new expensive electric vehicle catches fire, it is news.
I've witnessed two that happened for other reasons.
80s Chrysler with an engine block made of such poor steel that the valve cover bolts (which are under very little stress) pulled from the block, dripping oil down the back of the block onto the exhaust manifold catching the car on fire. The hood release cable was carefully placed so that it's casing melted, the hood couldn't be opened to extinguish the flames and the car was totaled.
Autozone sold a hose fitting for fuel line use that actually melted in gasoline.
Isn't there an armoured plate under the Tesla battery pack? Hitting a piece of metal at highway speeds might be dangerous in more immediately hazardous ways in another vehicle.
Holy shit, did you really just ignore the entire point the GP made in an extremely well thought-out post?
We shouldn't be asking, "are gas cars just as risky or more under the same conditions?" Maybe they are, but who the hell cares? The point is that even if every single other car out there would have killed all occupants inside and exploded taking out dozens of bystanders given the same accident while all the Model S did was catch on fire...there's still an opportunity here to see if Tesla can make improvements that would also prevent it from catching on fire.
I own a Model S, and I'm not worried about driving it. The thing isn't spontaneously combusting, it's catching on fire given very specific high-speed accident conditions where debris actually pierces through a quarter-inch plate and into the battery. Also, every owner has had ample time to get out of the car, and nobody has been hurt. It's an exceedingly safe car. That said, I don't see anything wrong with an investigation into the matter which would lead to further safety improvements. Maybe the answer is that they need a half-inch plate, I don't know. There is, however, no question that completely independent from the safety of other cars, we shouldn't ignore the opportunity to make any car safer than it is currently.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
That's a very rough approximation, and besides that, noone ever claimed that the engine was somehow dangerous to start with... A full tank of gas, even though it cannot ignite unless exposed to air (which isn't unlikely given a crash), stores way more energy than the battery of a gasoline car. An almost-empty tank of gas, however, doesn't have that much energy anymore, but will readily explode if somehow ignited.
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