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Man In Tesla Model S Fire Explains What Happened
An anonymous reader writes "The three recent Tesla fires have raised concerns with a lot of people. One person who isn't concerned, however, is Juris Shibayama, the man whose model S burned in Tennessee. He says: 'I would buy another one in a heartbeat.' From the article: 'Shibayama said that he struck a three-pronged trailer hitch in the middle lane of the interstate. He continued: "About 30-45 seconds later, there was a warning on the dashboard display saying, 'Car needs service. Car may not restart.' I continued to drive, hoping to get home. About one minute later, the message on the dashboard display read, 'Please pull over safely. Car is shutting down.'" He said he had time to remove his possessions, even though, he said: "About 5-10 seconds after getting out of the car, smoke started to come from the front underbody of the car."'"
... to include "Car is about to burst into flame"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
At least it didn't bluescreen and lock him in the car.
At least the car was upbeat and friendly about its impending doom!
Or is he going to buy a third Tesla after his first two caught fire?
Translation - when you get in a WRECK your car does odd things. I am happy this person came forward and said "had a wreckand the car even warned me to RUN!"
Good design tesla.
> One person who isn't concertinaed
Of course he wasn't concertinaed -- he ran over a hitch, he didn't biff a bridge abutment.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The guy got in an accident and figured he would just, you know, say screw it and drive home instead of stopping and reporting an accident?
THL phish sticks
Good job, lets of safety features worked as intended. I LOVE to see when these sort of active safety systems do their job.
Now move the fucking battery pack so this shit stops. 1/4" aluminum armor 'a good idea' and all, but only because you mounted the battery in a stupid fucking position. Treat it like the gas tank, since it too is the energy storage medium for the car and its most dangerous components. Gas tanks don't need 1/4" armor ... because they don't mount them where shit getting wedge under the car is going to penetrate them, neither should you.
Designing a new car from the ground up without all the old baggage of a 100 years of car building practices may seem like a great idea for efficiency, but its really not considering you're now going to RELEARN a BUNCH of shit that GM, Ford, Nissan, Mazda, Toyota and all the rest learned a long time ago.
Nothing Tesla is doing is new or groundbreaking, theres no reason for throwing the baby out in the bath water, which is what they've done.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Did he avoid having to listen to one?
"I feel much better now, Shibayama-san"
Once again the haters are eating crow.
Tesla is the REVOLUTION the driving public has been waiting for, and nothing can stop them now!
^ If ever a missed opportunity for an error message....
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
The man has some seriously low expectations of a car.
I can't believe they missed such a golden opportunity. The final warning should have been "Car will now Halt and Catch Fire".
concertinaed ????? What the HELL?
What exactly is a "three-pronged trailer hitch"? Google Images doesn't seem to have a clue, and it doesn't sound very functional. How does a trailer hitch with more than one "prong"/fulcrum do anything useful?
A pet peeve with cars is the stupid engine light that gives no clue what the problem is. I have no idea if it's some lower-priority thing like a polution sensor slightly out of spec or something where I need to stop immediately to avoid engine damage. (I know you can buy the code readers, but I don't carry one around in my car typically.)
So the Tesla, with all its sophistication, says 'Car needs service. Car may not restart.' WTF? They might as well replace it with an engine light to save money.
I do agree that 'Please pull over safely. Car is shutting down.' is a little better, but not much.
In spite of the warnings, the car still caught fire.
Doo-dee-doo-dee-dah! Skip-to-ma-loo-dee-doo!
The car caught on fire.
Try changing your mac address.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
... in that order.
While a fire isn't desirable, this sounds like a good example of how to do it right.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You are correct that Tesla needs to analyze why the batteries are being compromised from what should be survivable incidents, a car's batteries should be protected better to keep them from being damaged by even the most severe road debris.
Actually, the described scenario of striking a multi-headed trailer hitch is probably WORSE than all that you described. It must of acted like a huge caltrop. You can't design for 'everything' and keep the car light enough to be functional.
Concrete curb - Odds are at least one of the wheels are going to hit the curb as well, raising the vehicle and lowering the strike area, and standard ones probably don't stick up as high as the hitch did. Even if not, you likely have a deflecting implact, not a puncturing one.
Road sign - These are generally constructed of mild steel and aluminum, as the worst the post has to withstand is the weather on the sign. In an impact it's going to be forced down of course, but then the rest of the sign will act as a lifting/distributing force on the car.
Trailer hitch - Designed to be able to haul trailers weighing 5k pounds and up, the balls are solid hardened steel and the post is generally at least 1/2 inch thick, again of hardened steel. Given the described hitch was a multi-ball type, it's entirely possible/probable that the thing weighed more than the average stop sign/post(excepting concrete), much less a mile marker. It probably impacted the car in a armor-piercing fashion much like a pike against a calvary charge.
I don't read AC A human right
Now initializing self-destruct program in 30...29....28...27....
The driver has admitted to driving the car after an accident, ignoring all warnings until told that the car had a problem so big that it was going to stop ( on fire). I would be interested in seeing the insurance companies response this this...
-- Power windows
-- Power locks
-- Power seats
-- Air-conditioning
-- Automatic transmission
-- iPod dock
-- Quadrophonic smoke detectors
-- Asbestos seats
-- Sprinklers (interior/exterior)
-- Fire axe
Li batteries are known to explode/catch fire when under heavy use and high temperatures. Tesla is ahead of time with nice concept but battery technology isn't there yet.
He should have installed a firewall.
nosig today
Here comes good old times, except the blue screen you get fire..
I'm sure my Dodge would have told me the same thing.
Nah it wouldn't. Maybe a stupid check engine light and my scan tool is at home in my garage.
Consumer cars usually have either a metal or a glass-fiber-reinforced PVC tank hidden away in the the frame of the car, just above or behind the rear axle. The GFR tanks have flame retarders in the plastic and are easily as thick as 1/4th inch.Even after Ralph Nadar did his famous "unsafe at any speed" these tanks do get punctured and car fires do occur. Especially when someone gets rear ended, fires way too often start from short circuit under the hood of the rear vehicle, setting the gasoline from the split open tank of the front vehicle on fire. Metal tanks are usually made of thin steel plate, not aluminum and only mounted on cheap consumer cars with bad general safety ratings, or older cars that are usually very unsafe compared to new modern cars anyway.
Gas tanks need armor too to protect them from puncturing. They are just usually not located in a position where the chance that road debris will puncture them directly, but there are plenty of other scenarios where they still get punctured. not only that, gas tanks have thin, vulnerable fuel lines running along the bottom of your car to the front, while Tesla has the power lines shielded way more efficiently. It may not directly set your car ablaze if you cut a fuel line, but it will 50% chance stop your car immediately, or otherwise you won't be able to drive for more than 15 minutes or so before you have dumped all the fuel on the road. If for some reason the leaking fuel were to ignite, you'd be in a whole lot more trouble with that than you'd be with a punctured cell in a Tesla. Imagine the whole bottom of your car sprayed with fuel and set on fire, directing the flames onto your fuel tank with you sitting in the car driving along; without getting a warning until it gets really hot or you see the smoke or flames in your rear view mirror. The moment you stop, flames will be up on all sides of the car making you have to go through fire to get out of the car.
Apart from the fuel tanks getting punctured in accidents, fuel lines often break from the fuel pressure alone during regular driving. These fuel line leaks start under hood fires that can't be put out by the time people notice and stop the car on the road. Most modern cars have no or nearly no rubber fuel lines anymore, but older models have plenty of rubber hoses that dry out and deteriorate with age. Adding ethanol to gasoline has not helped this problem, since it accelerates the aging of these hoses. Many cars spontaneously burn out because of this on a daily basis.
Fuel powered cars have plenty of electric fires as well. Everyone you ask knows several cases that didn't even make the news of cars spontaneously bursting into flames in the driveway or while driving because of a short circuit. Some make the news if it was a slow news day or traffic was impeded because of the fire, but most just go by without any media attention whatsoever. This is not counting the numerous times something like this happens because people added accessories themselves, or some dimwit tried to jump someone elses car and shorted something out with a big fat jumper cable.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
In general, a solidly-on check engine light is a non-urgent item, usually emissions related. The first thing to do when you get one is make sure your gas cap is tight.
A flashing check engine light indicates a more serious problem, and you may or may not need to stop driving. The thing that'll really mess you up is loss of oil, but there's a separate oil light for that - if it comes on, STOP THE ENGINE.
fencepost
just a little off
" You know what stupid things they did to cause this? One was parked in the driveway outside his house the other was being driven down the interstate..."
And I bet they sued the f*** out of the car company for making an incompetent car. Because cars that explode on every little tap are a hollywood movie fiction and a Tesla fact.
Good opportunity to get around legacy hardware designed under circumstances that are often no longer relevant.
What's the saying? 'Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it'? What legacy hardware are you afraid they'll bolt onto an EV that's 'no longer relevant'?
While breaking from the past is a good idea, especially considering that the optimizations for a BEV are certainly different than for a GFV, I'd argue that there's still an awful lot to learn from the history of GFVs for operability, safety, security, and such. Take everything with a grain of salt, of course, but have traditional experts in the process of you designing the vehicle to point out stuff that was solved generations ago. Or perhaps problems that they have trouble with even today that an EV might be able to solve.
I don't read AC A human right
Sure, you'll pull loads slightly off center with such a hitch if you use the balls to either side, but not enough to make a big difference, apparently.
I've read that farmers will do this deliberately sometimes to bias their trailer to one side or another - keeping clear of traffic, for example.
I don't read AC A human right
every. single. Toyota. fire?? Oh yeah - those aren't "new tech" disrupting cash-flush oil barons that would prefer to kill electric cars (again).
/. become reddit?
After the integrity of the battery has been breached beyond possible containment, there should be a way to dump it while continue driving.
And enough reserve-power on-board to allow the vehicle to reach a safe distance before it explodes.
In regards to the technology, what do they use under-the-hood in the battery ..
It has the is_computer_on_fire() system call.
I used to have a classic 60's Porsche 911. They put the carburetors directly above the coil and distributor...
We used to say, if the car wasn't on fire, you're probably out of gas...
Of course, that was still safer than the auxiliary heat -- which sprayed burning gas directly into the hot air flow into the cabin... ensuring when you died in a horrific conflagration, at least the carbon monoxide had already dulled the pain.
...is that he's an idiot. Both for ignoring the car warnings and then wanting to purchase another faulty hunk of shit.
Warning: Your Car Is On Fire. Continued driving in this mode may affect your warranty.
Three is not 'a number of.....' except in the most hyperbolic sense of the phrase. Yes, its a number. No it is not an accurate description of the number of Tesla fires relative to any other car fire. The car itself is designed around the possibility of a battery breach-what more do people want? They built the car, designed failsafes around known possible risks that they could not engineer out. Guy walks out of burning car, that had the courtesy to warn him first. What more do people want?
If it's not broken, let's fix it till it is.
So I did a little math. I know, a bad habit, but I can't help myself.
In any case, I was curious as to the numbers behind the recent Tesla vehicle fires and how that compares to the rest of the vehicles on the road.
So last year 21,500* Tesla vehicles where sold. To date there have been 3 fires. That makes 21500/3 equals roughly 1 fire out of 7167 vehicles. That looks pretty bad, wow. Tesla vehicles must be terrible. Right?
For comparison, there were 194,000** vehicle fires between 2008 to 2010 or to oversimplify things 97,000 per year. And in 2008 there were roughly 256 million*** vehicles on the road.
256000000/97000 equals about 1 fire out every 2639 roadable automobiles. Doh!
It appears that it is almost three times as likely that any random vehicle on the road will catch fire than any random Tesla. That bears repeating. You are just about 3 times safer from dying by fire in a Tesla.
And yet another sensationalist story that the media is getting wrong.
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2013/11/05/tesla-up-9-as-production-hinders-growth/
** http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v13i11.pdf
***http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_11.html
Never sell cars to the Impossible Mission Force.
So I did a little math. I know, a bad habit, but I can't help myself.
In any case, I was curious as to the numbers behind the recent Tesla vehicle fires and how that compares to the rest of the vehicles on the road.
So last year 21,500* Tesla vehicles where sold. To date there have been 3 fires. That makes 21500/3 equals roughly 1 fire out of 7167 vehicles. That looks pretty bad, wow. Tesla vehicles must be terrible. Right?
For comparison, there were 194,000** vehicle fires between 2008 to 2010 or to oversimplify things 97,000 per year. And in 2008 there were roughly 256 million*** vehicles on the road.
256000000/97000 equals about 1 fire out every 2639 roadable automobiles. Doh!
It appears that it is almost three times as likely that any random vehicle on the road will catch fire than any random Tesla. That bears repeating. You are just about 3 times safer from dying by fire in a Tesla.
And yet another sensationalist story that the media is getting wrong.
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2013/11/05/tesla-up-9-as-production-hinders-growth/
** http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v13i11.pdf
***http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_11.html
cat sig >
As many have posted there are lots of fires with 'normal' cars. This was a particularly tragic accident where a car fire killed five women:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/mateo-hayward-bridge-limousine-fire-due-mechanical-problems-chp-article-1.1431349
Apparently the suspension failed and the car dragged low enough that the heat caused the gas tank to catch fire. Child locks helped make escape difficult and so five people were trapped and killed.
When you think of how dangerouse gasoline is, it makes the objections to electric cars or hydrogen powered calls seem silly.
In some states there aren't even vehicle inspections. Here in Florida, you can drive your jalopy around until a cop pulls you over (and writes you a $5 ticket to fix whatever issue is blatantly unroadworthy enough for a cop to notice) or it bursts into flames. You're comparing an awful lot of old, poorly maintained vehicles to brand spankin' new Teslas. For a $70,000 car, it should be a whole lot less likely than the average beater to go up in smoke after hitting some debris in the road.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Model S's lifeforce is running out!
navigation...
I've seen those signs as well. Still, having seen a number of them hit at least the ones in my area tend to not break off(wintertime, cars sliding into them is a semi-normal event), they still bend down, but the sign post can still be replaced with a wrench set, no need for working/replacing/repairing the concrete. Which is a couple OOMs easier, faster, and therefore cheaper.
I don't read AC A human right
Where do the ducks go?
... and become Peking Ducks
If I could program this thing, that is what I would do...
or possibly if it refuses to start after pulling over, "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
http://www.examiner.com/article/mr-bean-crash-details-emerge-car-caught-fire
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
1 fucking useful comment, everything else here is full retard bullshit.
What more do people want?
I would want the 'Please pull over safely. Car is shutting down.' part to happen *before* the fire.