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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."'"
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
On a more serious note, you should read the actual post and not just the couple sentences.
Here's probably the most revealing item in terms of how safe the car is:
The firemen arrived promptly and applied water to the flames. They were about to pry open the doors, so I pressed my key button and the handles presented and everything worked even though the front of the car was on fire. No flames ever reached the cabin, and nothing inside was damaged. I was even able to get my papers and pens out of the glove compartment.
So, guy runs over hitch in the road doing 70mph, it damages the car, the car tells him to pull over, and even though it no longer accelerates it still steers and works 100% normally. Car starts smoking a few minutes later, so he sits around and watches it burn until the fire deparment shows up, and even while it's on fire it still works and doesn't even get enough heat into the passenger area to melt the cheap plastic pen in his glove box.
If it wasn't $100k, I'd buy one tomorrow. Shit, we just had a guy in my town catch his truck on fire (leaky fuel line they think) and he pulled over, had 2nd degree burns by the time he got out of the cab, and watched his truck burn to the ground within minutes.
And yet the driver not only kept driving after the impact, but then (after the second warning) had time to pull over, collect his things and calmly get out.
And after the fire, which was easily put out, he recovered his other possessions from the car, which were all unburnt because not only did the fire never breach the passenger compartment, the heat from the fire never reached it. Theoretically, he could have sat in the car the whole time. I've only seen one vehicle fuel fire, and even though the fire dept was there in a few minutes, there was nothing left afterwards but bare metal.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.