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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."'"
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.
Why's the current location a big problem? The current location helps lower the Tesla's CG which is good in many other ways. For a "sports car" I'd say the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
These class of cars crash and burn all the time (some even split in two). Google if you don't believe me. Heck even other conventional cars crash and burn too- A friend's friends were burnt to death in a BMW after a crash - they were stuck and couldn't get out.
This Tesla model seems really safe in comparison. Maybe add some thermal sensors, have a "car about to burn" warning and we're good to go.
Too much information can be a bad thing. You need to communicate these situations in a simple manner so that they don't distract the driver too much.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The man has some seriously low expectations of a car.
For better or worse, by the standards of 'devices with more than a thousand pounds of Li-ion batteries right underneath the operator', responding to a massive puncture wound with a series of error messages and a controlled shutdown is pretty damn polite...
This doesn't necessarily mean you want to be the lucky driver of one; but I'm impressed that the system held off the worst of the failure cascade long enough for him to make it out alive, rather than just burning him into a grease spot and some mixed oxides right then and there. (I had the pleasure of one of Sony's defective battery packs back in the day, and after having to toss it, and the attached computer, off my lap in a hurry, I've never taken the term 'laptop' quite as literally. Those things go pretty fast, once they start.)
That being said, 1 in 6300 is a lot
That might be significant if it was statistically significant. One incident does not make it significant.
Now, if there were 10 in 63000, that would be significant, but one in 6300 is not.
In addition, this accident was not caused by a car malfunction, it was caused by an external event.