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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.
No, cops would get rather annoyed if everyone called them just to tell them they hit something on the road way. He wasn't in an accident that involved another car and at the time he wasn't aware of how much damage had been done to his car. There was no reason to call the cops ever, only the fire department.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
^ If ever a missed opportunity for an error message....
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Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
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.
I can't believe they missed such a golden opportunity. The final warning should have been "Car will now Halt and Catch Fire".
Gas tanks have plagued automotive manufacturers as problematic for as long as cars have had them.
GM had sporadic issues with "saddle" fuel tanks mounted outboard of the frame rails of some of their pickup trucks. This got downplayed because Dateline couldn't properly reproduce the problems and ended up cheating to set them off, but the positioning got changed later.
Ford had several issues. Pintos had tanks mounted too-far aft, making them vulnerable to rear-end collisions. Ford also experimented with making the tank integral with the trunk floor, basically the trunk floor was also the top of the fuel tank itself, and collisions would rupture it. They further had problems with the Crown Victoria, when rear-ended with significant force, puncturing the tank.
All American automakers had trouble with tanks mounted with the fuel filler necks behind the license plates.
There have been incidents where debris on the road was kicked up so that it contacted the fuel tank underneath, rupturing it and causing a fire.
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. After all, a car could strike a concrete curb in a parking lot at high speed and high-center across it, or could be forced to take an evasive maneuver and strike something like a milemarker sign post and run that along under the car. These kinds of strikes shouldn't even particularly phase the car, let alone lead to its destruction.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Obviously you haven't looked under a car before. Most gas tanks are mounted under the rear seat and VERY exposed, having only a couple straps and..... a piece of sheet metal (for a heat and debris shield) to protect it. (tanks nowadays are mostly made of plastic as well, so the casing on a battery is probably stronger. the plastic is soft, and flexes, so that helps)
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.
What a know it all, arm chair commenter. Have you seen the overall model S safety and notice no one has any permanent injuries despite some crazy crashes? This is due to the regidity and strength of the skateboard battery.
You are quite good at using the word fuck, but that's all you know.
I've know two people had trucks catch fire in the last year or so.... A Chevy Silverado and a Ford F150. 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.... Where's the relentless news coverage on these incidents? Even better is the response from the companies, for letters stating it was not their fault.
Yes. Shit on the road.
All kinds of stuff happens and sometimes you don't have time or options to deal with it. So, it's a drive over and hope. Sucks, but there isn't too much we can do about the problem.
Here's a nice one:
It's a torrential rain kind of night. About 11:00 PM, on a rural highway, two lane, cars regularly passing in opposing lane. My brother in law was driving an old 70's Toyota Corolla. The engine in that thing was great, but the body was crapping out here and there. This was the mid 90's. Toyota has since beefed things up some, but their 70's era cars were awful thin in places. The Corolla was thin in the trunk.
This brother in law saw a few rust patches, but didn't think too much of it having driven some Chevy thing or other before. No worries. Well, he had a nice, big, heavy floor jack in the back of that Corolla because he lost the stock one. Besides, the floor jack could lift one end of the car in a pinch, which made tire rotation quicker. That, and a 4-way lug wrench, various cans of oil, etc... were all in this razor thin, rusted out trunk, just waiting to exit the car, which they did.
When it happened, he was moving about 60, nobody in front, headed to meet the rest of the family. Two or three vehicles were behind him, following close as people in my neck of the woods will often do. Out comes that jack. It probably weighed 25 pounds. He heard the clunk, and it actually wedged in a way that moved the rear of the car some, he saw sparks and then one of the lights behind him went out.
Now he's a dick, and just floored it. All he knows is that way too close tailgater got up close and very personal with that floor jack, and had to pull off the road. Some other cars in the other lane darted about and a few had pulled over that he could see in the rear mirror, while speeding away as quickly as he could.
When he arrived to tell the story, we opened the trunk, and he basically didn't have one anymore. All the stuff was gone, and the metal bits were bent this way and that along the edges. We think the trunk floor just dropped out and onto the road. The news featured the event and he worried about it for years. That jack took the first car right out! Bashed the drivers side light out, pierced the radiator, and ruined the drivers side tire before bouncing into traffic going the other direction where other fun 'n games proceeded to occur where it bounced into another one doing enough damage to the muffler and side panel to be ugly, and ended up pinned under a third where it ground to a stop.
Shit happens.
Probably that thing was not secured and just ended up on the road. So this guy is driving along, somebody changes lanes or something and there it is! He probably didn't have options. If he did, he would have not driven over it, unless it just dropped in such a way that left him no time.
Blogging because I can...
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
Actually, that's by design. If the battery pack catches fire, the fire is diverted AWAY from the passenger doors, so passengers may safely exit the vehicle. Unlike say, regular car fires which can flame up around and through the passenger cabin, potentially trapping the occupants.
The battery directs the fire to the front or the back of the vehicle and away from the sides. Sure there's less chance of your stuff int he frunk or trunk surviving, but you're still more likely to come out alive minus a few possessions.
It's also fairly well protected - besides the aluminum plate, the battery contains 16 sealed and isolated chambers that contain fire suppressant and coolant to keep one section from spreading into another.
The bigger question is three fires, and yet no passenger cabin intrusion of flame... a regular car on fire typically leaves nothing left of the passenger cabin.
-- Power windows
-- Power locks
-- Power seats
-- Air-conditioning
-- Automatic transmission
-- iPod dock
-- Quadrophonic smoke detectors
-- Asbestos seats
-- Sprinklers (interior/exterior)
-- Fire axe
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.)
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...
Unless Team Insurance can send somebody out and prove that the battery pack would have avoided thermal cascade if the driver had immediately stopped the engine (and that doing so is the driver's responsibility, in response to those error codes, rather than Tesla's responsibility to have the battery shut down harder, earlier), it probably won't help them much.
Discharging a battery excessively quickly can start the fire (especially if one of the cells was dodgy); but once one gets going, it doesn't much matter whether you stop the discharge or not, it'll burn.
In this situation, your brother in law committed what was potentially multiple felonies and certainly was a negligent motor vehicle operator for failing to secure his cargo (which would include the floor jack and contents of the trunk). It could even be considered a hit and run accident in the way you've described.
Seriously, this sounds like one heartless bastard that really needs to rethink his personal ethics.
I do agree that some people who tailgate often get karmic justice in terms of shit happening to them simply because they are not thinking about potential problems with the vehicle ahead of them. When I'm driving I try to imagine from time to time that a sinkhole or at least a large pothole has opened up to swallow the vehicle in front of me and wonder if I have time to react and avoid that disaster myself? I've also seen a whole bunch of stuff on a highway that has fallen out of vehicles.
I've even taken the time to pull over and if there was a safe way to remove the debris (like on a rural interstate with a lull in the traffic) I try to pull it off to the side of the highway. Even if I can't take it off the highway safely, I have tried to report the problem by dialing 9-1-1 on my cell phone where dispatchers will take note of the milepost and get a highway patrol or state police vehicle to check it out. It is amazing how much trash and stuff they pull off of highways.
Any debris impact severe enough to pierce the quarter-inch armor plate on the underside of the battery pack is more than enough to pierce an oil pan, transmission, fuel tank or floorboard of any other vehicle. That is a debilitating debris strike in any vehicle, not a "little tap." In any other vehicle this guy could have ended up with that trailer hitch piercing his leg instead.
That said, this is the second debris strike in as many months... maybe Tesla owners just aren't paying attention to the road?
=Smidge=
If Chevy Volts were bursting into flames, we'd be hearing about it. There's a whole swath of American politicians ready to pounce on anything negative regarding the Volt because, you know, Obama.
You mean like this earlier Slashdot Story? Or like this Volt that burned down the owner's garage and house?
It just takes a little searching in your favorite search engine to find that it has happened to a Volt as well, and in fact was worse.
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.
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.
Where is the emergency in dialing 911 for road debris? I suppose I could dial directory assistance and call the business line for the local police agency (assuming I even know what jurisdiction I am in) and try to resolve the issue that way, and I guess that would be the logical thing to do.
Then again, if there is a huge hunk of metal sitting on a highway that urgently needs to be removed, like say this particular 30 lb. or 50 lb. tow hitch mentioned in the OP or saying "dispatch, I just dropped my car's jack on the highway", that indeed would be an emergency to get a police officer to turn on his lights, throw up some orange cones, and spend the freaking 2-5 minutes that might just save somebody's life. Are you really sure that isn't considered an urgent emergency on a freeway? I'm sure most police officers wouldn't mind a little bit of prevention rather than spending the next couple of hours responding to somebody's severe injury or death.
Geez, what do you think?
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 >
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.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.