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Days After A Fiery Crash, a Tesla's Battery Keeps Reigniting (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Mercury News
Six days after a fiery crash on Highway 101 involving a Tesla Model X took the life of a 38-year-old San Mateo man, the car's high-voltage lithium-ion battery re-ignited while sitting in a tow yard, according to the Mountain View Fire Department... The battery reignited twice in the storage yard within a day of the accident and again six days later on March 29. Two weeks later, in an effort to avoid more fires, the NTSB and Tesla performed a battery draw down to fully de-energize it...
On the company website, Tesla wrote "the reason this crash was so severe is that the crash attenuator, a highway safety barrier which is designed to reduce the impact into a concrete lane divider, had either been removed or crushed in a prior accident without being replaced. We have never seen this level of damage to a Model X in any other crash"... Tesla also reported that the vehicle's autopilot function was active at the time of the crash...
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the Highway 101 crash and three other accidents also involving Teslas, including a fiery 2014 Model S crash Tuesday in Florida that killed two teenagers. Also under investigation: A Model S crashed into a fire truck near Culver City in January, and the driver reportedly said Autopilot was engaged at the time. And it is looking into a battery fire of a Model X that drove into a home's garage in Lake Forest in August.
Two hours after that story was published, a Tesla smashed into a Starbucks in Los Gatos, California.
On the company website, Tesla wrote "the reason this crash was so severe is that the crash attenuator, a highway safety barrier which is designed to reduce the impact into a concrete lane divider, had either been removed or crushed in a prior accident without being replaced. We have never seen this level of damage to a Model X in any other crash"... Tesla also reported that the vehicle's autopilot function was active at the time of the crash...
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the Highway 101 crash and three other accidents also involving Teslas, including a fiery 2014 Model S crash Tuesday in Florida that killed two teenagers. Also under investigation: A Model S crashed into a fire truck near Culver City in January, and the driver reportedly said Autopilot was engaged at the time. And it is looking into a battery fire of a Model X that drove into a home's garage in Lake Forest in August.
Two hours after that story was published, a Tesla smashed into a Starbucks in Los Gatos, California.
The desperate schmucks who've shorted Tesla would love nothing more than another headline but the implication here (that Li-ON is even less stable than some of us may have realized) affects Tesla only indirectly... and effects their [viable, prospective] competition equally.
Eyebrow raising but otherwise changing nothing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In any accident that hurts the integrity of the batteries, then they should be drained as standard operating procedure.
If a gas tank was leaking, then would they just let that go too?
I'm glad my non-electric car has a real park setting on the transmission. One where there is a physical cable attached to the selector that engages a pawl to lock the transmission.
Electric cars have those too. It's required by federal safety standards no matter the propulsion method.
And people "thought the car was in park" lots of times in ICE vehicles.
Can someone please provide a car analogy?
The battery catching fire is an interesting point. I'd be interested to know if the emergency responders initially followed the published guidelines for cooling the battery or if they stopped when they stopped seeing flames. Regardless, it's an interesting point and an important one for the future.
Regarding the rest of the OP's posting...yeah, 2 teens died in a Tesla in Florida while speeding 50-60 around a corner marked for 30 mph. Yes, a lady crashed her car into a Starbucks. Where are the headlines about some random kid who died in a pickup truck this weekend? I'll bet you $50 it happened. Or the old lady in her Ford Fiesta who ran into a parked car? I'll put $20 on that one. What, no national headlines on those ones? What gives? Or do we think miraculously owning a Tesla makes you immune to being a stupid/careless/human driver? I didn't know Musk was advertising that feature. Is Ford? Honda? Lexus?
Any energy storage system will have inherent danger, and the more concentrated it is, the worse the possible result. But you knew that.
As bad as battery fires are, they don't spread like a chemical fuel fire can and often does.
I am not very sore at the massive per-unit subsidies that Tesla's above-average wealthy customers are getting on cars
So not very sore that you described it using passive-aggressive terms. But yep, Tesla gets the same electric car tax credit that all the other battery electric vehicle car manufacturers can also take advantage of. Unless you are going to claim there is a special subsidy just for Tesla?
News flash: when the government wants something to happen, one lever they use is tax breaks. The government would like to see electric cars happen sooner, so they gave tax breaks. To everyone. Equally.
And yes, new technology is more expensive than older established technology, which in turn means that the initial customers might be more affluent. Not news.
NTSB is basically deputized to solve private sector problems at taxpayer expense. How much longer does Tesla and it's financiers get this free tax benefit?
NTSB is investigating because of the lithium ion batteries, the same battery technology used in every modern electric car. How much longer does GM (Chevy Bolt), Nissan (Leaf), VW (eGolf), Ford (Focus Electric), BMW (i3), etc. etc. get this free tax benefit?
NTSB has, over the years, spent quite a lot of time investigating gasoline car crashes. They've slowed down a lot because they've got a solid knowledge base.
So it's patently unreasonable for you to claim that this is somehow special treatment given Tesla. Tesla cars are the most popular electric cars right now, even though they are expensive; so there are crashes from time to time, just as with gasoline cars.
If the NTSB investigates a Nissan Leaf crash, will you rail against Nissan, or is Tesla just special?
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Someone give this guy a mod point. Seriously.
To expand...danheskett...the person bitching about the NTSB "solving private sector problems" on the taxpayer dime. You realize what you're complaining about is, literally, the government doing the job we pay them to do right? Are YOU going to hold a car manufacturer accountable for putting a dangerous product on the road? Were you personally going to pony up the cash to fly out to the crash site, check the forensics, go over the debris field, and make sure that what happened was a genuine accident and not the result of some guy cutting corners in the factory to improve his bottom line by 1%?
No? You weren't offering to do that? Gosh, I guess it's a good thing we all pay taxes and the NTSB does this stuff so that the rest of us have at least some slight reasonable reason to believe that manufacturers are making quality products. Yes, even Tesla...but also GM, Ford, Acura, Porsche, Kia, et al. They aren't doing those company's jobs for them. They are, quite literally, capable of shutting those companies down if they find a critical flaw in their product. That's not doing their job for them, that's keeping your disingenuous, passive aggressive, Neanderthal butt safe.
...and then hope and pray your house doesn't slam into a safety barrier at high speed while you're asleep at the wheel.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
Yes, but we will all benefit from the electric cars eventually. As the batteries get better and the prices come down, they'll be something that most people can afford to use. Unfortunately, getting to that point is rather expensive, hence the subsidies.
In the mean time, people in places that have clean power generation benefit from the reduced emissions from the electric cars being sold.
So where's the "Honda crashes into bus!" stories?
Right here
Where are the headlines about some random kid who died in a pickup truck this weekend?
Oh please! He didn't die in the pickup truck.
Or the old lady in her Ford Fiesta who ran into a parked car?
Apparently, not a lot of old ladies drive a Ford Fiesta... but when they do, it's epic. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
> For whatever reason people make this mistake all the time
In my Dodge, if I open the door while the car is stopped, it automatically goes into park.
Humans screw up all the time. Good systems are designed so that mistakes that happen "all the time" don't cause your car to drive through a Starbucks.
Well, let's see, I have had a car suffer complete electrical failure while driving it before. Because it had a mechanical linkage between the steering wheel and the front end, I just pulled over. Because the brakes were a simple hydraulic link, I was able to stop.
I also had a brake failure once. Because the emergency brake was a simple cable link between pedal and the brakes, I was able to stop safely.
Drive by wire would have been a problem in either event.
Not with the previous release of AP2. It filtered out stationary objects to avoid spurious detections of hazards that were actually on the edges of the road.
The latest version - ironically, right before the accident (Tesla updates have a slow rollout process, so the driver almost certainly hadn't gotten it yet) - no longer appears to filter out stationary objects.
The big question is: why are we still talking about this accident that happened months ago? 3300 people die per day in car accidents. There's virtually no news in any of them, but every time it's a Tesla (AP or not), it's huge news. Which creates a misleading perception, given that Teslas have such a low rate of fatalities per mile (a point that's on this site frequently used against Tesla in arguing that Autopilot doesn't actually make a driver safer - the argument is that the vehicles are physically safer to begin with, so you can't credit that to Autopilot).
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
There are 100 million ICE cars on the road in USA. And NTSB reports there are 500 vehicular fires that kill 100 people every day.
Since 1 on 800 vehicles on the road are Tesla, we should expect around 0.625 Tesla fire every day or about 18 fires a month or 60 Tesla fires in the first quarter of 2018.
Since every Tesla fire gets national news coverage, I would assume at most two fires happened in that period.
I would conclude Tesla prevented 58 vehicular fires in the first quarter of 2018.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Your simple mechanical systems aren't as foolproof as you think." No one said they are foolproof. The discussion here is that the system still works (somewhat) even with no electrical power. In addition, mechanical systems tend to fail slowly and give noticeable indications of problems well before actual failure. Electrical and software failures can be sudden, e.g. a connector fails (common) or a bug.