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Tesla is a young car company - yet they’re punching above their weight so easily. I’m aware of the safety benefits inherent in the skateboard-battery chassis de

Tesla is a young car company - yet they’re punching above their weight so easily. I’m aware of the safety benefits inherent in the skateboard-battery chassis design but that doesn’t account for all of the safety accolades they’ve received. Why aren’t the other automakers doing as well in the NHTSA tests as Tesla? Cynically I’d suppose the incumbents are heavily optimised to maximise shareholder value so vehicle safety might actually be reduced to maximise profit given expected liability from damages (Fight Club comes to mind) while Tesla is still idealistic and expends a certain amount of profitability for absolute safety. Is this really the case or is there a better explanation for it?

rusticpenn 8y ago
They are increasing their brand value by these safety ratings, As a new company, this increases the long term value for the shareholders.
Shivetya 8y ago
When you are breaking into an industry or trying to position yourself you need to hit above your weight. I remember when Volvo made their move, they went for the safety angle as well. Tesla has always been dogged by members of the industry and instead of turning to marketing speak Tesla turned to established and trusted entities to show their cars true value. Now it can be claimed by getting into the gritty details as they did in their blog they are entering the realm of marketing speak. (disclaimer, I own a 3). With regards to why aren't all other manufacturers doing as well, just glancing through the web site of the NHTSA I cannot figure out how they decide what to test. In their current list of vehicles to test I do not even see Tesla so I will assume manufacturers can submit cars independently of being requested by the NHTSA. Now when comparing cars at https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings we only get stars which four is pretty common in the price range but you can compare and find cars that have the same star rating. Volvo's tend to still get 5 stars across the board
- iamzozo 8y ago
  Here is a test report: https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2018/TESLA/MODEL%2525203/4%252520DR/RWD https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2018/TESLA/MODEL%2525203/4%252... As it wrotes, probability of injury, its beyond the stars rating. They provide technical reports on the site, which you can download. These are more detailed results, where injuries also measured and explained, like Head Injury Criterion. Just curious and checked other manufacturer, and see "worse" results. But also realized reading these documents that these tests are depend on many factors...
MrEfficiency 8y ago
.
- zwily 8y ago
  They are not selling for a loss. Analysts predict the $35k model will sell at a loss but all currently selling models generate a marginal profit.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  >When you give away cars for a loss, its easy. That's quite an illogical statement. 1) If they were giving it away, that would be normal to make a loss. Giving away has to be free, isn't it? 2) If that was easy, why aren't the profitable cars not safer? Tesla has far less money to spend (and to profit, in your view) on the Model 3 than their competitors. Also, the Model 3 is a mid-sized premium model: why aren't the competitors most high-end vehicles not safer? There's nothing easy to make the safest vehicles among all cars sold in the US, irrespective of loss and profit. 3) Will you review your comment after Tesla release its Q3 financial reports? Because if they are actually making a profit on the Model 3 while ramping up production, I'm curious to hear your opinion when Fremont is at 10K unit/week and the Shanghai factory starts producing Model 3 (by 2020).
syntaxing 8y ago
They can probably achieve this because they are a young company. "Generational" companies has a tendency to fall into a "best known practices" void. Usually these best practices have some sort of merit behind them. Either technically (to minimize risk or keep existing process) or economically (existing tooling or manufacturing plants). The red tape can be hard to break through even if you're an engineer that knows of a way to make the chassis safer.
- hef19898 8y ago
  If there is one thing western, read US, European, Japanese and Korean, car makers don't compromise it is safety. They might cheat (some of them are real frauds) on emissions. Safety on the other hand is simply to important and to thoroughly conzrolled for that. There is post on thus thread explainingvthe mechanical design side of things pretty well.
  - brisance 8y ago
    Are you unaware of the Takata airbag scandal?
    - hef19898 8y ago
      Counter point: Tesla's bursting to flames. ;-) Takata was a scandal, even more so as it was Japanese supplier. I just hope we don't use exceptions to the rule in general discussion now, are we?
      - mavhc 8y ago
        Counter point: Every car bursting into flames
      - danso 8y ago
        Yeah, but Takata was a pretty major "exception" -- it resulted in the biggest safety recall in American history Even though all of its other competitors gave up on using cheap ammonium nitrate because of its inherent instability, Takata pushed forward, as if they had some magical engineering solution. This decision required years of deliberate delusion and coverup and denial of evidence. It was not just some blunder that was tragically overlooked. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-02/sixty-million-car-bombs-inside-takata-s-air-bag-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-02/sixty-mil...
claydavisss 8y ago
But also by being later to the game, they have the benefit of seeing the scores of every other vehicle and ensuring they exceed in each dimension by some measurable quantity. Not much different than "world's fastest" claims...just find the current fastest car and exceed it by something measurable.
hwillis 8y ago
> I’m aware of the safety benefits inherent in the skateboard-battery chassis design but that doesn’t account for all of the safety accolades they’ve received. Why aren’t the other automakers doing as well in the NHTSA tests as Tesla? Factor #1 is the battery. It's far and above the biggest safety feature. Factor #2 is that nobody else makes electric cars as big as Tesla. The Model 3 is 9" longer than a Leaf and a full 21" longer than a Bolt. That means WAY more crumple zone -the crumple zone is the first thing to go in a small car, making room for legs- and that's the biggest safety difference between cars. I think you're also underestimating the impact of the battery. The center of mass makes it practically impossible to roll, a huge source of injuries and deaths. It's also incredibly resistant to pole and many vehicle intrusions, since those happen either on or just above the battery, which is extremely strong compared to normal cars. The battery also lets almost the entire front and back of a Tesla be used as a crumple zone. Nobody else is really doing this. The Bolt has the second best battery among EVs for sale currently, and it's still shaped and positioned pretty much like a gas tank. It blocks a lot of crumple zone. The engine in any normal car is totally incompressible and massively limits the crumpling- worse, the higher end, larger cars will still have correspondingly larger engines, limiting safety. They might have a foot or two of crumple distance, while the entire hood of a Tesla can absorb impact. Even the motor can snap up and back if needed. In a Tesla, you automatically combine 3x the shock absorption with an extremely strong safety cell and the strongest anti-rollover feature of any car. It's zero surprise they do incredibly well in crash tests.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  Ben Evans is good on the issues of "Does tesla have a real moat, or are they just first, and so will get steamrollered by incumbents when they catch up." He posits the question that what is it Tesla does differently that might be a moat - and your answer to the question indicates they might just have something So Evan's main argument seems to be, Tesla is a bit like Apple in that they make a highly restricted set of products, but all their component parts are hyper-specific to the product, meaning they go to town on integration - there are no factory line compromises to be made between product X and a batch of a thousand product Y tomorrow. Your answer suggests that using an existing factory line to build your electric cars seems a good idea, but then all you can do is replace the space where the fuel tank goes with the space where the battery goes. That means they lose out on a "free" safety upgrade of putting the battery in the middle of the car. So Tesla's approach - can it be mimicked by incumbents - sure - by those willing to throw away their existing factory capital and reinvest. And it does make the idea of "the org chart of the car company is seen in its dashboard" as even more important - if the ideal position of the battery is compromised by the current factory investment, what else in the way car companies are organised is sub-optimal in a new world?
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Safety doesn't scale (well it does, but it scales linearly, meaning it doesn't get much cheaper at scale). It might cost Tesla a grand or two per car for all the metal they throw at the safety problem. That's less than a quarter million per quarter for them. Trimming that fat looks a lot more attractive to a company like GM that's shipping a quarter million cars per quarter because not over building things is a multi-million quarterly savings for them
- ma2rten 8y ago
  You need to compare against cars in the same price class.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    The vehicles in higher price classes are built on the same platforms as their mass-market counterparts. An Audi is just a VW and a Cadillac is a GM. Adding reinforcement to the luxury version of a car but not the mass-market version is a PR mess waiting to happen so nobody in their right mind will do it.
    - hef19898 8y ago
      Size of the car, not brand. Sure an Audi A3 is disguised Golf, a VW Passat is disguised Audi A4. So the correcr comparison is Golf vs. A3 vs. similar sized car. You don't compare a VW Tuareg against a VW Polo for that very reason.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gcb0 8y ago
Every car was getting the top score until nhsta realized they were all "cheating". by cheating I mean going for the low hanging fruit: they all saw crash tests only doing frontal crashes and sideways, so they beefed up against those type of collisions. When NHTSA checked that the most fatal (but less common) crashes where off center, they started testing that way and all grades crashed (pun intended). and all makers had a hard time to improve because engine and engine bay designs made it very difficult, but that was the goal of the new test: go for the high hanging fruit for those car designs. the tesla battery chassis doesn't have the engine, so it is easier to make changes that will beef up their car in the very same way other makers did for full fontral collision before. basically they are " cheating" the same way makers "cheated" on the full fontral collision test before. it is very likely that other kind of crash tests, that are not even tested by anybody because internal combustion engine cars always did so well on those, are extremely fatal on teslas. but we will never know because nhsta just put teslas in the same test battery as any other car. we lack the 50+ year of continuous self improvement cycle the crash tests had with other designs so far.
- TwoBit 8y ago
  I highly doubt it's likely there are other possible tests that are "extremely fatal" only with Teslas.
  - farseer 8y ago
    Well that battery could and does catch fire during collisions, however rare that might be.
    - thebluehawk 8y ago
      True, and that never happens with cars with gasoline in the tanks. (/sarcasm)
      - hacker11235 8y ago
        To add substance: From the nhsta site (https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/documents/12848-lithiumionsafetyhybrids_101217-v3-tag.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/documents/12...) Observations on various aspects: * "Because the lower the flash point, the more hazardous the fire risk, flammable electrolyte solvents in Li-ion batteries are more or less as hazardous as conventional vehicular fuels." * "Because the narrower the flammability range, the less hazardous the fire risk, flammable electrolytic solvents in Li-ion batteries are about as hazardous as conventional vehicular fuels, and certainly less hazardous than hydrogen." * "Because the lower the minimum ignition temperature, the more hazardous the fire risk, flammable electrolytic solvents are not as hazardous as conventional vehicular fuels." * "Because the lower the minimum spark energy, the more hazardous the fire risk, flammable electrolytic solvents are probably about as hazardous as conventional vehicular fuels." * "Because the lower the maximum flame temperature the lower the exposure risk (skin burns) to fire, electrolytic solvents are expected to pose no more of a severe risk to burn injuries than conventional vehicular fuels, gasoline and diesel." * "Because of the probable similarity in the magnitude of the maximum flame temperatures, if the combustion of the electrolytic solvents were confined, the resulting overpressure that could build up would maximize at about the same levels as for the other flammable fuels, meaning that the burst damage that would result from Li-ion explosions would also be comparable to that from conventional vehicular fuels." * "The thermal energy expected to be released upon initiation and combustion of the electrolytic solvents would be less than that of gasoline and diesel fuel."
fipple 8y ago
LOL idealistic. Basically, if Tesla hasn’t made the absolute safest cars on the market, the auto industry would have sufficiently spread enough FUD about people’s kids burning up in battery fires.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I have a relative in the car industry here in the UK who keeps telling me that Teslas keep bursting into flames and there's some kind of massive cover-up. Surely if it were true we'd be hearing a lot more about it? They can't seem to cover-up their crazy CEO's antics or the autopilot issues, so how would they get away with this?
  - Latteland 8y ago
    Of course the auto industry incumbents would publicize any weakness in tesla that they can find. Tesla fire danger is lower than ice cars, search google and find many article with hard numbers. Any fire is terrible, but the number of ice cars with fires is surprisingly large.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  No amount of "but muh skateboard is hard to roll over" will chance the fact that all lithium batteries, provide fuel and an ignition source in one place whereas liquid fuels do not. If batteries weren't more volatile than gasoline we'd store them in thin sheet-metal or plastic enclosures (like we do with gasoline) instead of enclosures so substantial that it makes sense to use them as a structural member in the vehicle.
  - fipple 8y ago
    Ok, reconcile your incontrovertible fact with the incontrovertible fact that the flagship electric car company’s products are safer than their liquid fuel competitors.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
marcoperaza 8y ago
>Cynically I’d suppose the incumbents are heavily optimised to maximise shareholder value so vehicle safety might actually be reduced to maximise profit given expected liability from damages How else should we arrive at the optimal amount of safety? What moral formula, if not the averted costs of accidents, do you propose? In this world at least, resources are not unlimited. An ultra-safe car that cost a million dollars would not be very useful to many people. As for why Tesla would go beyond that, I can think of several reasons: it might be betting that its customers place a higher subjective value on the feeling of security, it might think that higher safety is important to fend off unfavorable press/regulation, etc. It could also be that the costs for Tesla to increase safety are lower than for other car companies for some reason (e.g. older car companies have already invested into older sub-optimal components). But these are all rational, self-interested reasons just like the avoidance of liability.
013a 8y ago
> yet they’re punching above their weight so easily. If you follow the news and especially Musk's twitter and interviews; there's nothing at all easy about what they're doing. The sweat and hours Tesla puts in to making their company successful is far beyond any of the other typical "corporate" car companies.
beerlord 8y ago
I would view it somewhat of another way - there is so much excess space in these Teslas, that the vehicle could be made smaller. Do we really need a frunk? What if the vehicle was made ~1m smaller instead? This is what they are doing in China, with LSEVs: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-giant-market-for-tiny-cars-1537538585 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-giant-market-for-tiny-ca...
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  I drive a Model X and I got it precisely because of the extra space :)
SEJeff 8y ago
Tesla has access to technology most auto companies simply don't is one way to look at it. Also, Elon doesn't seem to be willing to compromise on safety in the overall vehicle designs if at all possible. The crash testing from every tesla vehicle pretty much prove this. They're in a league of their own, quite literally. Their battery packs are using Inconel instead of steel. Inconel is a super-alloy generally used in aerospace applications, such as SpaceX's superdraco rocket engines. SpaceX was the first rocket company to use friction stir welding at massive scale to manufacture their rocket bodies and as a result, developed some novel methods to do it. They transferred this expertise to Tesla, which is one of the things that makes the Tesla vehicles safer. Their welds are simply stronger due to FSW techniques. That's not to mention less obvious things such as the expertise in aeronautics and wind tunnels from SpaceX helping Tesla design more efficient body styles, etc.

rusticpenn 8y ago

They are increasing their brand value by these safety ratings, As a new company, this increases the long term value for the shareholders.

Shivetya 8y ago

When you are breaking into an industry or trying to position yourself you need to hit above your weight. I remember when Volvo made their move, they went for the safety angle as well. Tesla has always been dogged by members of the industry and instead of turning to marketing speak Tesla turned to established and trusted entities to show their cars true value. Now it can be claimed by getting into the gritty details as they did in their blog they are entering the realm of marketing speak. (disclaimer, I own a 3). With regards to why aren't all other manufacturers doing as well, just glancing through the web site of the NHTSA I cannot figure out how they decide what to test. In their current list of vehicles to test I do not even see Tesla so I will assume manufacturers can submit cars independently of being requested by the NHTSA. Now when comparing cars at https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings we only get stars which four is pretty common in the price range but you can compare and find cars that have the same star rating. Volvo's tend to still get 5 stars across the board

iamzozo 8y ago
Here is a test report: https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2018/TESLA/MODEL%2525203/4%252520DR/RWD https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2018/TESLA/MODEL%2525203/4%252... As it wrotes, probability of injury, its beyond the stars rating. They provide technical reports on the site, which you can download. These are more detailed results, where injuries also measured and explained, like Head Injury Criterion. Just curious and checked other manufacturer, and see "worse" results. But also realized reading these documents that these tests are depend on many factors...

MrEfficiency 8y ago

zwily 8y ago
They are not selling for a loss. Analysts predict the $35k model will sell at a loss but all currently selling models generate a marginal profit.
rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
>When you give away cars for a loss, its easy. That's quite an illogical statement. 1) If they were giving it away, that would be normal to make a loss. Giving away has to be free, isn't it? 2) If that was easy, why aren't the profitable cars not safer? Tesla has far less money to spend (and to profit, in your view) on the Model 3 than their competitors. Also, the Model 3 is a mid-sized premium model: why aren't the competitors most high-end vehicles not safer? There's nothing easy to make the safest vehicles among all cars sold in the US, irrespective of loss and profit. 3) Will you review your comment after Tesla release its Q3 financial reports? Because if they are actually making a profit on the Model 3 while ramping up production, I'm curious to hear your opinion when Fremont is at 10K unit/week and the Shanghai factory starts producing Model 3 (by 2020).

syntaxing 8y ago

They can probably achieve this because they are a young company. "Generational" companies has a tendency to fall into a "best known practices" void. Usually these best practices have some sort of merit behind them. Either technically (to minimize risk or keep existing process) or economically (existing tooling or manufacturing plants). The red tape can be hard to break through even if you're an engineer that knows of a way to make the chassis safer.

hef19898 8y ago
If there is one thing western, read US, European, Japanese and Korean, car makers don't compromise it is safety. They might cheat (some of them are real frauds) on emissions. Safety on the other hand is simply to important and to thoroughly conzrolled for that. There is post on thus thread explainingvthe mechanical design side of things pretty well.
- brisance 8y ago
  Are you unaware of the Takata airbag scandal?
  - hef19898 8y ago
    Counter point: Tesla's bursting to flames. ;-) Takata was a scandal, even more so as it was Japanese supplier. I just hope we don't use exceptions to the rule in general discussion now, are we?
    - mavhc 8y ago
      Counter point: Every car bursting into flames
    - danso 8y ago
      Yeah, but Takata was a pretty major "exception" -- it resulted in the biggest safety recall in American history Even though all of its other competitors gave up on using cheap ammonium nitrate because of its inherent instability, Takata pushed forward, as if they had some magical engineering solution. This decision required years of deliberate delusion and coverup and denial of evidence. It was not just some blunder that was tragically overlooked. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-02/sixty-million-car-bombs-inside-takata-s-air-bag-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-02/sixty-mil...

claydavisss 8y ago

But also by being later to the game, they have the benefit of seeing the scores of every other vehicle and ensuring they exceed in each dimension by some measurable quantity. Not much different than "world's fastest" claims...just find the current fastest car and exceed it by something measurable.

hwillis 8y ago

> I’m aware of the safety benefits inherent in the skateboard-battery chassis design but that doesn’t account for all of the safety accolades they’ve received. Why aren’t the other automakers doing as well in the NHTSA tests as Tesla? Factor #1 is the battery. It's far and above the biggest safety feature. Factor #2 is that nobody else makes electric cars as big as Tesla. The Model 3 is 9" longer than a Leaf and a full 21" longer than a Bolt. That means WAY more crumple zone -the crumple zone is the first thing to go in a small car, making room for legs- and that's the biggest safety difference between cars. I think you're also underestimating the impact of the battery. The center of mass makes it practically impossible to roll, a huge source of injuries and deaths. It's also incredibly resistant to pole and many vehicle intrusions, since those happen either on or just above the battery, which is extremely strong compared to normal cars. The battery also lets almost the entire front and back of a Tesla be used as a crumple zone. Nobody else is really doing this. The Bolt has the second best battery among EVs for sale currently, and it's still shaped and positioned pretty much like a gas tank. It blocks a lot of crumple zone. The engine in any normal car is totally incompressible and massively limits the crumpling- worse, the higher end, larger cars will still have correspondingly larger engines, limiting safety. They might have a foot or two of crumple distance, while the entire hood of a Tesla can absorb impact. Even the motor can snap up and back if needed. In a Tesla, you automatically combine 3x the shock absorption with an extremely strong safety cell and the strongest anti-rollover feature of any car. It's zero surprise they do incredibly well in crash tests.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago
Ben Evans is good on the issues of "Does tesla have a real moat, or are they just first, and so will get steamrollered by incumbents when they catch up." He posits the question that what is it Tesla does differently that might be a moat - and your answer to the question indicates they might just have something So Evan's main argument seems to be, Tesla is a bit like Apple in that they make a highly restricted set of products, but all their component parts are hyper-specific to the product, meaning they go to town on integration - there are no factory line compromises to be made between product X and a batch of a thousand product Y tomorrow. Your answer suggests that using an existing factory line to build your electric cars seems a good idea, but then all you can do is replace the space where the fuel tank goes with the space where the battery goes. That means they lose out on a "free" safety upgrade of putting the battery in the middle of the car. So Tesla's approach - can it be mimicked by incumbents - sure - by those willing to throw away their existing factory capital and reinvest. And it does make the idea of "the org chart of the car company is seen in its dashboard" as even more important - if the ideal position of the battery is compromised by the current factory investment, what else in the way car companies are organised is sub-optimal in a new world?

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Safety doesn't scale (well it does, but it scales linearly, meaning it doesn't get much cheaper at scale). It might cost Tesla a grand or two per car for all the metal they throw at the safety problem. That's less than a quarter million per quarter for them. Trimming that fat looks a lot more attractive to a company like GM that's shipping a quarter million cars per quarter because not over building things is a multi-million quarterly savings for them

ma2rten 8y ago
You need to compare against cars in the same price class.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  The vehicles in higher price classes are built on the same platforms as their mass-market counterparts. An Audi is just a VW and a Cadillac is a GM. Adding reinforcement to the luxury version of a car but not the mass-market version is a PR mess waiting to happen so nobody in their right mind will do it.
  - hef19898 8y ago
    Size of the car, not brand. Sure an Audi A3 is disguised Golf, a VW Passat is disguised Audi A4. So the correcr comparison is Golf vs. A3 vs. similar sized car. You don't compare a VW Tuareg against a VW Polo for that very reason.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gcb0 8y ago

Every car was getting the top score until nhsta realized they were all "cheating". by cheating I mean going for the low hanging fruit: they all saw crash tests only doing frontal crashes and sideways, so they beefed up against those type of collisions. When NHTSA checked that the most fatal (but less common) crashes where off center, they started testing that way and all grades crashed (pun intended). and all makers had a hard time to improve because engine and engine bay designs made it very difficult, but that was the goal of the new test: go for the high hanging fruit for those car designs. the tesla battery chassis doesn't have the engine, so it is easier to make changes that will beef up their car in the very same way other makers did for full fontral collision before. basically they are " cheating" the same way makers "cheated" on the full fontral collision test before. it is very likely that other kind of crash tests, that are not even tested by anybody because internal combustion engine cars always did so well on those, are extremely fatal on teslas. but we will never know because nhsta just put teslas in the same test battery as any other car. we lack the 50+ year of continuous self improvement cycle the crash tests had with other designs so far.

TwoBit 8y ago
I highly doubt it's likely there are other possible tests that are "extremely fatal" only with Teslas.
- farseer 8y ago
  Well that battery could and does catch fire during collisions, however rare that might be.
  - thebluehawk 8y ago
    True, and that never happens with cars with gasoline in the tanks. (/sarcasm)
    - hacker11235 8y ago
      To add substance: From the nhsta site (https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/documents/12848-lithiumionsafetyhybrids_101217-v3-tag.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/documents/12...) Observations on various aspects: * "Because the lower the flash point, the more hazardous the fire risk, flammable electrolyte solvents in Li-ion batteries are more or less as hazardous as conventional vehicular fuels." * "Because the narrower the flammability range, the less hazardous the fire risk, flammable electrolytic solvents in Li-ion batteries are about as hazardous as conventional vehicular fuels, and certainly less hazardous than hydrogen." * "Because the lower the minimum ignition temperature, the more hazardous the fire risk, flammable electrolytic solvents are not as hazardous as conventional vehicular fuels." * "Because the lower the minimum spark energy, the more hazardous the fire risk, flammable electrolytic solvents are probably about as hazardous as conventional vehicular fuels." * "Because the lower the maximum flame temperature the lower the exposure risk (skin burns) to fire, electrolytic solvents are expected to pose no more of a severe risk to burn injuries than conventional vehicular fuels, gasoline and diesel." * "Because of the probable similarity in the magnitude of the maximum flame temperatures, if the combustion of the electrolytic solvents were confined, the resulting overpressure that could build up would maximize at about the same levels as for the other flammable fuels, meaning that the burst damage that would result from Li-ion explosions would also be comparable to that from conventional vehicular fuels." * "The thermal energy expected to be released upon initiation and combustion of the electrolytic solvents would be less than that of gasoline and diesel fuel."

fipple 8y ago

LOL idealistic. Basically, if Tesla hasn’t made the absolute safest cars on the market, the auto industry would have sufficiently spread enough FUD about people’s kids burning up in battery fires.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I have a relative in the car industry here in the UK who keeps telling me that Teslas keep bursting into flames and there's some kind of massive cover-up. Surely if it were true we'd be hearing a lot more about it? They can't seem to cover-up their crazy CEO's antics or the autopilot issues, so how would they get away with this?
- Latteland 8y ago
  Of course the auto industry incumbents would publicize any weakness in tesla that they can find. Tesla fire danger is lower than ice cars, search google and find many article with hard numbers. Any fire is terrible, but the number of ice cars with fires is surprisingly large.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
No amount of "but muh skateboard is hard to roll over" will chance the fact that all lithium batteries, provide fuel and an ignition source in one place whereas liquid fuels do not. If batteries weren't more volatile than gasoline we'd store them in thin sheet-metal or plastic enclosures (like we do with gasoline) instead of enclosures so substantial that it makes sense to use them as a structural member in the vehicle.
- fipple 8y ago
  Ok, reconcile your incontrovertible fact with the incontrovertible fact that the flagship electric car company’s products are safer than their liquid fuel competitors.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago

marcoperaza 8y ago

>Cynically I’d suppose the incumbents are heavily optimised to maximise shareholder value so vehicle safety might actually be reduced to maximise profit given expected liability from damages How else should we arrive at the optimal amount of safety? What moral formula, if not the averted costs of accidents, do you propose? In this world at least, resources are not unlimited. An ultra-safe car that cost a million dollars would not be very useful to many people. As for why Tesla would go beyond that, I can think of several reasons: it might be betting that its customers place a higher subjective value on the feeling of security, it might think that higher safety is important to fend off unfavorable press/regulation, etc. It could also be that the costs for Tesla to increase safety are lower than for other car companies for some reason (e.g. older car companies have already invested into older sub-optimal components). But these are all rational, self-interested reasons just like the avoidance of liability.

013a 8y ago

> yet they’re punching above their weight so easily. If you follow the news and especially Musk's twitter and interviews; there's nothing at all easy about what they're doing. The sweat and hours Tesla puts in to making their company successful is far beyond any of the other typical "corporate" car companies.

beerlord 8y ago

I would view it somewhat of another way - there is so much excess space in these Teslas, that the vehicle could be made smaller. Do we really need a frunk? What if the vehicle was made ~1m smaller instead? This is what they are doing in China, with LSEVs: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-giant-market-for-tiny-cars-1537538585 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-giant-market-for-tiny-ca...

DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
I drive a Model X and I got it precisely because of the extra space :)

SEJeff 8y ago

Tesla has access to technology most auto companies simply don't is one way to look at it. Also, Elon doesn't seem to be willing to compromise on safety in the overall vehicle designs if at all possible. The crash testing from every tesla vehicle pretty much prove this. They're in a league of their own, quite literally. Their battery packs are using Inconel instead of steel. Inconel is a super-alloy generally used in aerospace applications, such as SpaceX's superdraco rocket engines. SpaceX was the first rocket company to use friction stir welding at massive scale to manufacture their rocket bodies and as a result, developed some novel methods to do it. They transferred this expertise to Tesla, which is one of the things that makes the Tesla vehicles safer. Their welds are simply stronger due to FSW techniques. That's not to mention less obvious things such as the expertise in aeronautics and wind tunnels from SpaceX helping Tesla design more efficient body styles, etc.