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Seven Teslas have caught fire in the last four days
- egberts1 4y agoMan, that was the most electrifying store by far.
- blakecaldwell 4y agoYeah, really shocking. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
- 11thEarlOfMar 4y agoIt's important to remember that Teslas are equipped with a secondary manual door handle. You are able to open the door even if there is no power in the vehicle.
- claaams 4y agoWhere is the secondary manual door handle?
- kemiller 4y agoIt’s right where you would naturally expect a handle actually. To the point that people new to the car use it by mistake. Not the best design tbh.
- kccqzy 4y agoBut why have two different ways of unlocking the door, one automatic and one manual? Why not just one control for this one operation?
- Animats 4y agoCoolness.
- incanus77 4y agoSounds a little hot to me.
- lambda_lord 4y agoThe automatic control lowers the window a few millimeters as the door opens to clear the trim. This design ensures a tight seal to eliminate wind noise. If you use the manual control, it won’t lower the window, which can cause damage. It’s meant for emergencies.
- comradesmith 4y agoMy Toyota 86 has a manual door handle, and it will also automatically lower the window a little too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alphabettsy 4y ago> If you use the manual control, it won’t lower the window, which can cause damage. On a Tesla. Other cars, mostly with similar frameless windows, have this same functionality and have had it for at least the last 15 years and they do so with mechanical releases.
- xxs 4y agoThere is absolutely to reason why a purely mechanical solution would be unable to lower the window. Heck, they can use the same engine/latch that's controlled electronically when using the manual handle.
- stickfigure 4y agoA friend of mine with a model Y explained it to me like this: When "correctly" opening the door (electronically), the car lowers the window slightly first. This causes less wear and tear on the seals. Honestly, the car has too many mechanical actuators for my taste. Door handles don't need to pop in and out, they're just handles. Every one of those motors will go bad someday.
- ahahahahah 4y agoYes, it is common for cars with frameless windows to have that behavior of rolling down the window when opening the door. Normally it doesn't require two different mechanisms of opening the door. Also, the normal design for it doesn't trap backseat passengers in burning cars.
- bouke 4y agoLooking at the picture, the release design [0] is unfamiliar to me. Maybe it is a common design for US brands? I haven’t seen such a design on any EU car that I’ve been in. Over here they look like this [1]. [0]: https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/pNrXP/s3/tesla-model-3-manual-door-open.jpg https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/pNrXP/s3/tesla-model-3-man... [1]: http://www.rssportscars.com/photos/cars/2015-bmw-m4-m-performance-parts/m4-performance-parts-18-door-m.jpg http://www.rssportscars.com/photos/cars/2015-bmw-m4-m-perfor...
- pokeymcsnatch 4y agoI've seen similar mechanisms here in the US but usually they're much bigger. Like you can curl all your fingers around it easily, and typically not blocked off like that. Most common is your [1] though.
- HomeGear 4y agoUS resident here. I’ve never seen a handle like [0]. Every car I’ve been in has handles like [1]. I don’t know if I’d be able to get out of [0] in the event of an emergency without being made aware of it prior.
- ahahahahah 4y agoIf I'm in the back seat of a Tesla Model 3, I'd expect the handle to be somewhere on the door next to me. I'm really surprised that you would expect to have to crawl over the seats into the front to find the release.
- cortesoft 4y agoNot on the rear doors of the Model X. I just checked, there is no internal mechanical handle.
- MandieD 4y agoHow is a two year old strapped into a car seat supposed to manage that?
- KennyBlanken 4y agoNot in the rear seats, they don't.
- porphyra 4y agoThe Model S has one for the rear seats, but the Model 3 doesn't.
- ahahahahah 4y agoAnd while the model x technically has one for the rear seats, you have to literally remove the speaker grille and pull a cable behind it.
- kemiller 4y agoYes they do.
- United857 4y agoWhat's the rate of ICE car fires in comparison?
- typon 4y agoWould also be interesting to see the rate of car fires in non-Tesla EVs. It's probably confirmation bias but I have not heard of a car like the Audi E-Tron catching fire.
- MrRiddle 4y agoYou would need to make that a serious research, people are throwing some stats around like it means something. What’s the severity of the fire is most obvious thing that can’t be easily measured. EV cars tend to burn down completely, while ICE cars do not.
- mdorazio 4y agoThese kinds of titles bother me because it's never clear if that's actually a lot or not. I did some basic research and it looks like there are about 180,000 car fires per year in the US on average, out of about 275 million registered vehicles. Or about 0.6 fires per 1000 cars. According to Motortrend, there are around 250,000 Teslas registered in the US. The table on this site lists 96 Tesla fires. Or about 0.4 fires per 1000 cars. So, your Tesla is actually less likely to catch on fire than a regular ICE car. It's just more likely to do so while parked in comparison to an ICE car that's more likely to do so due to bad/no maintenance.
- foobar1962 4y agoMany of those ICE registered vehicles are 10 or more years old. A better comparison may be to limit the comparison to vehicles of the same age as the oldest Tesla.
- cute_boi 4y agoAre older vehicles likely to get fire?
- xxs 4y agopoor maintenance would be the most common reason, e.g a lose hose. Then you have to compare the class of the vehicles, Tesla ones are likely to be the more expensive ones.
- fingerlocks 4y agoYes, especially if they have old rubber fuel hoses (Volkswagen).
- tobijkl 4y agoMost of the car fires I have heard of are caused by incorrectly installed auxiliary components due to incorrect fuses and unsuitable cable diameters. This is a phenomenon that probably does not affect Tesla at all.
- 4y ago
- kjksf 4y agoPer Tesla stats from https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2021-tesla-impact-report.pdf https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2021-tesla-impact-report.pdf Average US car fires: 53 per billion of miles Tesla: 5 per billion of miles That's 10x less. Just putting things in context.
- ahahahahah 4y agoAverage age of car on the road: 12.2 years Average age of tesla on the road: 1.8 years Just putting things in context.
- jjcon 4y agoI'm not sure the age of a car has all that much to do with its ability to catch fire unless we are talking cars from before the 70s (when the flame retardant standards were set). Certainly not a 10x change in the past couple decades. Edit: This study suggests 12 year old cars have at most 2x the relative risk of fire as 2 year old cars. That would still suggest Teslas are still 5x safer when adjusting for age. https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st
- kamranjon 4y agoOlder cars have higher probability of lacking proper maintenance but also we are both just guessing and not providing actual evidence for our assumptions.
- ac29 4y agoIn this data from 2017, fires peaked in cars around 15 years old: https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-statistics-and-reports/US-Fire-Problem/osvehiclefires.pdf https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st... (see pg 7)
- jjcon 4y agoSo we're talking maybe a maximum 2x increase due to the age factor based on that study. That would still mean Teslas are 5x less likely to cause a fire when adjusting.
- notyourwork 4y ago
- vorpalhex 4y agoOddly enough, I was by a prius that had caught fire earlier today. I feel like the reporting of these incidents has intensified, but not sure if the underlying metrics have. I remember a bad gasoline fire on a highway as a kid. Vehicle was totally engulfed, with flames that seemed very high (at least, from the perspective of a young kid). That seemed quite bad too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- micheljansen 4y agoThis made me think: how the hell will I get my kid out of the back of my Model 3 in case of a fire? The front doors have manual release latches (and adults who know how to use them). The back doors won’t open from the outside in case of power loss. Smashing the window in from the outside seems like a good way to get glass over anyone back there. After a quick search of the manual it seems this is not really a scenario Tesla has considered well. I would probably end up pulling my kid out through the front or via the trunk, but surely there must be a better way.
- colechristensen 4y agoThe non mechanical door handles seem ridiculous to me as someone who grew up in a place where regularly you’d wake up to a car covered in a quarter inch of ice.
- olivermarks 4y agoI'm like a broken record saying ALL BEV's should have mechanical door locks because of the huge fire risks
- Hamuko 4y agoThey use electric door openers because of the frameless windows. So when you open the door, it slides the window down by a couple of centimeters in order to clear the window seal cleanly. As to why this requires a fully electric door opening mechanism, I don't really know. AFAIK, BMWs had mechanical door mechanisms in their frameless doors 20 years ago that did the exact same window sliding.
- aaomidi 4y agoIt doesn't require one. In case of power failure it'll just damage the glass. Preferred to fuck my glass up than let someone burn in the back. This was just awful design and tesla and the NHTSA is responsibile for this fuck up and lives lost in events on fire.
- jackvalentine 4y ago
- npunt 4y agoI can't help but put on my PM hat and say well this is almost certainly a statistical artifact, but they should probably take a closer look at the last software update.
- hinkley 4y agoBefore we started using it as a pejorative, the point of fire drills was to practice doing something so that when it really matters you don't have to try to improvise a solution on the spot. There are teachable moments around how long it takes you to verify that this had nothing to do with the software update. And if it turns out to be the software, you're going to feel pretty dumb for sandbagging. And as unlikely as it is, there is a non-zero probability of someone going to jail. So don't just check it, invest in being able to check it.
- chemmail 4y agoThis is impressively small amount of EV fires.
- bmitc 4y agoI always like how Teslas are apparently so ahead of every other car, but yet, when something goes wrong with them, statistical gymnastics are pulled to say they're no worse that combustion cars, as can be seen in this thread. So which is it? In my opinion, Teslas are low quality, maintenance nightmares and even look dated. I've been seeing Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 cars on the road in the past month, and they're jaw dropping when driving by. And a look into their features and functionality shows high quality and well thought out interior designs that don't use coolness factor as their only design constraint.
- stephenitis 4y agoGut feeling might be ok for an individual. I trust statistics over a single anecdote or sensational news articles. How are we supposed to judge and regulate the safety of mass produced vehicles?
- bmitc 4y agoAccurate statistics are hard to come by because of the way Tesla does business and markets themselves. For the longest time, they only allowed repairs done by them. I think that's been reduced a little? Not sure. There were reports of Tesla logging repairs as "goodwill" repairs and replacements, when they should have really been done under warranty or not at all if the warranty period was over. This mislabeling misleads, if only internally and to investors about how much warranty work they're doing. There's several other things like this were Tesla has first hand manipulated data to benefit them.
- svet_0 4y ago> There were reports of Tesla logging repairs as "goodwill" repairs and replacements, when they should have really been done under warranty I call BS, got any source for that? Tesla has cash reserves for warranties (as most companies do), it would be stupid financially not to use them, and waste "real" money instead. > There's several other things like this were Tesla has first hand manipulated data to benefit them. Like what?
- svet_0 4y agoPlainSite's owner Aaron Greenspan is a known TSLAQ troll who's obsessed with Tesla and Elon Musk, and just lost a huge lawsuit against Tesla (https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-dismisses-lawsuit-musk-tesla-twitter-fan-84862639 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-dismisses-...) Let's look at all these reports: * Some seem fake/old - (e.g. a single potato quality image in a tweet https://twitter.com/ATXKev1n/status/1528826357177892864 https://twitter.com/ATXKev1n/status/1528826357177892864 from a TSLA short - https://twitter.com/ATXKev1n/status/1527691352569524224 https://twitter.com/ATXKev1n/status/1527691352569524224) * Some are caused by other fires (e.g. https://brooklynreporter.com/2022/04/streets-of-fire-tesla-goes-up-in-flames-on-fifth-avenue/ https://brooklynreporter.com/2022/04/streets-of-fire-tesla-g... - "A garbage fire on Fifth Avenue and 77th Street engulfed a Tesla") * Some are minor fires in the cabin that didn't proliferate to the battery and didn't cause any serious damage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgZf-auOZxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgZf-auOZxI) * Some involve other vehicles as well (https://presse-fotos.dk/post/fire-elbiler-i-ladestander-brudt-i-brand/ https://presse-fotos.dk/post/fire-elbiler-i-ladestander-brud..., https://abc7.com/santa-monica-car-crash-fire-parking-garage/11706511/ https://abc7.com/santa-monica-car-crash-fire-parking-garage/...) - and as expected only reported as Tesla fires on PlainSite, although it's unknown which one started the fire. Overall, the rate of serious Tesla fires with any injuries/fatalities is extremely low, since there are many safety nets in place and fires take a lot of time to expand (if they do at all).
- singularity2001 4y agoSo that's what the recent "don't charge at noon in Texas" messages by Elon were about?