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Tesla: Third Model S fire in past two months
- jamra 13y agoI wonder if auto manufacturers are starting fires as a sort of false flag operation against the good name of Tesla. It absolutely makes no sense that a fender bender would engulf the car in flames. The driver safely pulled over to the side of the road and yet the car is in the middle of an intersection with the hood engulfed in flames. Check for accelerant.
- josefresco 13y agoIf you believe this, you might also believe the republicans are DDOSing the new gov health care website.
- shocks 13y agoNow… wait a minute… :P
- agf 13y agohttp://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/new-denial-of-service-attack-aimed-directly-at-healthcare-gov/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/new-denial-of-servic...
- mkramlich 13y agoThey just DoS'ed the entire Federal government and put the full faith and credit of the government in doubt by risking default. It's not exactly a stretch of imagination that the same kinds of people or organizations might also have the motivation, means and willingness to try it against one particular website: the website associated with the very same law, the ACA, which was their ostensible reason for DoS-ing the US government itself. And note for those who can't make distinctions. There's a difference between whether parties were attempting to DoS the website, versus whether it was successful. Also it's entirely possible and reasonable that a DoS attack could result in being a partial contributor, though obviously not the sole cause of its woes. Distinctions. Shades of gray. Life. It's subtle that way.
- EpicEng 13y agoThe conspiracy theorist's typical argument; a lot of "well it makes sense, right?!" With absolutely no facts to back up the story.
- mherdeg 13y agoFYI in these models accelerant is the long skinny pedal on the right.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- 001sky 13y agoCheck for accelerant. Ah, Lithium...
- ollysb 13y agoThe battery doesn't appear to actually be on fire. Makes you wonder what exactly it is that is burning in the picture.
- 001sky 13y agoAfter an October accident, a burning Tesla Model S was captured on video by a passerby. That was definitely the battery. It was triggered by debris on the highway striking the undercarriage and penetrating the 6mm armour plate surrounding the battery. They had to flip the car on its side (while it was burning), drill holes into the car to access the battery packs, and only then could put it out.
- mkramlich 13y agoexactly. considering the batteries are down on the bottom of the vehicle. The front hood area has an open trunk beneath. Air, by default as shipped. So what's inside that particular car's trunk?
- ollysb 13y agoI wasn't actually suggesting anything conspiratorial, just curious about what was on fire i.e. bits of metal don't catch fire that easily but obviously there's something under a car hood that does.
- EpicEng 13y ago>It absolutely makes no sense that a fender bender would engulf the car in flames. How can you possibly make such a claim? Are you intimately familiar with the design of the Model S? Have you performed some level of engineering analysis on these three cars post crash? If you really believe that a conspiracy is more likely than a design flaw then I don't know what to say to you.
- dram 13y agoCorruption on this level only existed 50+ years ago. Nowadays our politicians, popes and corporations would never do what they'd did in the 20th century.
- Aqueous 13y agoThat picture is not from the incident in the article. It's from an earlier incident in October.
- kgermino 13y ago>The driver safely pulled over to the side of the road and yet the car is in the middle of an intersection with the hood engulfed in flames. Check for accelerant. Per the caption that's a picture of a difference car...
- jamra 13y agoThanks. I didn't catch it.
- tanglesome 13y agoI wonder how many gas-fueled car fires have there been in the last two months... just asking.
- sjtgraham 13y agopro rata
- 001sky 13y agoFYI only ~2% of auto fires involve the fuel system.[1] If this fire was battery related, we are now at 100% for TSLA [1] On public highways.
- bastawhiz 13y agoThat's not the fairest of comparisons. It'd be like saying only 7% of jet crashes happen because of a malfunction in the vicinity of the cockpit but 100% of hot air balloon crashes happen because of a malfunction in the vicinity of the cockpit. Just because the concentration of failures is on one component doesn't mean the component if generally defective; in this case it just (potentially) means there's fewer components.
- 001sky 13y agono, you are missing the point. the battery is not defective. the battery system is just more likely to catch fire when compromised. petrol fuel systems are not only more protected from damage (typically, behind the second axle) but also just less likely to catch fire (on the hwy)[1]. You generally need both a puncture and a spark. A battery shorts with Just a puncture by something metal (usually), so there is one less logical step. [1] High-pressure fuel lines are well protected outside of the battery, also (they are small) en route to the intake manifold. Here, the EFI rail is also behind the engine block and not likely to take a direct impact. Even then, they are flexible and not likly to break (they would bend).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shmerl 13y agoRight now they sell very expensive, exclusive cars. Are they going to sell more commonly accessible models or production of such cars is prohibitively costly?
- xutopia 13y agoThe plan is to provide a car for the every day man. Each new car they come out with will have a larger appeal than the previous one for the foreseeable future.
- blah32497 13y agoThey have plans for a cheaper vehicle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_BlueStar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_BlueStar But they'd be competing against the Nissan Leaf (The Model S costs about as much as two Leafs). I think the way car manufacturers see it, it's a little early for electric cars. The Leaf has the market more or less saturated (and they're not selling that many cars). I'm sure Toyota and Honda had electric cars in the pipeline and will flood the market once it becomes viable (ie. when a good battery/range becomes affordable). What Tesla has that the others don't (at the moment!) are the charging stations. That may make them more competitive.
- thrillgore 13y agoI expect in the time between now and the BlueStar, Nissan will have a PHV priced in the same range as a subcompact. The Leaf is very cost-effective given its current charge range.
- blah32497 13y agoPlug in Hybrids? My gues is that they will not be around for long. The beauty of the Leaf is that it's so fundamentally simple. A battery, some electronics and an electric motor. It's fundamentally so much more reliable and simple than a combustion engine vehicle. By the time the BlueStar will come out, Nissan will have better prices and ranges available.
- wil421 13y agoWhy does the media have a frenzy when something bad happens to Tesla? It seems like the media is trying to find anything to publicly put them down.
- eli 13y agoI'm sure Boeing would say the same thing. And I think there were only two incidents with the Dreamliner!
- wil421 13y agoGood point but I do remember Elon stating it was because they had such large cells without sufficient spacing in between the cells. http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/elon-musk-boeing-787-battery-fundamentally-unsafe-381627/ http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/elon-musk-boeing-7...
- darkchasma 13y agoTesla, Apple, Google, etc... They're sexy, and in the public mind, so they drive traffic. Media used to be about information, but now it's about clicks and link bait.
- dsugarman 13y agobig oil
- nonchalance 13y agoFar from it: Tesla was the one that came out and said they had the safest car on the road. Even when NHTSA said it wasn't appropriate, Tesla flaunted a 5.4 star rating. Tesla supporters came out and said the first fire was a fluke. They came out and said the second is a fluke. Now the third time is a conspiracy? It's possible that there's an engineering flaw or issue with new components that underlies the problem. That is a possibility. To deny it is to be delusional. We don't know what's wrong yet, and denying the problem exists prolongs the discovery process
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- acgourley 13y agoCould you make money but lighting teslas on fire and shorting the stock?
- jggonz 13y agoThat's probably what the fire department decided was the cause of fire #2 and fire #3.
- QuasarLogic 13y agoOnly one way to find out..
- nicholassmith 13y agoJust to put in perspective, Ferrari had 10 458's set on fire randomly in 3 months.
- eli 13y agoUh, and didn't that lead to a global recall? My point is that I don't think it's anti-electric bias that is causing to people to take their vehicle catching on fire pretty seriously.
- nicholassmith 13y agoIt did indeed! But they recalled them as they were dangerous at fault, it was to do with some of the glue if I remember rightly. It should definitely be taken seriously, but Tesla have put their cars through the NCAP testing which does check to see if they set on fire after an accident. I'd wager there's a specific defect that effects a number, but a lot of the articles have made it out as if you're driving a ticking time bomb.
- kohanz 13y agoThat's one additional data point. I would hardly call it perspective. Yes, 3 fires is less than 10, but is 10 an outlier? More statistics are needed.
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- redthrowaway 13y agoBetween their earnings report and this, TSLA's down 20% from a couple days ago. Great time to buy if you're bullish on them in the long run.
- cromwellian 13y agoSometimes I get a nagging suspicion that there's a secret cabal of short-investors hyping and egging on these stories through PR chains in the media. On the plus side, I missed out on buying TSLA when it was cheap, maybe I'll get the chance again!
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- scragg 13y agoPic of 3rd fire: http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=34908&d=1383786543 http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=3... CNet is showing the first fire. Keep in mind the model s has a 12 volt battery right behind the nose. It is in a much more vulnerable spot then the main battery pack.
- natural219 13y agoRegardless of how you feel about Tesla, or whether you believe these articles are PR pieces written by oil shills, this is just bad journalism. Good journalism would give us any piece of the following information: - The number of fires in Tesla vehicles compared to: - other gas-powered cars in the same vehicle class - other electric cars in the same vehicle class - overall vehicle fire statistics in the country - A possible explanation as to what mechanism in Tesla vehicles causes fires like this. - Some brief exploration of how concerns about Tesla's safety standards might affect its broader offering, brand, and stock price. Instead, we get: Whether the latest news will have any lasting effect on public perceptions is doubtful. But it offered more fodder for bears who have been dumping Tesla shares since the company reported third-quarter earnings earlier this week. Tesla's stock has been on a tear most of the year but in the last month has lost more than 20 percent of its value. Wait, sorry, was I trying to be impartial at the beginning of this comment? This is pure shill journalism. The big three are scared. Ignore them.
- larrys 13y ago"Good journalism" would have the requisite "to be sure" info such as you mentioned in "any piece" above. Problem with that is if there is enough of that you end up with a story that has no punch and it becomes "why is this newsworthy then". Not to mention doing that is also more work. So you've basically given people a reason why the story you are writing doesn't matter.
- 001sky 13y agoIf you do the math you suggest, it looks like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6499111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6499111 Musk argued that TSLA was 5x less likely than a petrol car to catch fire on the freeway. That math does not hold up. At the time, TSLA was approximately equally (1x) likely to catch fire under these circumstances. Given two more datapoints, that data is now TSLA is 3x more likely to catch fire, not 5x less likely than a standard car in a fwy accident. That actually seems like news.
- 001sky 13y agoWow, thought police flagged this off the front page? ________ 82. Tesla: Third Model S fire ...(cnet.com) 32 points by .... 1 hour ago | flag | 68 comments
- jcampbell1 13y agoThere are about 150,000 car fires in the US per year [1]. Tesla is on pace for about 12 fires per year (1 per month, as one of these three fires happened in Mexico). There are probably ~15,000 total Teslas on the Road in the US, out of about 200 million cars. On the surface, Tesla has .8 fires per 1000 vehicles, where as .75 fires per 1000 vehicles is the US average. [1] http://www.nfpa.org/safety-information/for-consumers/vehicles http://www.nfpa.org/safety-information/for-consumers/vehicle...
- dkokelley 13y agoGreat link. I was looking for some actual figures, but hadn't found anything yet. The best measure of fire 'likelihood' is probably the incidence per vehicle mile driven, because it captures actual utilization. Right now, the total number for 2003-2007 was 90 highway vehicle fires per billion miles driven. (http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/vehicles/vehicle-fire-trends-and-patterns http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/vehicles/ve...) The question remains: what is that number for the Tesla Model S? So far we know of 3 fires. The last piece of the puzzle is how many miles have the Model S cars driven? The average annual miles driven for all vehicles is about 13,000 (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm). Assuming driving habits are identical between Tesla owners and non-Tesla owners, we can get a rough upper limit of 195 million miles driven (the actual number is less because most model S owners have had their vehicle for less than one year). Back of the envelope calculations show that comes out to 65 million miles per fire (rough upper limit), without additional fires. Given the above data on all vehicles, similar reporting shows that the average vehicle goes about 11.1 million miles per fire. Assumptions and research issues: Vehicle fire data for 2003-2007 has not significantly changed There are 15,000 Model S's on the road (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/20/teslamotors-results-idUSL4N0BK65V20130220 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/20/teslamotors-result...) Tesla owners drive the national average of 13,000 miles per year in their Model S's, and have had their cars for an average of one year. If the fire issue is systemic, the rate of fires will go up, and that is not captured here.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lxmorj 13y ago150,000 gasoline car fires per year / three trillion miles driven per year = one fire per 20 million miles driven for ICEs. three Model S car fires / 100 million miles of Model S driving = one fire per 33 million miles driven for the Model S. I'm assuming someone was injured in a car fire last year, and so far no one has been injured in a Tesla fire. So far, then, Tesla Model S fires occur on average 50% less, and are some non-zero amount safer when they do occur. Sounds pretty OK to me...
- makomk 13y agoWhat's the age breakdown on those fires? That is, if you just look at cars of a similar age to the Model S, how does that affect the number of car fires? I wouldn't be surprised if most of those fires are in cars far older than any currently-existing Model S.
- lxmorj 13y agoFair, but lots of fires are from internal issues. I think only 60% of car fires are due to collisions. All three Tesla fires were from collisions. You'd have to have more data than my attention span will allow to calculate whether the collision-to-fire ratio is higher in a Tesla than a ICE vehicle. You'd need the total number of collisions, and the percentage of those that resulted in a fire. You'd likely have to do some analysis about driving habits too. Perhaps limit the data to comparable luxury cars. People bombing around in a luxury car likely have different collision rates than the average Joe. More because the car is faster? Fewer because the care more about the vehicle? I don't know...
- gte910h 13y agoWith this small number of fires, you can't get meaningful comparative statistics between Tesla's and Petrol powered cars yet. Variance is too high with this small number of incidents/cars on the road.