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Lets see the amount of fires of, lets say, the Ford Fusion in the past 6 weeks. Or maybe the amount the fires for all of Ford vehicles. It's only because Tesl

• TylerE 13y ago
  That's just a dumb comment. Gasoline gars don't catch on fire in non-fatal accident with any frequency Now let's talk numbers. Ford Fusion fleet, in the US: 1,520,000 vehicles. Tesla Model S fleet, world: 18,300. If 300 Ford Fusions caught on fire in a 6 week span I guarantee NHTSA would be investigating.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • dham 13y ago
    True. Probably a bad comparison and point. Thanks. >Gasoline gars don't catch on fire in non-fatal accident to begin with. That can't be true. I live in a relatively small town and I've seen 2 car fires(or the aftermath) in the past year, as a result of an accident.
    • TylerE 13y ago
      A: selective editing B: There are a ~11 million auto accidents (that's accidents, not vehicles involved in accidents) in the US each year. ~10.9 million of them don't catch on fire.
  • sitharus 13y ago
    > Gasoline gars don't catch on fire in non-fatal accident with any frequency There were 187,500 car fires in 2011 (http://www.nfpa.org/research/fire-statistics/the-us-fire-problem/highway-vehicle-fires http://www.nfpa.org/research/fire-statistics/the-us-fire-pro...), that's just over 3600 a week, which is about 0.07% of the total cars (~254M, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...). 3 of 18,300 Model S vehicles have caught fire. That's 0.02%.
    • Zimahl 13y ago
      Unfair comparison still. How many of those cars were old and in disrepair? How many of them were non-fatal accidents? How many of them were due to running over debris?
      • cdash 13y ago
        You have a point with the old and disrepair but fatal accidents is a bad classifier because what proof do you have that fatal accidents of other cars are fatal accidents of a model S and by fatal I am assuming you mean fatal not due the fire. As for running over debris, again it is not important because who cares if gasoline cars have different causes for their fires vs the causes of the model S. What matters is the percentage that actually do catch on fire with a large enough population. After that, the next question that should be asked is, what is the difference between the danger of these fires. Are gasoline fires more or less dangerous.
        • blinkingled 13y ago
          Are there stats around how many traditional cars exploded because of road debris hitting the gasoline tank? That's the key point here - everything can explode but what is the relative likelihood of a traditional car exploding because of road debris (as seems to be the case with the Tesla)? May be the gasoline tanks on cars are better shielded than the batteries on Tesla are.
          • Dylan16807 13y ago
            Cars don't explode.
            • Natsu 13y ago
              Not sure if I need to recalibrate my sarcasm detector, but their gas tanks sure seem to: https://www.google.com/search?q=car+fire&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=car+fire&tbm=isch
  • cdash 13y ago
    "While there are an average of 150,000 car fires in the U.S. each year." Straight from the article.
  • deleted 13y ago
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• robotcookies 13y ago
  Well for comparison, the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf have never had a fire. This is despite the two combined having sold over 100,000 cars. Meanwhile the Tesla S has only sold about 19,000 cars.
  • justin66 13y ago
    > Well for comparison, the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf have never had a fire. The volt had one, rather famously when it was tested by the NHTSA. In that test (which was pretty ludicrous if you dig into the details) as in the recent Tesla crashes, I don't think they're really reflective of the engineering quality of the car.