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With 17 car fires per hour in the USA, it seems quite obvious that some of those would be from a Tesla. It's unfortunate that these are the only ones that make
by ben174 13y ago
With 17 car fires per hour in the USA, it seems quite obvious that some of those would be from a Tesla. It's unfortunate that these are the only ones that make the news though.
Relative to other cars, Tesla car fires are quite rare.
- DanBC 13y agoI agree, but what is the rate for newish well maintained expensive vehicles? (Not because I disagree, but it's useful to compare similar vehicles).
- gagaga 13y ago>Relative to other cars, Tesla car fires are quite rare. Can you point to a source for that statement?
- parfe 13y agoThere are now substantially more than the 19,000 Model S vehicles on the road that were reported in our Q3 shareholder letter for an average of one fire per at least 6,333 cars, compared to the rate for gasoline vehicles of one fire per 1,350 cars. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mission-tesla http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mission-tesla with numbers from http://www.autonews.com/article/20131108/BLOG06/131109827/tesla-firetraps-numbers-dont-back-it-up http://www.autonews.com/article/20131108/BLOG06/131109827/te... When reading any story about a Tesla fire keep in mind that HN users post multiple stories about 100% of Tesla fire events, while 0% of internal combustion stories reach the HN audience. The media create this "issue" by detailing the exceptional Tesla fire events and ignoring commonplace gasoline vehicle fires.
- shas3 13y agoHow many of those are spontaneous? The concern over Tesla is understandable if you consider the voltage and currents associated with running the motor.
- aestra 13y agoAnecdote alert! A friend of mine told me a story about how his car spontaneously caught on fire sitting in his driveway while he was sleeping. The fire department had to investigate. I don't recall the cause though. Wasn't anything too crazy.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Jtsummers 13y agoI don't know the frequency of incidents, but I did get this [1] recall notice once for my Explorer. [1] Recall ID # 67472 at http://www.motortrend.com/cars/1999/ford/explorer/recalls/ http://www.motortrend.com/cars/1999/ford/explorer/recalls/
- devicenull 13y agoVersus 10+ gallons of flammable liquid, usually under pressure?
- shas3 13y agoLet's take it further. It is an internal COMBUSTION engine. But it is unlikely that your car can spontaneously burn up. Electrical fires however start more easily. For example, in spite of the prevalence of gas-heating systems, the most common cause of fire in residential buildings is electric arcing. Granted that this is not conclusive data about high-voltage being more dangerous than IC engines, but it is not as straightforward as it seems. http://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/reports/residential_structures.shtm http://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/reports/residential_stru...
- hnriot 13y ago*Relative to other cars, Tesla car fires are quite rare. is that true? do you know the stats on this because that would be interesting, obviously normalized for model year.
- bri3d 13y agoI was only able to find very rough numbers. In 2012, there were about 172,500 car fires out of an estimated 243,000,000 total registered cars. That means that about .072% of registered vehicles caught fire in 2012. 6-8 out of 22,000 Teslas built worldwide have caught fire - at worst, .04% of Teslas. Why would you normalize by model year before having seen any data? Do you posit that older cars by years since manufacture date are more likely to catch fire? That poorly maintained cars or higher mileage cars are more likely to catch fire? That modern cars are less likely to catch fire? Each of these hypotheses would require some form of validation. As a point of comparison to a car with an actual fire problem, 10 of the 1,500 produced Ferrari 458s caught fire in a 3 month period before Ferrari recalled the cars to replace a wheel arch adhesive which caused the fires. Source for fire number: http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/fires-in-the-us http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/fires-in...
- Recoil42 13y ago>With 17 car fires per hour in the USA, How many of these are modern, late-model cars?
- Someone 13y agoThey better be. It would strongly surprise me if new cars were equally likely to catch fire as older cars, and the average Tesla is way newer than the average car. To get a feeling of whether my idea that older cars are more likely to catch fire is true, let's compare what the average car in the USA does. There are 250M cars in the USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States#Total_number_of_vehicles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...). 17 an hour is about 400 a day or 160k a year. That would mean that about one in 1500 cars catches fire every year. I don't have data, but I find that very high for new cars. Also, translating to the about 25k Tesla's in the USA (can't find precise numbers easily), we would expect 15 fires a year or just over one a month. That's within a factor of 2 or so of the frequency with with I read about Tesla fires. I don't think those arguments are conclusive, but I certainly don't see them as evidence for your claim, either. Edit: should have refreshed the page. There's some data elsewhere on this page that puts some nuance into this. I still think Tesla cars should be compared to cars of similar age, and don't expect them to do that much better there. Stats on causes do car fires could sway that, though. If many of them are caused by people being careless with gasoline (smoking at the pump, dropping gasoline or oil on a hot engine), things could look wildly different.