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Yawn. It self-extinguished just as the fire department got there. There were 174,000 vehicle fires in the US in 2015.
https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Resea...tatistics/Vehicle-fires/Highway-vehicle-fires

From https://www.etonline.com/tesla-resp...o-of-their-car-seemingly-catching-fire-104354

"The company claims that, based on the 300,000 cars they've produced -- which have collectively driven over 7.5 billion miles -- there are only five incidents of cars catching fire per billion miles traveled.
In comparison, the company cites data collected by the National Fire Protection Association and U.S. Federal Highway Administration that shows there are 55 incidents of fire for every billion miles driven when looking at all automobiles in the country."


I like order-of-magnitude better odds.

Discussed on TMC: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-goes-up-in-flames.118286/ Their threads also wander off-topic.

It's sad that Tesla gets singled out for what is almost a non-event compared to the number of horrific car fires which occur daily.
 
Or looking at it from another angle--it happens so rarely is exactly why it gets the special attention.

Also if it did burn up all the combustibles and extinguish on it's own, then it performed as designed, especially if it was contained to only a few of the module sections.

If any section can burn out completely without catching fire to the sections next to it or immediately burning up the passenger compartment, well that is quite an accomplishment and design success by the engineers with respect to safety in the event of the bad thing happening.

Our cells have vents to open and prevent explosion, but once vented they will likely catch fire and burn. The steel floor pan would provide some shielding and won't melt like aluminum, so there would hopefully be time to get out.
 
Did the guy run over a piece of steel? That's happened before. I believe the car will tell you to pull over and exit the vehicle while the flames vent out the bottom.

I think we're going through another negative news media blitz similar to the Toyota Prius one 10 years ago where a Prius battery failed and the media reported the story over and over to the point to where I thought all Priuses (Pri?) were failing.
 
The general public is still wary of EV's and fire is one reason - Let one EV catch fire and they forget about the 50 or so ICE cars which catch fire every single day. One is so rare it always makes news, the other happens so often we ignore it . . . . that's not news!

My favorite was the Ford cruise control switch which could burn down your house even if your truck hadn't been started in a week - THAT was news, but it still got less coverage than a single Tesla fire

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/automobiles/27FORD.html

Don
 
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