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Comment by simplexion | Hacker News Reader

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simplexion·

Failure rates for rechargeable Li-ion batteries are on the order of one in 10 million cells.

http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i6/Assessing-Safety-Lithium-I...

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"Failure" including everything from fire and explosion to peaceful, boring death.

At a rough guess, the number of cells that fail excitingly are probably a fraction of those that fail overall.

One in a million odds breaks down when you're talking about a population size of billions. A couple hundred cellphones every year catching on fire is still pretty noteworthy.

If that's noteworthy, what does one call a class of product that causes >1.25 million deaths per year? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...)

Definitely worth fixing if it's not too hard/expensive, but probably not worth spending much time worrying about it.

How many cells in a laptop? I would assume 3 at the low end, but it can go much higher and many people have multiple laptops, cellphones etc. So, 20 per person on an aircraft is probably a solid round number.

How many people in an aircraft say ~200. How many aircraft in the air say ~5,000. Now that 10 million is down to 2-3 per however often those 1 in 10 million chance is supposed to stand for.

Replace aircraft with car and continue this conversation.

Cars typically have battery packages that can easily survive a cell failure without anyone noticing.

If your phone battery explodes and starts a fire you have better odds surviving a dive out of your car as opposed to an airplane.

You must have a pretty big phone to take down an airplane. If you are driving the car you are much more likely to loose control and cause deaths then a phone bursting in an airplane causing anything more then nasty burns.

Fires in a luggage compartment may be an issue even if they start small.

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