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Comment by Latteland | Hacker News Reader

Just like you can get a patent on anything by adding "with a computer" you can get traction for any news story by adding "in a tesla" to it. A fire in any car would be horrifying, but it's not really that newsworthy. Gas cars catch on fire all the time.

Dubai - car catches on fire twice!

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/transport/car-catches-fire-tw...

Didn't quite make the us news. Cars catch on fire at amusement park, Teslas apparently not involved http://abc11.com/several-cars-catch-fire-in-parking-lot-of-c...

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Ok, so former reporter here.

There are several 'criteria for newsworthiness'. One of them is novelty. Another is general public interest. And there is substantial general public interest in Tesla as a whole, since it is doing new things. Additionally, many of the things Tesla is trying is also novel. So that is two things right off the bat that make basically anything that happens there newsworthy to some degree.

I get that people like to say "oh the media is just reporting on this failure because it's Tesla and they want them to fail," but to hold that view is to misunderstand the nature of news in general. Pieces like this aren't inherently "anti-Tesla", (which is what I am admittedly inferring you're getting at with your comment). But the fact that this is a new thing that humankind is experimenting with makes it newsworthy, and that includes its failures and successes.

I also admittedly didn't read the article yet :)

If your criteria allow for this sort of handwaving nonsense, your criteria may be wrong.

Then reporters should emphasize baselines. Otherwise this type of reporting misleads people and reporters are to blame for it. It is a "fake news" tough not necessarily any single report is false.

Is a battery fire one of "tesla's failures" even though most other cars burn too? Is it statistically exceptionally common for tesla cars to burn?

The story is about the findings initiated by a NTSB investigation. You can see the current list of ongoing investigations here: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/All-Investigations...

This is the clickbait approach to journalism.

Investigative and traditional news journalism will still focus on unusual deltas or events — and in this case, those deltas should be in Tesla's favor. A good example of newsworthiness might be if firefighters failed to put out a battery fire or if the NTSB (edited from NHTSA) focused on a particular incident for some reason, e.g. to learn and see how this event is being handled versus others.

"Tesla on fire" isn't newsworthy.

"NTSB monitoring emergency response to Tesla car fire" probably is. (edited from NHTSA. Source release: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180509.as...)

"Tesla batteries catch on fire [more or less] frequently than gas cars" is newsworthy. It may even be worthy of further investigation in either event.

"Tesla on fire" isn't newsworthy.

Then would you call the NTSB investigation a "clickbait" investigation? They are the ones who initiated the investigation that is being reported on right now.

How unusual/newsworthy is a NTSB investigation? You can look at their list of major highway investigations right here:

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/All-Investigations...

There are about 50 ongoing investigations since 2016. Of those, Tesla is the subject of 4 of them:

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/HWY18FH004.aspx

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/HWY18FH011.aspx

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/HWY18FH013.aspx

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/HWY17FH013.aspx

By my informal count, Tesla seems to have the most NTSB investigations of any individual automaker right now, given that many of the NTSB highway investigations involve bus and train accidents.

Honestly, I would expect the NTSB to investigate any kind of accident involving rare or new technology. I'd expect to see them investigate a higher percentage of accidents involving electric vehicles and self-driving vehicles until those technologies are safe enough and proven enough that you get diminishing returns from the investigations.

Tesla probably also has one of the higher counts of deployed electric vehicles out there too, so the absolute number of units involved in anything unusual should be expected to be high too. The interesting context would be relative numbers to number of units and miles travelled for both regular vehicles as well as other makers electrics.

Let's look at the third one you linked as an example. It's the one I referred to in my initial comment:

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180509.as...

(Investigation page https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/HWY18FH013.aspx)

The focus is on the response because the fire isn't the kind of fire most response teams are used to dealing with. It's not necessarily focused on the car.

Clickbaiting is a legitimate though devious tactic. Per my comment referencing one of the same examples you cited, I wouldn't consider it clickbait to focus on the investigation when the investigation's true intent is highlighted. "NTSB investigating response to Tesla crash" and "NTSB investigating Tesla crash" are vastly, vastly different.

I went ahead and edited one of your examples into my post. Thanks for finding it; I was wondering why I wasn't able to dig it up while searching for NHTSA.

To be fair, the original title of the submitted article (likely truncated to fit HN's 80-char limit) contains the context of NTSB:

"New NTSB Tesla fatal crash report: Model S battery reignited twice after Florida crash"

This is newsworthy when you consider that this is extremely unlikely to happen with gas fires.

And considering that my comment may have appeared to critique the story itself (even though my comment was a critique of its parent and not of the actual story), it's a fair point to make, so thanks.

Tesla on fire might or might not be newsworthy by your criteria. Is this fire in some way worse than a normal car fire? Is this fire significantly more likely than a normal car fire? Either could be true (I don't know if either is), I want my news to tell me.

But news needs to sell something everyday, and real investigative work takes months.

While true that Tesla is attempting novel things — and sometimes falling short of success — there is nothing particularly novel about a car fire. They aren't particularly widespread, but neither are they incredibly rare.

I think without another element to the story that's notable, novel or otherwise interesting, I think it falls short of the criteria for meaningful reporting and falls into the realm of sensationalism. It may not be specifically or deliberately "anti-Tesla", but that doesn't mean it's not sensationalist.

Electric cars are a different beast in terms of fire. Fire crews know how to put out a conventional fire. Remove the fuel and/or source of ignition and fire is out. Drain the tank, disconnect the battery terminals, and it is safe to haul away. A battery fire is different. You can never really remove the energy potential without discharging the batteries, something that cannot reasonably be done at an accident scene. So the wrecked Tesla is a different animal, something more newsworthy, than a standard wreck.

I read about a concept car that was going to integrate capacitors into its carbon fiber frame. High electrical potentials, encased in a mesh of carbon, doing 100kph down a public road. What could possibly go wrong? I think more boom than burn.

Err, most cars don't catch fire days after they were in an accident. That's the scary part.

Electric vehicles require additional specialized handling after a crash. Who provides that training? Who provides the equipment and consumables for that special handling? Who covers that cost?

Very important factors which play into the lifespan of an electric car, factors which need to be discussed.

Except it does happen, eventually. It doesn't happen to teslas much either. Web search found this stack exchange article "Catalytic converter - ... and as he was driving down the hill a few days later it caught fire"

https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/4010/car-crash...

Amusingly the same story about the tesla as in this article comes up over and over again in different reports of the same incident.

Moreover, you don’t see “Mercedes-Benz” or “Range Rover” ignites twice in a title. It would be “Sedan” or “SUV” ignited twice.

Here I’d be okay with “electric vehicle” catches fire twice or something to that effect.

I think that isn't being very truthful to the fact that Tesla owns a huge market share of electric vehicles and that these are problems that affect the big player. If Ford, Honda, Chevy, Suzuki... had problems that made people questions the very keystone of the technology that their product was, the possibility of an unsafe product, you're wrong that it wouldn't be in the title, and doubly so if it was such a key player in their niche.

I like Tesla, but everytime something bad happens to Elons company people fall in line of saying well this wouldn't happen to x or y or talked about in the media the same way. Without ever considering it isn't a problem if the companies referenced were all considered on equal terms. This is the price Elon is paying for not having a dedicated marketing team and also being innovative.

> Moreover, you don’t see “Mercedes-Benz” or “Range Rover” ignites twice in a title.

However, I think one might if it were just a bit more exotic, like a Ferrari.

More importantly, if, e.g., Mercedes had recently been making headlines (arguably through their own efforts) about their new [1] hydrogen-fuel-cell technology, and it was that technology that was catching fire twice, I'm pretty sure we'd see their brand name in the title.

[1] fictional/hypothetical, for the purposes of this thought experiment

That's fair. It still seems like the media like putting Tesla in a negative light, if for nothing else for eyeballs. So even though a particular issue is not statistically abnormal, they'll print away either for eyeballs or to slight Musk because he doesn't play by their expected rules.

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