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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

> Tesla is also facing a federal field investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board after several Model X and Model S owners across the globe said their cars burst into flames

yawn

Are other automakers suffering the same investigations?

https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=812639

> Each year, from 2014 to 2016, an estimated 171,500 highway vehicle fires occurred in the United States, resulting in an annual average of 345 deaths > Approximately one in eight fires responded to by fire departments across the nation is a highway vehicle fire.

Car fires are nothing new. The media coverage for EVs is not proportional.

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> The media coverage for EVs is not proportional

Do we have EV car fire frequencies for comparison with ICE engines? Without denominators saying “all cats burn” is overly reductive.

> Do we have EV car fire frequencies for comparison with ICE engines? Without denominators saying “all cats burn” is overly reductive.

Fine. And yet, is Reuters reporting those? In fact, why is Reuters even talking about cars?

Tesla fires feature very prominently in the news whenever they happen. When was the last time anyone here saw news of ICE fires? I only ever see those in local news, and only if they caused other incidents (like fatalities or traffic jams).

ICE cars aren’t catching on fire due to design defects, generally. They don’t spontaneously combust. There is almost always a causal factor unrelated to the actual car. Tesla’s could conceivably catch fire sitting in your driveway.

> Tesla’s could conceivably catch fire sitting in your driveway.

My mother had to drag me out of an ICE car when I was three because it caught fire in our driveway, so I'm not sure you're comparing equivalent things.

There's hundreds of times more non-EVs on the road, so the question would be the proportionate level of fires.

any figures or citations?

Yeah, but relatively speaking there aren't that many Tesla's on the road.

What you'd need to do is compare the number of Tesla fires (per 1000 cars) versus other new IC cars (per 1000).

Indeed, and please share the numbers if you have them. But my complaint was centered more in the media reporting, rather than the investigation per-se.

No other car company claims to sell the safest car ever made.

When you make outlandish statements like that you have to expect increased scrutiny.

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