Federal safety agency launches probe of Tesla battery fires
latimes.com
latimes.com
Based on comments so far most people, even those defending Tesla, accepted the false premise that NHTSA decided to investigate Tesla on its own.
That's not what happened.
Originally the author claimed NHTSA launched "investigation" into Tesla.
NHTSA contacted LATIMES and said this is "defect petition", not an investigation, so he reluctantly changed it to "probe" because he "doesn't want to argue over definition of words".
Here's the proof: https://twitter.com/russ1mitchell/status/1190352973013995520
https://twitter.com/VGrinshpun/status/1191187292288929792 is a longer expose of how biased and misleading this article is.
The short of it is: someone complain to NHTSA and they are bound by the law to investigate the complaints, hence the "defect petition" (i.e. someone petitioned NHTSA claiming that Tesla's are defective) even if they don't believe any of it. Hence request of relevant documents from Tesla.
For context: Russ Mitchell, the author of this article, is a full-on Tesla hater.
If you read his LA Times articles you'll see an extreme anti-Tesla bias.
His tweeter feed is almost a daily stream of retweeting anti-Tesla news, making anti-Tesla comments.
That LA Times allows this guy to report on Tesla is just mind-boggling.
Fake news! In the wild, unambiguously.
The bigger story might be the risk/reward tradeoff of those few battery fires vs everyone's charge capacity.
source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/377006/nmber-of-us-highw...
Indeed, but you also get animal related fires (I have no clue as to what percentage) as birds, mice, chipmunks etc will build nests in vehicles.
I imagine the animal related fires are pretty low and in the case of an EV would be next to non-existent for nest-related fires, I wonder though if EVs though are more at risk of electrical fire from pets chewing on wires.
Trying to find any sort of statistics I stumbled upon a wildfire site that documents animal-started fires, the most recent one gave me a bit of a chuckle so I'm including it here:
"Bear falls on Sheriff’s vehicle causing crash and fire" https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/08/09/bear-falls-on-sheriffs-...
There's also the infrastructure damage caused by animals that is documented at https://cybersquirrel1.com/
Even if the electronics failed, leaving the driver stuck inside, you would think the owners would have the foresight to either have something capable of breaking windows or a method by which to break them.
In an EV your fuel and ignition sources are fundamentally inseparable and you can gain a lot (range/capacity, charge time/peak power) by being unsafe with it (running the battery to the ragged edge of what it can tolerate).
The fact that in response they quickly rolled out an update that neutered a large amount of capacity is far more interesting than the fires themselves and probably what the NHTSA wants to look into.
It is pretty clear though, Tesla has expensive new cars you need to compare them with similar cars.
Also, lithium cells just need to be punctured to catch fire, they don't need an external ignition source.
I was in a significant crash when I was 10 years old, and had to kick the opposite-side rear door to get me and my younger sibling out of the burning vehicle. The latch still worked, but the body panel was heavily dented by the collision.
And the only car I had in my live that has something to break a car window from the inside is my 4x4. And that only because the previous owner used it extensively for off-roading. So quite the opposite from your average Tesla.
Just for clarification, all Tesla vehicles, Model X included, have a manual pull to open the door even in the case that the power is dead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01lXcD_Uz74
Basic design should mean that familiar methods work in an emergency. People often follow the usual way out of a building, even if there's a closer fire exit.
I just wrote above, but I was trapped in a burning car when I was a kid. The door latch worked, but I had to hold it open and kick the door to unjam it after a collision.
Had it been a Tesla, would I have known about unclipping the speaker grill, or finding a small tag to pull on at night? And been able to kick the door at the same time?
Compared to flammable liquid fires at 180,000 per year, see above, which really are pretty common.
This is a straw-man argument too. You're comparing battery fires to all vehicle fires. Ask any mechanic and they will tell you vehicle electronics systems are the primary source of crispness with stalled electric motors and rodent damage being the primary sources. Regardless of how it gets its motive power a vehicle's power-train rarely catches fire compared to other things that catch fire (which is probably in part why the NHTSA is interested in this).
Their clearly biased against EVs because "libtards" drive them.
This is not an issue with Tesla design, all of that is handled by a traditional car battery that every car has, not the main battery. Those batteries are completely separate and in different parts of the car, I think specifically because of this safety issue.
On the other hand you're unlikely to notice a fire in a gasoline car before there's smoke or fire.
Doesn't lithium react violently with water? Looking online, lithium creates hydrogen gas on contact with water. That seems like adding fuel to the fire. Makes sense that it takes a lot to extinguish a fire with fuel.
Tesla battery fires are not lithium metal fires. They are primarily organic solvent fires which evolve flammable gasses when overheated.
Then there's hybrids. I've personally witnessed 2 fires and know another friend whos car burned. Two Prius and one Nissan something. Those are the worst of both worlds, gas and electric!
Have there been any deaths in these EV fires?
Of course it's still rare, and I'll also mention that the Model 3 has a newer battery pack design and is not being investigated.
Many, I think, mostly maintenance related. Frequent causes involve old gaskets or cracked fuel lines dripping onto the exhaust manifold, right on the side of the engine.
You're not wrong that fuel does sometimes catch fire but it is very rare for a fuel leak to cause a fire on its own. It usually happens after a fire starts elsewhere.
Fuel system integrity in crashes has been scored in crash tests for a very, very long time (I recall reading about it when I was reviewing some microfiche with crash tests results of 70s pickups) so OEMs have been trying to build secure fuel systems for a long time and have gotten pretty good. With cross flow cylinder head designs (which every engine today has) there is no reason (it would be a waste of material to plumb it) to have fuel on the same side of the engine as the exhaust. The routing between the engine and the vehicle body basically always (i.e. I know of 0 exceptions but can't prove one doesn't exist) go out of their way not to run over exhaust. Fuel systems rarely have gasketed connections, almost everything is sealed with O-rings.
Mature EV designs probably catch on fire less than ICE designs but not really for any of the reasons you specified. Fuel fires mostly come from crash damage to fuel tanks where the crash also leaves the vehicle overturned. Most fires come from electrical systems not related to the drive-train. Even engine fires are rarely fuel, animal nesting debris is a far more common cause.
Ford recalled 8.7 million cars for spontaneous fire risk.[1] And that's just one case.
It happens more often than you'd think, and coverage of it in media tends to be subdued. Automotive is the largest source of advertising dollars for many media markets.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-26-mn-63066-...
How many modern vehicles spontaneously burst into flame? I could easily believe it's orders of magnitude larger than for Teslas, but when you make comparisons like you did it just discredits your entire argument.
Oh, and the majority of present-day ignitions in automobiles are still the exact same mechanical interlock switching types used since the 60's. Higher-end vehicles have solid state switching, but it's not the majority of vehicles.
Also:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/bmw-recalls-million-vehicles-fire-...
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
Anyway, agree to disagree I guess.
2,000 cars in the U.S. and Canada were believed to have had fires related to the ignition switches, which were installed in 23 million Ford vehicles. This is a failure rate of about 0.0087% overall, although Ford ultimately argued that it would only need to recall a subset of the vehicles with the ignition switch: 8.7M vehicles.
There are at least a dozen [1] Tesla fire incidents, and 720,000 Tesla vehicles sold through 2019 Q2 [2], which is a failure rate of about 0.0014%. So Tesla has a lower rate, but not by an order of magnitude, because Tesla has sold far fewer vehicles than Ford did over roughly the same number of years. So it seems justified for NHTSA to take a serious look into the issue.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/04/26/f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicle_fire_...
Strung out million dollar Ferraris and PoS 30 year old death traps shouldn't count towards the normalization.
See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/377006/nmber-of-us-highw...
If anything there's a gradual trend of increasing number of fires in the last 6-7 years.
Fires should be doused with lots of water.
The timing and urgency seems interesting:
Letter issued: Nov 24
Due date: Nov 28 (Thanksgiving day in the US)
Extension can be requested no later than 5 days before due date (which isn't possible)
Is this normal for these types of petitions?
Edit: Oh jeez, I totally misread the Issued stamp (which is actually Oct 24). Ignore this comment.
e.g. Elon has tweeted the Cybertruck has 250k+ pre-orders and counting. The pre-order deposit is only $100 (vs. $1000 when the Tesla 3 came out). The fact the deposit is only $100 for a $50k+ truck makes me question whether they intentionally set it at a low price to pump pre-order numbers, knowing full well that in 2 years time the majority of these people will likely not actually purchase the truck at all. And at 250k preorders it means Tesla has raised at least $25M in interest-free loans that they can do whatever with for the 2 years.
More than that they have no clear idea on how to scale production of this vehicle at present time, and considering how many Tesla 3 owners have complained about defects with a "standard" Tesla why would anyone believe that Tesla can produce high quality Cybertrucks at scale in a reasonable amount of time to fulfill legitimate preorders?
And does anyone actual think that most of these 250k people actually intend to buy the truck when it comes time to put down the $49900+?
its an option not a deposit.
tesla obviously doesn't expect them all to convert, in fact they have their internal numbers on how well the model3 reservations converted so they can make a much more accurate estimate than either you or I.
tell me a marketing department for a product that can't be shipped for 2 years that wouldn't kill for a list of not just warm leads, but people who had out and out handed over money! its like they managed to get the customers to pay for the marketing budget.
So they expect to convert fewer people than the Model 3. Likely far fewer.
So if Elon knows few people will convert then why call it a "pre order" and why does he keep announcing the numbers on Twitter every few hours?
Either way despite the frothy market investors don't appear to be biting at the preorder numbers anyway, but the whole preorder song and dance feels like the world's biggest Kickstarter whose main function is raising a bunch of interest free loans.
There was a lot of squabbling over the words used to summarize the Model S, X, and 3 waiting lists, too. I don't think anything good came out of the discussion.
A $100 deposit is large enough that people wouldn't feel overtly locked in while confirming a rough number for scaling. As opposed to other "probably want it" who decide not to preorder for $1000.
The function is mostly marketting in the "business intelligence" sense and the assumption that preorder fall throughs would be matched by non-preorder purchase demand is reasonable for anything which isn't a massive stinker.
this is a brand new vehicle that is unlike anything they've offered in the past. they have historical data on conversion for the Tesla 3 preorders with a $1000 deposit. now they're offering preorders on something that is more expensive and "unique" for 1/10th the preorder amount. how would a business intelligence analyst on their team even begin to predict how many of these customers actually intend to convert given the data they have?
If they actually wanted a rough idea on how many people actually intend to order in order to plan how many resources they need to throw at cybertruck production then they've done everything possible to make their job harder with the preorder decisions they've made.
There could be any number of reasons why Tesla lowered the deposit amount. Either way, the purpose of a preorder is likely to gauge demand and not to guarantee sales. Of course the conversion rate won't be 100%, but 250k deposits is a much more promising signal to Tesla than 100k or 25k.
The pre-order deposits are not recognized as revenue and do not improve their cash flow. But in any case, Tesla has had ~$1B of positive cash flow over the last two quarters and has over $5 billion of cash on hand.
The $100 deposit is definitely designed to inflate the pre-order numbers versus the $2,500 Model Y deposit, for example. I think reading into the 250k pre-orders is extremely difficult. But the refundable cash itself will sit in escrow earning approximately nothing for Tesla other than the marketing value of the pre-order count.
What is better than cash if you don't need it? An accurate predictor of demand. This is likely what the small $100 deposit is for.