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...
Tesla battery fires are not lithium metal fires. They are primarily organic solvent fires which evolve flammable gasses when overheated.
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.
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.
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-...
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_...
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.
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.
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.
It is pretty clear though, Tesla has expensive new cars you need to compare them with similar cars.
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?
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.
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.
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/
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?