Hacker News Reader

Comment by King-Aaron | Hacker News Reader

Just a classic case of someone driving their extremely fast car just that bit too fast. Sad to hear.

Too early to say, I think.

Possibly, though if the original articles were reporting that 'no one was in the drivers seat', then there must have been a fairly substantial impact to throw the driver into the rear of the car.

Plus, it was a 100D on a back road, I can't imagine they'd be doing a leisurely pace... Conjecture, of course.

Back road? Says they made it 550 feet from his home in a culdesac before leaving the road. What's the quarter mile trap speed of a 100D and what are the power numbers? How fast could it really have been going, under its own power, before gravity took over?

125mph-ish is what they trap in a quarter mile, 1/8th mile (660ft) trap is in the 95-100mph area.

Electric instant on torque can be a dangerous thing. So assuming just under the 1/8 mile number, we're probably around what? 80-85 mph before leaving the road? That'll do it. I assume it's a TX culdesac, similar to mine and not dense pack like my old one in CA. Plenty of ace and temptation to do something I'll advised.

200km/h in 10.5 seconds, apparently.

Didn't one of the early statements from the investigation say that they knew that no one was in the driver's seat at the time of the accident? I don't know on what basis they would make that statement and of course it could be erroneous, but all the more reason to remember we all know so little we probably can't reason about it well enough for conjecture to be much better than random guessing.

edit: Indeed [https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/business/tesla-fatal-crash-no...]

Yeah, but despite his certainty the usual disclaimers about initial investigations apply. I think the officers weren't thinking about how many people would pick up on their words.

A policeman would just write up "Too fast for conditions".

it was going 30 lol. i’m sure they just got in the back seat for no reason too

And burning alive because they couldn't escape the car. No big deal.

This isn't uncommon in motor vehicle accidents, however.

In Hollywood crashes maybe, but in the real world auto fires are not common at all. As of 2018, there are 56 fires per billion miles driven. Furthermore, only 3% of all fatal automobile accidents involved fire.

https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st...

Do Teslas/electric cars burn more frequently in severe crashes than ICE vehicles? Last time I looked, a few years back, the data showed that ICE vehicles burned quite a bit more frequently.

tesla’s are death traps. you can’t put out their fires with water. and since their doors aren’t mechanical you’re stuck inside once the battery dies. this fire took over 4 hours to put out with the fire department not knowing how to put it out

> and since their doors aren’t mechanical you’re stuck inside once the battery dies

Tesla's front doors have internal mechanical levers that can be used in the case of power loss.

This sounds like you just have a bone to pick with Tesla. Their doors can be opened when the battery dies.

Doors that dont open on a power failure sound super fucking unsafe. Looks like on the Model s they do open manually in front if you pull the handle back enough and in the back via a hidden release cable under the seat which sounds less than ideal. I'm not sure if this is the case with the other models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01lXcD_Uz74 https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1234782/Tesla-S.html?page=...

The Model 3 has a manual emergency release in the armrest: it's one of the more awkward parts of the car, actually, because it's right where most people expect the door handle to be and the actual "door handle" is a button a little bit up.

since their doors aren’t mechanical you’re stuck inside once the battery dies

This is maliciously false. There's a manual door handle just like you'd find in every other car; to the point where people new to them almost always use it by accident instead of using the button.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-y-vs-model-3-differenc...

It's in an identical place on the other models. Please don't trot out hot takes like this on something you don't understand.

That is a really good question, tbh. I've seen comparisons that show the Tesla's burning less often, but those weren't specifically post crash. A lot of ICE cars come from fuel leaks, often after major repairs and without a collision.

I'm not aware of a direct comparison of post-crash fires. Anecodally, it seems the post-crash fires are rare with the 3 and Y and much less rare with the S/X.

The average age of a car in a fire is over ten years. Electric vehicles should be less common based on their relative youth.

The first sentence in your article that you linked states that in one year in the US alone, 560 civilians burned to death in fires.

Wrangling statistics to try and suit your argument is one thing, but that's more than one person a day that's burning to death in a car.

Nearly as many die annually in bathtubs. As it stands the average person could drive about 400k years before dying in a fire.

It's not playing games with statistics to point out the effects of large numbers.

3% isn't that small.

What's the percent for teslas?

I'd say the stupid doors are a much bigger problem than the ability to catch fire.

The fleet of EVs is very different from the fleet of light duty ICE vehicle. You can't do a 1:1 comparison and have anything useful come out of it. There is no EV equivalent of a rusted out 1995 S10 with a gas tank held in with a ratchet strap for anyone to crash because EVs haven't been around that long.

I suspect once you control for vehicle age the difference is marginal. Statistically nobody is burning to death in late model luxury sedans (Tesla included) because they're well enough designed that practically nobody is getting trapped in the vehicle in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com