Seven Teslas have caught fire in the last four days | Hacker News Reader

Seven Teslas have caught fire in the last four days

plainsite.org

These kinds of titles bother me because it's never clear if that's actually a lot or not. I did some basic research and it looks like there are about 180,000 car fires per year in the US on average, out of about 275 million registered vehicles. Or about 0.6 fires per 1000 cars.

According to Motortrend, there are around 250,000 Teslas registered in the US. The table on this site lists 96 Tesla fires. Or about 0.4 fires per 1000 cars.

So, your Tesla is actually less likely to catch on fire than a regular ICE car. It's just more likely to do so while parked in comparison to an ICE car that's more likely to do so due to bad/no maintenance.

Many of those ICE registered vehicles are 10 or more years old. A better comparison may be to limit the comparison to vehicles of the same age as the oldest Tesla.

I thought that too until I (as a former/current BMW driver) saw how many new BMWs burned down. What I found most interesting is how e.g the Korea recall did not even register on any of our German newspapers or news agency in any way comparable to Tesla (there where some really small footnotes to be fair)

https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/14/news/companies/bmw-korea-fi...

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bmw-mystery-fires-abc-news-i...

Wait how does this anecdote change the need to compare apples to apples? Also, if anything this anecdote highlights why this comparison is so poor. What if BMWs are responsible for all the ICE car fires? Why wouldn't Tesla compare against the safest or biggest automaker's stats then, to know if they're doing well? E.g. Toyota?

>Wait how does this anecdote change the need to compare apples to apples?

Because when you get into a car there are a lot more risks than it spontaneously combusting; and for those risks (like getting into an accident with a drunk driver), Tesla is already top of the class; almost as safe as a Volvo.

So is 7 in the last four days a lot; and am I in more danger in a Tesla, when accounting for other risks? If I am just as likely to; or even twice as likely to combust in a Tesla chances are the only car I'd be safer in is a Volvo.

I'm still confused, I thought we were responding to this comment: `So, your Tesla is actually less likely to catch on fire than a regular ICE car.` << this assertion is not supported by the named statistic, that's all we are saying here.

> for those risks (like getting into an accident with a drunk driver), Tesla is already top of the class

I guess while we're here, I don't know if that's easy to back up either. Overall fatality rates vs other models show a complicated story.

It is ain’t so safe if it swerves into oncoming traffic due to its shitty “fsd feature”.

No one was talking about comparing general car safety, the discussion was specifically around car fires on ICE vs Tesla EVs for relatively newer vehicles.

I don't understand why you went on this diatribe about general safety...

The one person I know whose car caught fire, it was a fairly new Toyota RAV4 - probably three or four years old at the time. They were driving on a highway, saw smoke from under the bonnet (hood), pulled over and within a few minutes the whole thing was on fire!

Are older vehicles likely to get fire?

poor maintenance would be the most common reason, e.g a lose hose.

Then you have to compare the class of the vehicles, Tesla ones are likely to be the more expensive ones.

Yes, especially if they have old rubber fuel hoses (Volkswagen).

Most of the car fires I have heard of are caused by incorrectly installed auxiliary components due to incorrect fuses and unsuitable cable diameters. This is a phenomenon that probably does not affect Tesla at all.

An even better comparison would also distinguish between differently fuelled ICEs. A diesel powered car is much less likely to catch fire than a petrol one.

And, as previous commenter points out, age comes into the mix too. I used to be involved in the old VW camper van scene. Due to the age of those vehicles, it was generally advised to replace all the rubber fuel lines on those when buying a petrol engined one, as so many people had had engine bay fires because of perished rubber piping.

Another reason this might be news-worth is if the rate of Tesla fires suddenly rose. I didn't look at any numbers and I suspect the number didn't suddenly change. Just trying to point out that ICE fires aren't the only baseline to compare to.

"I did not actually look to see if what I'm saying is true. I'm going to just declare it is and rely on someone caring enough to do the legwork to disprove me, assuming that's even possible."

That's just being bad at statistics. How old are the cars that catch on fire on average, and why do they catch fire? You can't just compare all cars to some subset of cars and derive a basic conclusion from there. For example; the average car on the US roads is 12.2 years. Tesla only started mass production 10 years ago.

By that logic, I think you'd first need to show that the age of the car impacts the likelihood it catches fire. Product failures tend to follow a bell curve over the period of their lifetime.

To compare in good faith you still have to cut at the same side of this bell curve though.

Tesla's imaginary PR department engages in this sort of nonsense themselves. They compare their fleet's crash rate, for example, to all cars on the road in the US, at a time when the age of the average car on the road is the oldest it has ever been.

The average car on the road also isn't a well-optioned mid-luxury car with driver assistance aides.

It would be like BMW saying "our new BMW M-whatever is faster than 90% of cars on the road!" Uh, yes, but how fast is it compared to other new, similarly priced sports sedans?

When you compare Teslas against cars made in a similar time period, in a similar market space (mid luxury) which are much more likely to have driver assistance aides like emergency braking, lane departure warning / intervention, cross traffic warning, etc - Teslas have a much worse crash rate.

If you have data that granular, please share. If not, a top-level analysis seems better than none at all.

It's worse than none, it's basically useless. Take into account safety ratings of all Tesla's on the road (one of the highest) vs safety rating of all cars on the road (average at best), and then think again whether 0.6 vs 0.4 says anything at all. The actual difference could be many factors higher.

This made me think: how the hell will I get my kid out of the back of my Model 3 in case of a fire? The front doors have manual release latches (and adults who know how to use them). The back doors won’t open from the outside in case of power loss. Smashing the window in from the outside seems like a good way to get glass over anyone back there.

After a quick search of the manual it seems this is not really a scenario Tesla has considered well. I would probably end up pulling my kid out through the front or via the trunk, but surely there must be a better way.

The non mechanical door handles seem ridiculous to me as someone who grew up in a place where regularly you’d wake up to a car covered in a quarter inch of ice.

I'm like a broken record saying ALL BEV's should have mechanical door locks because of the huge fire risks

They use electric door openers because of the frameless windows. So when you open the door, it slides the window down by a couple of centimeters in order to clear the window seal cleanly.

As to why this requires a fully electric door opening mechanism, I don't really know. AFAIK, BMWs had mechanical door mechanisms in their frameless doors 20 years ago that did the exact same window sliding.

It doesn't require one. In case of power failure it'll just damage the glass.

Preferred to fuck my glass up than let someone burn in the back. This was just awful design and tesla and the NHTSA is responsibile for this fuck up and lives lost in events on fire.

Honestly in the case of a fire breaking the glass seems like the best move. The glass will break in to tiny granules that while maybe scary to have shower down on to you are unlikely to cause significant harm.

My car has one of these in the centre console in case it’s needed:

https://www.amazon.com/uxcell-a17011200ux0296-Emergency-Brea...

> how the hell will I get my kid out of the back of my Model 3 in case of a fire?

Either get them out now and get another car, or get some of those emergency glass car window hammers - in the back and in the front that you can take out and use immediately the car becomes unresponsive. Lacerations from window glass is far better than the other alternative.

Automobile side windows are typically tempered glass, which as sibling noted shatters all at once into little chunks. BUT, increasingly they're laminated (like windshields) to avoid passenger ejection, which apparently (I didn't research thoroughly) also makes them much harder to break when escaping:

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a28422725/car-windows-glas...

And it looks like Tesla is included (edit: only the front side windows are laminated, so your scenario isn't affected):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tnEDH1HfD0

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempered_glass)

Weird that the Model 3 doesn't have a manual release to open the rear doors. The Model S has a cable release (albeit pretty hidden) [1]

> To open a rear door in the unlikely situation when Model S has no power, fold back the edge of the carpet below the rear seats to expose the mechanical release cable. Pull the mechanical release cable toward the center of the vehicle.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-7A32EC0...

I always like how Teslas are apparently so ahead of every other car, but yet, when something goes wrong with them, statistical gymnastics are pulled to say they're no worse that combustion cars, as can be seen in this thread. So which is it?

In my opinion, Teslas are low quality, maintenance nightmares and even look dated. I've been seeing Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 cars on the road in the past month, and they're jaw dropping when driving by. And a look into their features and functionality shows high quality and well thought out interior designs that don't use coolness factor as their only design constraint.

Gut feeling might be ok for an individual.

I trust statistics over a single anecdote or sensational news articles.

How are we supposed to judge and regulate the safety of mass produced vehicles?

Accurate statistics are hard to come by because of the way Tesla does business and markets themselves. For the longest time, they only allowed repairs done by them. I think that's been reduced a little? Not sure. There were reports of Tesla logging repairs as "goodwill" repairs and replacements, when they should have really been done under warranty or not at all if the warranty period was over. This mislabeling misleads, if only internally and to investors about how much warranty work they're doing. There's several other things like this were Tesla has first hand manipulated data to benefit them.

> There were reports of Tesla logging repairs as "goodwill" repairs and replacements, when they should have really been done under warranty

I call BS, got any source for that? Tesla has cash reserves for warranties (as most companies do), it would be stupid financially not to use them, and waste "real" money instead.

> There's several other things like this were Tesla has first hand manipulated data to benefit them.

Like what?

Just search "tesla goodwill warranty", and you'll find several articles and reports, including first hand ones from Tesla owners.

Seems like another unbased short sellers conspiracy:

> Ultimately, math doesn’t lie. If we are going to find fraud, the math should add up to at least justify the reason for the fraud. As far as I can tell, and as far as a warranty expert can tell, Tesla’s numbers don’t support the company doing any sort of fraud with this. I cannot find proof of the supposed “widespread” issue of repairs being mislabeled as goodwill. And the only things I can seem to find that are even questionable wouldn’t have a benefit from a safety standpoint, thus not lending credence to the theory that Tesla is avoiding NHTSA scrutiny.

(https://cleantechnica.com/2020/07/18/re-tesla-tsla-has-a-war...)

It's important to remember that Teslas are equipped with a secondary manual door handle. You are able to open the door even if there is no power in the vehicle.

Where is the secondary manual door handle?

It’s right where you would naturally expect a handle actually. To the point that people new to the car use it by mistake. Not the best design tbh.

But why have two different ways of unlocking the door, one automatic and one manual? Why not just one control for this one operation?

Coolness.

Sounds a little hot to me.

The automatic control lowers the window a few millimeters as the door opens to clear the trim. This design ensures a tight seal to eliminate wind noise.

If you use the manual control, it won’t lower the window, which can cause damage. It’s meant for emergencies.

My Toyota 86 has a manual door handle, and it will also automatically lower the window a little too.

> If you use the manual control, it won’t lower the window, which can cause damage.

On a Tesla. Other cars, mostly with similar frameless windows, have this same functionality and have had it for at least the last 15 years and they do so with mechanical releases.

There is absolutely to reason why a purely mechanical solution would be unable to lower the window. Heck, they can use the same engine/latch that's controlled electronically when using the manual handle.

A friend of mine with a model Y explained it to me like this: When "correctly" opening the door (electronically), the car lowers the window slightly first. This causes less wear and tear on the seals.

Honestly, the car has too many mechanical actuators for my taste. Door handles don't need to pop in and out, they're just handles. Every one of those motors will go bad someday.

Yes, it is common for cars with frameless windows to have that behavior of rolling down the window when opening the door. Normally it doesn't require two different mechanisms of opening the door. Also, the normal design for it doesn't trap backseat passengers in burning cars.

Looking at the picture, the release design [0] is unfamiliar to me. Maybe it is a common design for US brands? I haven’t seen such a design on any EU car that I’ve been in. Over here they look like this [1].

[0]: https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/pNrXP/s3/tesla-model-3-man... [1]: http://www.rssportscars.com/photos/cars/2015-bmw-m4-m-perfor...

I've seen similar mechanisms here in the US but usually they're much bigger. Like you can curl all your fingers around it easily, and typically not blocked off like that.

Most common is your [1] though.

US resident here. I’ve never seen a handle like [0]. Every car I’ve been in has handles like [1]. I don’t know if I’d be able to get out of [0] in the event of an emergency without being made aware of it prior.

If I'm in the back seat of a Tesla Model 3, I'd expect the handle to be somewhere on the door next to me. I'm really surprised that you would expect to have to crawl over the seats into the front to find the release.

Not on the rear doors of the Model X. I just checked, there is no internal mechanical handle.

How is a two year old strapped into a car seat supposed to manage that?

Not in the rear seats, they don't.

The Model S has one for the rear seats, but the Model 3 doesn't.

And while the model x technically has one for the rear seats, you have to literally remove the speaker grille and pull a cable behind it.

Yes they do.

Per Tesla stats from https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2021-tesla-impact-report.pdf

Average US car fires: 53 per billion of miles

Tesla: 5 per billion of miles

That's 10x less.

Just putting things in context.

Average age of car on the road: 12.2 years

Average age of tesla on the road: 1.8 years

Just putting things in context.

I'm not sure the age of a car has all that much to do with its ability to catch fire unless we are talking cars from before the 70s (when the flame retardant standards were set). Certainly not a 10x change in the past couple decades.

Edit: This study suggests 12 year old cars have at most 2x the relative risk of fire as 2 year old cars. That would still suggest Teslas are still 5x safer when adjusting for age.

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

Older cars have higher probability of lacking proper maintenance but also we are both just guessing and not providing actual evidence for our assumptions.

In this data from 2017, fires peaked in cars around 15 years old: https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st... (see pg 7)

So we're talking maybe a maximum 2x increase due to the age factor based on that study. That would still mean Teslas are 5x less likely to cause a fire when adjusting.

But you don't know what P(tesla catching fire at 15 years old) is yet. You'll have to wait and sum all the tesla fires from before to N years from now to do a comparison, where N is the {avg age, or max age, or something more complicated} of the a car in the ICE cohort.

That or you can recalculate the "53 fires per billion of miles" statistic, breaking down by cars M years or younger, where M is the {avg age of a tesla, or max age, or something more complicated}

Are you joking? Why would you think that age has not much to do with it? Do you think that new cars are just regularly having failures and starting on fire?

To be clear, you can find some data here: https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st...

"roughly three-quarters of the highway vehicle fires reported in the US in 2017 that were caused by mechanical or electrical failures (77 percent) involved cars with model years of 2007 or earlier"

Such failures accounted for about a little over 13 times as many fires as "Collision, overturn, or run over" and the remainder of categorized ones are intentional/exposure/careless smoking.

Maybe you need to reconsider your mental model of car fire causes.

Not joking at all - Based on that data we're talking maybe a maximum 2x increase due to the age factor when looking at relative risk. That would still mean Teslas are 5x less likely to cause a fire when adjusting. Maybe you need to read the study closer before assuming they back up your assumptions.

> Maybe you need to read the study closer before assuming they back up your assumptions.

Now I'm more confused. What possible assumptions of mine are you talking about? I didn't really make any claims anyway, so at best you can assume I shared the data about the age of cars because I believe that the age of cars is relevant to how likely they are to be involved in fires. The data backs that up.

Driving hours and ownership hours affect the expression of your car's likelihood of catching fire.

P(tesla catching fire over 10 years) is different than P(tesla catching fire over 2 years) is different than P(tesla catching fire the first week you buy it). Same with ICE cars, so you have to compare apples to apples.

I also wonder: is it fair to compare Tesla to all cars? Tesla makes $30k+ cars. If we compare to cars in its price range, do things change? Other breakdowns: by country, by model year, by powertrain type. It's probable that Tesla is being overly generous to itself in the stat it chose to report.

I could see it.

How does a car catch fire? After a cursory google, I found this article: https://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/accidents-...

IMO, a lot of the points in that article come down to "poor maintenance". Spilled fluids, fuel leaks, overheating an engine, overheating a cat, and poor maintenance can be nailed down to a car being on the road for a long time. Just because the flame retardant standards are high, doesn't stop hoses from coming loose.

I've done some work on cars, and they're tricky beasts. There's a lot going on under a hood, and a lot can go wrong. When you have high temperatures and flammable liquids, lots of things can go wrong, and that doesn't decrease as your car ages.

> Edit: This study suggests 12 year old cars have at most 2x the relative risk of fire as 2 year old cars.

That's bad math, the study does not say that. It doesn't give any information about the ratio of number of cars on the road of different ages.

If you looked at the fires that the study categorized by age you could say that 3x were from cars that are 12 years old compared to cars that were 2 years old. But that's not what you are claiming.

Even if you said 2x instead of 3x, your math would be nonsense because it would require that there were the same number of 2-yr old cars on the road as 12-yr old cars. But no reasonable person would possibly think that because the lifetime of a modern car is only 12 years on average (and even if not for that, it's incredibly unlikely given that significantly more 2-yr old cars were built than 12-yr old ones).

> the lifetime of a modern car is only 12 years on average

This is the number you'll find, but I don't think it's actually fair to modern cars as it's dragged down by older cars. I can't find anything that provides a good prediction of modern car lifetime based on failure rates, but given that the average car age has been slowly increasing for a while, I expect newer cars to have longer lifetimes than older cars (and while I expect this is due to the cars being built in ways that improve lifetimes, there could be all kinds of other reasons for that increase: better maintenance, higher tolerance for old cars, lower affordability of new cars, cars seeing less use, etc).

oof it’s been years since i saw such a blatant red herring

This is a fair point. The stats are likely to get worse over time as the Tesla fleet ages. Driving a vehicle a mile in an old (and likely poorly-serviced second hand) vehicle is more risky than driving a mile in a new Tesla. Or at least it ought to be.

Thank you for that context.

I once pointed out to Wells Fargo risk management that the extreme fear, uncertainty, and doubt regarding the presence and - God forbid - charging of electric vehicles in their garages is misplaced.

Think of it: gasoline is both extremely prone to evaporation, and its vapor is explosive. It’s kept in single-walled steel and aluminum sheet metal containers mounted to vehicle undersides that are exposed to every insult imaginable, from flying debris to road salt, in ten+ gallon volumes. These containers are inspected yearly at best, and even then, only in the most perfunctory manner. Best-practice and long-known techniques for early identification of metal fatigue and corrosive failure standard to other industries for far milder threats are simply not applied. Yet, a single leaking container in an enclosed space could lead to catastrophic detonation and boiling liquid exploding vapor (BLEVE) explosions in any adjacent containers. And there are many adjacent containers in these “parking garages”. Hundreds, even thousands of them!!

Is Wells Fargo in the business of constructing massive time-bombs?! Because, gentlemen, that is certainly what we have on our hands, in the shape of these so-called “parking garages”.

If “risk management” is to mean anything at all, it must address this clear and present danger.

As a first measure, explosive-laden transports must be excluded from enclosed parking structures. You want to bring literally a hundred pounds of liquid fire into the garage, because why?

I’ll tell you why: because you’re not thinking like a risk manager!

They recognized the truth of it and the only thing to do was laugh.

I can't help but put on my PM hat and say well this is almost certainly a statistical artifact, but they should probably take a closer look at the last software update.

Before we started using it as a pejorative, the point of fire drills was to practice doing something so that when it really matters you don't have to try to improvise a solution on the spot.

There are teachable moments around how long it takes you to verify that this had nothing to do with the software update. And if it turns out to be the software, you're going to feel pretty dumb for sandbagging. And as unlikely as it is, there is a non-zero probability of someone going to jail. So don't just check it, invest in being able to check it.

What's the rate of ICE car fires in comparison?

Would also be interesting to see the rate of car fires in non-Tesla EVs. It's probably confirmation bias but I have not heard of a car like the Audi E-Tron catching fire.

You would need to make that a serious research, people are throwing some stats around like it means something.

What’s the severity of the fire is most obvious thing that can’t be easily measured.

EV cars tend to burn down completely, while ICE cars do not.

This is impressively small amount of EV fires.

PlainSite's owner Aaron Greenspan is a known TSLAQ troll who's obsessed with Tesla and Elon Musk, and just lost a huge lawsuit against Tesla (https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-dismisses-...)

Let's look at all these reports:

* Some seem fake/old - (e.g. a single potato quality image in a tweet https://twitter.com/ATXKev1n/status/1528826357177892864 from a TSLA short - https://twitter.com/ATXKev1n/status/1527691352569524224)

* Some are caused by other fires (e.g. https://brooklynreporter.com/2022/04/streets-of-fire-tesla-g... - "A garbage fire on Fifth Avenue and 77th Street engulfed a Tesla")

* Some are minor fires in the cabin that didn't proliferate to the battery and didn't cause any serious damage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgZf-auOZxI)

* Some involve other vehicles as well (https://presse-fotos.dk/post/fire-elbiler-i-ladestander-brud..., https://abc7.com/santa-monica-car-crash-fire-parking-garage/...) - and as expected only reported as Tesla fires on PlainSite, although it's unknown which one started the fire.

Overall, the rate of serious Tesla fires with any injuries/fatalities is extremely low, since there are many safety nets in place and fires take a lot of time to expand (if they do at all).

So that's what the recent "don't charge at noon in Texas" messages by Elon were about?

Oddly enough, I was by a prius that had caught fire earlier today. I feel like the reporting of these incidents has intensified, but not sure if the underlying metrics have.

I remember a bad gasoline fire on a highway as a kid. Vehicle was totally engulfed, with flames that seemed very high (at least, from the perspective of a young kid). That seemed quite bad too.

Man, that was the most electrifying store by far.

Yeah, really shocking. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

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