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.
Average age of tesla on the road: 1.8 years
Just putting things in context.
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
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.
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.
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.
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}
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.
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).
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).