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Comment by Camillo | Hacker News Reader

This is a very smart move by Musk from a PR point of view. By accusing Boeing's batteries of being fundamentally unsafe, he garners the maximum amount of trust from people who are concerned about battery safety, so that, when he immediately follows up with an explanation of why this couldn't happen on a Tesla, those very people are already leaning towards believing him. This goes over much better than attempting to defend the safety of high-density batteries in general.

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I think he probably saw it as a defensive move: He doesn't want li-ion technology to get a bad name, and that doesn't mean only explaining why Tesla's approach is safe, but also trying to help others avoid mistakes that could hurt the whole industry including his company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_best_defense_is_a_good_offe...

> Generally the idea is that offensive action preoccupies the opposition and ultimately its ability to directly harm.

That makes sense.

A smart move would be waiting for the NTSB report instead if assuming that you can divine what is happening with a minimal set of facts.

I've had my share of "experts" opine on their imagine root causes of problems based on whatever bullshit they made up while the incident response folks were figuring it out using real data.

The problem is, the folks figuring this out aren't talking, because they aren't done. So now a bunch of people will remember what Elon Musk said, and the whole process is tainted.

IMO, good PR is talking about how your company implemented battery technology in a safe way. Not this.

it makes strategic sense to taint your competitor, if there is no repercussion for doing so, but lots of advantages.

Boeing is not a competitor. If there is any strategy behind this move it is to make the public think it is just Boeing's batteries which are at fault and not lithium batteries in general.

United Launch Alliance competes directly with SpaceX. ULA comprises Lockheed and Boeing.

That makes me wonder what the next public and private PR moves should be for Boeing. My first guess is that their strategy should:

A) Mention the tradeoffs involved with any engineering project

B) Quickly accept blame instead of pushing it off to a supplier, a single employee and/or group (i.e., even if they have excellent reason and evidence for doing so)

C) Make known their official stance on Elon's technical assessment

I also think that they should first respond to Elon privately and later make a public statement--when they are ready. I happen to think they should make a public statement about what Elon's statement rather quickly. However, I realize that their executive staff and PR department may need some time to discuss this.

Because Elon is so "high-profile," if they don't handle this wisely, the press will give them two black eyes instead of one.

D) Invent a time machine and qualify two different battery types, as they should have done in the first place.

Everything else will keep the 787 on the ground for a very long time, I'm afraid.

E) Replace with proven technologies (NiCd or AGM) which weigh more and accept a small hit on fuel efficiency until the lithium problems are sorted out.

Trouble is, any such change, even to a "proven" technology, will trigger an avalanche of red tape from the FAA. They don't issue slipstream patches in that business.

D) take EM's offer and source the batteries / solution to a joint boeing-spacex/tesla project and proudly proclaim that they're going to the world's experts on batteries, the same people that NASA trusts - SpaceX. This provides positive press for both companies and (provided they fix the problem) resolves any long term problems that might completely destroy their business (like having multiple planes catch fire or blow up).

All it will take is to swallow their pride for a moment and go to their competitor to help solve the problem.

They can't do that since Boeing are in a joint venture as direct competition to SpaceX, as stated in the article.

There may be the perception that they "can't" - and it is realistic to state this - but they actually can.

Bad use of language on my part, it would probably be more accurate to say that they won't, because of the politics involved.

FWIW it was absolutely not the intention to criticise you, what you said, or how you said it – I'd have said the same thing as you did. I felt the need to put the distinction forward as I'm in the eternal process of removing "can't"'s from my mindset.

Tesla's /cells/ are also "fundamentally unsafe", but they make the /batteries/ as safe as possible.

Fundamentally _safe_ would be LiFePO4 chemistry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

Longer lifespan and significantly cheaper than cobalt, manganese, etc; but 20% lower specific mass. Survives having a nail driven through a fully-charged cell with only some smoke and a small bit of flame -- not a meltdown like the more active chemistries.

"Tesla's /cells/ are also "fundamentally unsafe", but they make the /batteries/ as safe as possible."

While it's certainly true that the Li-ion chemistry used in the Tesla's batteries are flammable, keep in mind the current common alternative to those potentially burning cells is carrying round a metal or plastic tank with 10 or more gallons of gasoline in it. If there weren't a 100+ year history of people doing just that and getting away with it most of the time, you surely wouldn't be allowed to do it in today's safety-conscious society.

Gasoline is not all that dangerous in the vast majority of failure modes. Li-ion is both corrosive and easier to set on fire which is a real issue for hybrids and aircraft.

Vast majority, yes. But I've seen failure modes where it was dangerous on more than one occasion.

Gasoline isn't dangerous? It's ten times as easy to light up a gas tank than a battery pack, and the energy release is instant.

You can drop a lit match into a bucket of gasoline. It needs to be aerosolized to be explosive.

You can indeed, and it ignites the gasoline. Gasoline vapors in air have relatively wide explosive limits which can be attained in a wide variety of ways, not only by aerosolization.

Then the multiple times I've seen that done, by multiple different people, all happened with something other than gasoline.

I'm not saying it can't happen, and I'm well aware that gasoline vapors are extremely dangerous. I'm just saying that the gas tank in your car isn't "10 times as easy to light up" as the newer, super-energy-dense lithium chemistry based batteries.

Diesel fuel and kerosene are good candidates for the "something other than gasoline". They'll both happily put out a lit match.

May I suggest, by the way, that you think twice and double-check your facts before posting potentially fatal fire-safety advice on the internet? You'll probably never know if you've killed somebody. If you want to try the gasoline-bucket experiment, I recommend doing it in a small coffee can on a large concrete pad that you don't mind discoloring.

I think the critical difference is how long the bucket full of gasoline has been sitting there. If you just filled it up, there will be a lot of vapors hovering above the surface. If it's been sitting, undisturbed and uncovered, for a good long while, there won't.

In the former case, you're going to lose your eyebrows, at best. In the latter, the match will go out.

Gasoline vapors are several times heavier than air, so they tend to stay in buckets, crawl across basement floors, and so on. Maybe if you let the bucket sit there long enough, they'll displace enough oxygen that you won't get a fire at the surface.

Another crucial variable is the temperature. If you do the experiment with the bucket sitting in a snowdrift, you probably can get it to snuff out a match, regardless of how long it's been sitting there.

Yup, it works out fine almost every time.

> This is a very smart move by Musk from a PR point of view.

This is an awful PR move if he's wrong. I hope he's sure.

an MIT professor already backs up what he is saying, he is not on his own with his opinion

Not just any MIT prof-- Sadoway is an expert metallurgist and leading researcher on energy storage in batteries. The article is also incorrect: Sadoway is part of the Materials Science Engineering Department.

As an aside, his intro chemistry lectures are excellent, entertaining, and available online. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/materials-science-and-engineering...

Except they're both clueless about battery use in planes.

Do batteries start working differently when they are placed in planes?

Well, they might do - temperature, pressure etc.

Eh, I can't imagine either Prof Sadoway or Musk is only familiar with batteries at room temperature at sea level.

...and on what basis do you make that claim?

Is this like that magic ink that patents are printed in that makes inventions something entirely different when you add "in planes" or "on the Internet" to them?

It's a smart PR move in either scenario. It's unlikely this will matter if he is wrong.

If he is correct, this will become an even larger main stream news story and there is a good chance that his prescience will be picked up and included in how it is reported.

More importantly, if this becomes a major story, he has preempted the inevitable look at other products (tesla) which include li-ion batteries by describing the distinction between the two. This could become a major shitstorm that Tesla gets rolled into but by making this statement he's getting out in front of it and shaping how that story will be told.

If he is wrong, the batteries are fine and there is no story.

No one ever remembers the predictions you got wrong, just the ones you got right. It's the basis of all punditry.

this is hard to swallow when someone posted a list of half a dozen horribly incorrect technology predictions in this very thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138247

Which were all urban legends or misquotes, though.

I don't know. I could see it getting to a less tech savvy media outlet and become Founder of Tesla openly admits batteries in their cars are fundamentally unsafe.

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