Tesla electric car catches fire in Toronto; company has not yet explained
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
New technology will always have problems; how you approach those problems will determine how successful you ultimately are.
And no matter how well you test your technology, once you get in the hands of the public, they'll do all kinds of things with your stuff that you could never imagine or test for.
So... what exactly did catch fire?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1xuwx7/tesla_fi...
Relative to other cars, Tesla car fires are quite rare.
Can you point to a source for that statement?
When reading any story about a Tesla fire keep in mind that HN users post multiple stories about 100% of Tesla fire events, while 0% of internal combustion stories reach the HN audience. The media create this "issue" by detailing the exceptional Tesla fire events and ignoring commonplace gasoline vehicle fires.
[1] Recall ID # 67472 at http://www.motortrend.com/cars/1999/ford/explorer/recalls/
is that true? do you know the stats on this because that would be interesting, obviously normalized for model year.
Why would you normalize by model year before having seen any data?
Do you posit that older cars by years since manufacture date are more likely to catch fire? That poorly maintained cars or higher mileage cars are more likely to catch fire? That modern cars are less likely to catch fire? Each of these hypotheses would require some form of validation.
As a point of comparison to a car with an actual fire problem, 10 of the 1,500 produced Ferrari 458s caught fire in a 3 month period before Ferrari recalled the cars to replace a wheel arch adhesive which caused the fires.
Source for fire number: http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/fires-in...
How many of these are modern, late-model cars?
To get a feeling of whether my idea that older cars are more likely to catch fire is true, let's compare what the average car in the USA does. There are 250M cars in the USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...). 17 an hour is about 400 a day or 160k a year. That would mean that about one in 1500 cars catches fire every year.
I don't have data, but I find that very high for new cars.
Also, translating to the about 25k Tesla's in the USA (can't find precise numbers easily), we would expect 15 fires a year or just over one a month. That's within a factor of 2 or so of the frequency with with I read about Tesla fires.
I don't think those arguments are conclusive, but I certainly don't see them as evidence for your claim, either.
Edit: should have refreshed the page. There's some data elsewhere on this page that puts some nuance into this. I still think Tesla cars should be compared to cars of similar age, and don't expect them to do that much better there. Stats on causes do car fires could sway that, though. If many of them are caused by people being careless with gasoline (smoking at the pump, dropping gasoline or oil on a hot engine), things could look wildly different.
They do. Check out YouTube, or the anecdotes in the other comments here. I'll throw in another -- one of my neighbors' cars spontaneously caught fire sitting in his driveway after midnight. The fire department had to come put it out, along with the front of his house it started to set fire to.
It would be interesting to know the Tesla's operating range during the cold part of the year in Toronto and environs. Most batteries are temperature-sensitive and don't charge or discharge as efficiently as they do in warmer climates.
Meanwhile, Winnipeg (Winterpeg) is a full 10 degrees latitude south of Oslo, but is much, much, colder.
As as aside, though Europe's warmer climate is often attributed to the Gulf Stream, evidence suggests it's actually a consequence of angular momentum. See, for instance,
https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/issue.aspx?id=999&y...
and the paper in PDF form here:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/pubs/Seager_etal...
Your emotional scale needs calibration.
What the hell?