Original text too short.
Tesla electric cars less likely to catch fire than internal combustion alternatives – report
12 thoughts on “Tesla electric cars less likely to catch fire than internal combustion alternatives – report”
Leave a Reply
Copyright © 2021. All rights reserved
I’m sure this is true, and as a Tesla owner I’m glad to hear it, but I still think like both sides of this debate are talking past each other. I’ve seen no evidence that EV fires are more *common* than ICE fires—or even as common—but surely they happen for entirely different reasons, right? I think it’s the fact that EV fires represent a *new* risk, irrespective of frequency, that makes this such an attention-getting subject.
Quantifying risk is one thing, but understanding it on a more qualitative level will always be essential. Even if they’re rare, I think EV fires still seem more mysterious to the general public. That’s worth addressing.
>data shows that in the US there is one ICE vehicle fire for every 19 million miles travelled
Deeply flawed comparison, IMHO. The most obvious flaw is the age of the affected cars: The average car on US roads is older than 12 years.
One big reason Tesla’s are less likely, is because they’ve been building in all sorts of software contingencies. Looking for certain malfunctions of sub components that can overcharge or overheat individual cells and disabling the cell pack or imposing voltage limits.
The time they had to develop their own tech really did give them an advantage. And all the people who were pissed their cars lost some range suddenly after Tesla rolled out those protection updates didn’t realize their cars were at risk of a fire too.
as stated in the article, every accident and mishap with a telsa gets media coverage. which is not true for ICE cars. the detrimental health and safety of ICE cars is severely underreported. for example ICE emissions have even worse health outcomes than we thought just a few years ago.
This is the same old Tesla report comparing new Teslas with old ICEs?
The difference seems to be in the relative difficulty of putting the fires out, not in frequency of fires. Firefighters arrive and put ICE vehicle fires out very quickly, while fires involving lithium batteries basically have to be left burning until the vehicle is fully consumed. Firefighters just use water to cool the outside of an EV fire so it doesn’t spread.
I just don’t think that these kind of statistics are useful. How old are the ICE cars that are bursting into flames? I’m guessing many of them are very old cars that are in a poor state of repair. Most Teslas are probably less than 10 years old.
> “From 2012 to 2020, there has been approximately one Tesla vehicle fire for every 205 million miles travelled. By comparison, data shows that in the US there is one ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicle fire for every 19 million miles travelled,” Tesla’s ***2020 Impact Report*** claimed.
And this is a fair comparison because Toyota produced zero vehicles before 2012?
An ICE car just burn up on my residential street a few days ago. I’ve seen several ICE fires in my time driving..just burning on the side of the road.
Individually I’m better than all humans on average. Comparing against averages isn’t exactly something to brag about
Well, there are not a lot of super-old Teslas on the road just yet, so that might skew statistics somewhat in their favor.
Also, Ferrari haven’t started making EVs yet, so that probably skews the spontaneous combustion ratio somewhat. → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtdDOeAlzrQ
Being less likely is not a good selling point.
EV batteries should not catch fire.
They need to redesign the batteries.