I am curious what folks think exactly got "fixed" here. It was incorrectly stated that the Model S is one of the lowest cars out there. It is not--there are a number of performance sedans that are lower (BMW M5: 4.6", Jag XF: 4.1", Audi RS7: 4.3") and have many more vehicles miles than the Model S without issues, so ground clearing is not an inherent issue. Speaking vehicle miles, the Model S has 12 months and 100,000,000 miles with the current design--two fires in a row does not make the design bad, it just makes for crappy timing for Tesla. Two data points does not make a trend--the other way to slice it, that is equally absurd is to say that Tesla will only have one road debris-based fire every 50,000,000 with no fatalities.
The issue is things getting under the car and penetrating the battery pack. By raising the car up, may actually be allowing more stuff under the car and make the situation worse. Unless you have some data that shows mean and mode height of road debris, you cannot say this fixes anything. Without the data, there is nothing magical about 5" or 6" that says one is inherently safer than the other as stuff that would have bounced off the front of the car now gets underneath it.
Maybe that data exists, but then it would be good to communicate that info, otherwise this seems like a panicked, knee-jerk reaction driven by PR and layers. I prefer engineers to design my car.
Tesla is a young company and I am willing to cut them some slack, but their handling of this is really this first time they have left me disappointed.
O