I see 1 major flaw in your analysis, all the similar ones out there and even Elon's reasoning. (Note: not trying to be hostile here, this is just my 2 cents).
You are all talking about car fires, and how many happen per year, etc. as if all those scenarios were the same. But I do not think they are.
The statistics we have mainly captures fires that are a result of a major crash, a faulty fuel line, some mechanical faliure due to maintenance, build quality/materials or under-specced parts. I am not sure this is the right comparison as we haven't seen that with Tesla so far. Maybe the 2nd fire falls under that category, but the consensus seems to be, that pretty much any car would have burst into flames in that scenario.
The Model S seems to have 1 potential weakness that presents itself in the most unusal situation. You need an enormous force concentrated on a small section of the thick bottom plate that manages to drill through it. That is a very odd situation - if it weren't, you would see a lot more of these cases. We have seen dozens of reports of huge Model S crashes, even many photos on these forums with no fire at all. Comparing these 3 cases to the general fire statistics creates the impression the Model S bursts into flames when it crashes - when that has never happened so far.
The only scenario that seems to defeat that thick housing is road debris of the sepcial kind.
Consider this: you need to
- have a large enough debris on the road that the S cannot simply drive over
- a small enough debris that the front of the S would not throw out of the way
- a heavy, strong enough debris that can provide the force (will not crumble)
so this can get stuck under the car, with the full weight of the vehicle pressing against it at high speeds for a long enough time.
Now, granted this has happened 2 times, but so far it seems the biggest issue was that the car acted like a gigantic broom on the highways: it sat about 1 inch lower than the majority of cars. Now that they updated the firmware, you could also add to the list above that you would also need to be the 1st car on the road to hit that debris - you can probably run the statistics on that with the number of cars on the road and miles driven.
And than you have the low number of cases once more: drawing conclusions from 0,015% of the Model S catching fire (3 out of 20000) is just raping statistics - in my opinion. Doing this per miles driven and comparing that to other, similarly used cars could make more sense, but no one has those numbers.
(By similarly used cars I mean A6/7, S8, M3, M5, etc. When people start comapring this to Leafs never catching fire, I start wonder if they relaize we don't have 20k Leafs going 70-100 miles an hour on highways for an extended period as they are small city cars with a very limted range at that speed. So what are the chances of them hitting debris at highway speed?).
You are all talking about car fires, and how many happen per year, etc. as if all those scenarios were the same. But I do not think they are.
The statistics we have mainly captures fires that are a result of a major crash, a faulty fuel line, some mechanical faliure due to maintenance, build quality/materials or under-specced parts. I am not sure this is the right comparison as we haven't seen that with Tesla so far. Maybe the 2nd fire falls under that category, but the consensus seems to be, that pretty much any car would have burst into flames in that scenario.
The Model S seems to have 1 potential weakness that presents itself in the most unusal situation. You need an enormous force concentrated on a small section of the thick bottom plate that manages to drill through it. That is a very odd situation - if it weren't, you would see a lot more of these cases. We have seen dozens of reports of huge Model S crashes, even many photos on these forums with no fire at all. Comparing these 3 cases to the general fire statistics creates the impression the Model S bursts into flames when it crashes - when that has never happened so far.
The only scenario that seems to defeat that thick housing is road debris of the sepcial kind.
Consider this: you need to
- have a large enough debris on the road that the S cannot simply drive over
- a small enough debris that the front of the S would not throw out of the way
- a heavy, strong enough debris that can provide the force (will not crumble)
so this can get stuck under the car, with the full weight of the vehicle pressing against it at high speeds for a long enough time.
Now, granted this has happened 2 times, but so far it seems the biggest issue was that the car acted like a gigantic broom on the highways: it sat about 1 inch lower than the majority of cars. Now that they updated the firmware, you could also add to the list above that you would also need to be the 1st car on the road to hit that debris - you can probably run the statistics on that with the number of cars on the road and miles driven.
And than you have the low number of cases once more: drawing conclusions from 0,015% of the Model S catching fire (3 out of 20000) is just raping statistics - in my opinion. Doing this per miles driven and comparing that to other, similarly used cars could make more sense, but no one has those numbers.
(By similarly used cars I mean A6/7, S8, M3, M5, etc. When people start comapring this to Leafs never catching fire, I start wonder if they relaize we don't have 20k Leafs going 70-100 miles an hour on highways for an extended period as they are small city cars with a very limted range at that speed. So what are the chances of them hitting debris at highway speed?).
- never mind)
