I liked Elon's point that if they had the slightest concern that there was a problem with the safety of the car, they would recall it immediately. He pointed to a recall they did earlier which was for something that was only a theoretical problem. IMO, this is the best way of framing this I've heard from him so far. Drop the statistics and such. Just say, "Look, I care about safety more than anything else. I'd recall the cars in a heartbeat if I had the slightest doubt about their safety---in fact, I already have. I looked at this, and I'm definitely not doing a recall."
AGREED! cant believe how everyone here got carried away by this...they were two freak accidents and one drunken retard.. lets move on to real issues
So, has there been a "permanent injury"? I'm wondering since Elon used to say "...to my knowledge there has never been a permanent injury in Model S"
In short term it is good for the stock. But what if several more Model S catch on fire due to road debris? They are really not planning to do anything about it?
Didn't Elon say 5 times less fire risk after the first fire? Now two fires later in a little over a month and the statistic is still 5 times less risk? I am not sure I follow this statistic, and why it doesn't change? I had it down to below 2 times by now, and then you are comparing a brand new car, that shouldn't catch fire all too often, to cars that are in some cases more than a decade old. Can someone please explain this to me?
What if, what if, what if. It could take 10 days, 10 months or 10 years for something like this to happen again. We'll have to see what the future brings. But at the moment they are not planning on doing anything about it simply because they do not consider it to be a serious safety issue. And if you take a step back and look at it, it really isn't. Yes, those cars were lost, but the occupants drove on for a while after hitting the metal objects, were warned by the car to pull over, had all the time in the world to leave the car, and when a fire eventually started it was limited to the front part of the car and never even reached the passenger compartment. If this is a reason for a recall or modification of the car, then we should recall and modify all the ICE's of the world. Preferably to remove the gasoline tank.
I guess we are down to about 2 times less (60%). But the new car/old car distinction doesn't make sense to me unless there is a reason to believe that old batteries are more prone to catching fire than new ones (not impossible but haven't heard so). OTOH, the Model S appears to have done extremely well in the second accident, fire afterwards or not, but that's not reflected on by the fire statistic alone.
I am watching the live stream of Elon's interview right now and he is walking through the math and it doesn't add up. I am extremely disappointed that a rocket scientist is doing simple math wrong: Elon: 1 in 1300 ICE cars catch fire. There are now 25000 Teslas on the road now, so 3 fires is 1 per 8000 cars or 5 times less likely to catch fire than ICE cars. Seriously?
Well, it is 6 weeks later now. So we have about 2000 more cars putting miles on the odometer now than we did at the time of the first fire, plus the cars that were already on the road continue to rack up miles. And maybe with more Superchargers, people are putting on miles at a greater rate as well. I'm not suggesting we actually doubled the number of Model S miles driven in the last 6 weeks, but with rounding differences and margins for error, maybe we are still relatively close enough to Elon's original estimate.
Sure Sleepy; You have 2 colours: 26 red and 26 black. What is the statistics of (when blind) picking a black or red card? Answer is 50 %. You picked a black card. You take 52 New cards; If you pick a second black card, what is the statistics of picking ablack card the next time? Answer is 50 %. If you picked a black card for the third time, what is the statistics of picking a black card the next time: the same 50 %. You may say that I can’t use the 52[SUP]nd[/SUP] card one more time. Ok, let’s say we have about 20000 cars; red and black. What is the statistics you pick the black car? 50%. If you remove the black car, what is the statistics when you have 9999 black cars and 10000 red cars? When you have picked 3 black cars, what is the statistics that you pick the black car, when you have 9997 black and 10000 red? Pretty close to 50%!
My math is a little rusty, but wouldn't this depend on whether the 1/1300 stat is per car per year vs. at any given moment 1/1300 ICE cars will catch on fire?
Several more will. There's 25,000 of them out there and there will be more as time goes on. This happens to cars, all kinds of cars, every day (and happens to the rest of them more often than to the Model S). As long as cars are traveling on the road at high rates of speed, this will happen. There's nothing to be done about it, which is why they're not doing anything about it. The issue is down to the media to report properly. Which is to say: not at all, because that's how they treat it when this happens to any other car. It's not news, it never was news, and it never was a problem, and why the hell are we still talking about it.