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Ugh. Another Model S fire - 2013-11-06

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No. Do I think that would result in a totaled car or injury to the driver? I doubt it.
There was another post about someone who cut their leg artery from running over road debris and died on the way to the hospital. I've also seen mention that the most common way cars catch on fire from debris is puncturing transmission/oil lines or pans and having the fluid hit the hot exhaust. There is no evidence new cars are any less susceptible to this. We don't have statistics to prove either way though.

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fires per collision.
To get sample for that, you have to answer how many collisions happened to the Model S (which is unknown).
 
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You could assume the collision rate for Teslas is the same as the national average, as someone here did.
That won't be accurate given the different ride height of vehicles (for example, a truck or SUV would have a very low probability of hitting road debris and we are a nation with a pretty large sample of trucks/SUVs). There's lots of talk about the ride height of the Model S being a possible contributor.

Average speed also contributes too (I think Model S trends high, esp. when comparing to something like Leaf or Volt).
 
That won't be accurate given the different ride height of vehicles (for example, a truck or SUV would have a very low probability of hitting road debris and we are a nation with a pretty large sample of trucks/SUVs). There's lots of talk about the ride height of the Model S being a possible contributor.

Average speed also contributes too (I think Model S trends high, esp. when comparing to something like Leaf or Volt).

That is a good point, it might be the case that the problem is that the low ride height makes collisions more probable. But even so, that is still problem worth talking about though. The low ride height is obviously important for the handling, so they might need to compromise.
 
That won't be accurate given the different ride height of vehicles (for example, a truck or SUV would have a very low probability of hitting road debris and we are a nation with a pretty large sample of trucks/SUVs). There's lots of talk about the ride height of the Model S being a possible contributor.

Average speed also contributes too (I think Model S trends high, esp. when comparing to something like Leaf or Volt).

Forget ride height. The real design flaw is that the car is just so much fun to drive. They should have made a crap-box, so people would just leave it in the garage. Then there'd be no highway collisions with metal debris at all!
 
I think it is pretty comical people believe we are defending the Model S because we own them. This whole fire issue is in my mind ridiculous. If the Model S were catching on fire spontenously I would think differently. However, in all of these cases the car struck objects on the road. Gas vehicles have the potential to catch fire the same way so why isn't everyone screaming about all the gas vehicles on the road. Why isn't Toyota, Honda blah blah being asked if they are going to recall their vehicles. In the end the Model S is safer than all the other vehicles and I would rather be in a Model S than any other vehicle because of the safety ratings and the potential of walking away from a major accident.
 
…/ I haven't offered any facts? Did I not give you the statistically expected number of fires with correct error ranges assuming a Poisson distribution?
Honestly… I don’t remember. And I don’t feel like spending time to go back and check. But for the sake of the argument – let’s assume there is something like what you are describing here up-thread.

1. According to our resident CERN-physicist Mario Kadastik and many others, such a number is meaningless at this point in time after just 2 fires.

2. There is no such thing as a figuratively speaking ‘bullet proof car’. And now we know that a Tesla Model S can catch on fire if it encounters something that exerts a pointed force of ~25 tons directly at the bottom of the battery pack. That fire though is something completely different when compared to fires in ICE-cars. It takes several minutes from the time the battery pack gets compromised until the fire starts. Consequently the driver and any passengers have plenty of time to stop and exit the vehicle.

3. The battery pack actually serves as protection against these kinds of road debris. If it wasn’t for the battery pack, things like a three-pronged trailer ball/trailer hitch could very well penetrate the floor board sheet metal. And on an ICE-car this kind of road debris could also rupture the fuel tank and the fuel lines – consequently leading to a very fast moving fire.
 
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Mod Note: I moved a whole bunch of stuff to snippiness. OK, I know it wasn't all snippy but much of was really off topic, back and forth semantics, and some provocation and silly stuff. Snippiness seemed as good a place as any to quarantine it all. A lot of folks were trying to make sense of it so I apologize to all who posted in good faith; I've tried to leave as much relevant stuff here as possible.

Let's move on please.
 

Thanks for the link. I think at is a very reasonable article that provides a fair perspective on the issue.

This is the key section, discussing how Lithium battery fires can start, quote:

"Put enough cells next to each other and a defect in one can quickly become a defect in all, thermal runaway on the scale of a car-sized battery pack. These breakdowns of the battery generate their own heat, or, in the words of chemists, the reaction is exothermic—enough so that the heat from one cell can set off another. That's why the software to manage the cooling and recharging of electric vehicle batteries is as important as the lithium ion battery pack itself.

And that's where Tesla has distinguished itself. (Tesla declined to provide someone to comment for this story but referred this reporter to the National Fire Protection Association and the company's online safety video.) The new car company confines each Model S's more than 6,500 lithium ion batteries from Panasonic in 16 individual modules—separate but equal and comprising the vehicle’s overall battery pack. By separating the modules in this way a mishap in one module is unlikely to spread to another module. In addition Tesla's battery pack is cooled with a glycol-based chemical cocktail, blue in appearance, that can quickly whisk away any excess heat. There is also a "firewall" between each module, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, suggesting that some kind of heat resistant material is segregating the modules. It seems that just one module burst into flames in the October 1 incident in Washington involving the pierced battery pack. The battery management system worked well enough that the car’s navigation system warned the driver to pull over and get away from the vehicle. He walked away from the accident unharmed.

That is often not true of crashes involving gasoline."
 
The Scientific American article was pretty thin on facts. It threw out a lot of statements and generalizations, but didn't back a lot of it up. I was hoping for a better analysis from SA. Oh well, Does anyone know if the NHTSA is moving forward with an investigation or if they are just waiting to hear back from Tesla first. I know Musk said their would be no recall, but that ultimately may not be up to him, so I was wondering if that meant the NHTSA had finished their investigation. That would be a fast turn around for a gov't bureaucracy, but you never know.

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Another question. Does anyone know if Elon Musk ended up responding to the fire in his blog as he said he would. He's had a lot to deal with the past few days, so it wouldn't be surprising if that has gone unaddressed.
 
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So curiosity got me and I went to Utube, put in "car fire" up came literally hundreds, finally scrolling down ran into the first incident.
i has over 3 million views! ALL the others were in the hundreds and thousands with ONE that had a little over 2 million. Hell, there was one where they pulled a mom and 2 kids out of an overturned burning SUV (CNN amateur footage) and even it didn't have but a few thousand views... I am astonished at the imbalance here I don't think the best PR firm could have gotten that kind of res.....

Oh, wow!
 
So curiosity got me and I went to Utube, put in "car fire" up came literally hundreds, finally scrolling down ran into the first incident.
i has over 3 million views! ALL the others were in the hundreds and thousands with ONE that had a little over 2 million. Hell, there was one where they pulled a mom and 2 kids out of an overturned burning SUV (CNN amateur footage) and even it didn't have but a few thousand views... I am astonished at the imbalance here I don't think the best PR firm could have gotten that kind of res.....

Oh, wow!

I think the publicity, as Elon Musk pointed out, is embellished on both sides of the spectrum. Telsa gets way more positive press than any other manufacturer and way more negative press. Often, the coverage is on topics that aren't all that groundbreaking or unique, but they are treated that way because it's Tesla. The company has a certain mystique that makes stories that wouldn't otherwise be interesting newsworthy.
 
Waze integration could help. "Object on road ahead alert" -> car auto-raises suspension until it passes the location. Should be plenty of time.

I had this exact idea this morning and even sent an email to Tesla suggesting it. Then, of course, I realized that someone must have thought about it already, googled for keywords and ended up right here :)
 
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I had this exact idea this morning and even sent and email to Tesla suggesting it. Then, of course, I realized that someone must have thought about it already, googled for keywords and ended up right here :)

I think in my area (Boston) they already seem to have the "Waze" traffic data overlaid on the Model S map... The roads show "Yellow" and "Red"on them, that seem to line up directly with the Waze app running on my iPhone, down to a very granular level :) I think they are working on integrating the Waze data already...