Washington Post Tesla Fire hit piece

[Cleo-n-Company]

The headline sounds kinda dramatic to me.

“A Tesla Model S erupted ‘like a flamethrower.’ It renewed old safety concerns about the trailblaz...”

it seems most of his Tesla articles are to the negative.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/faiz-siddiqui/

The sad reality is that 98% of media -- whether it's CNN Fox OANN etc etc etc - always focuses on the negative. Media digs up the dirty laundry because that's what most of the world likes to see / read / hear.

It's not Tesla centric. But since Tesla is ripe for the pickings - it gets a lot of slugs in the stomach.

 

[beatle]

This also doesn´t look like a battery fire, but a coolant one, plus it seemed only on the passenger side. View attachment 621764

A coolant fire? Coolant is not flammable.

 

[2101Guy]

Chuckles: "Experts say electric cars catch fire at a similar rate to gas cars, if not less often"

They probably meant to say "if not more often", since "if not less often" means EVs catch fire less often than ICE.

no. he was correct in what he said.

 

[trayloader]

A coolant fire? Coolant is not flammable.

Sorry I meant AC coolant:
Safety Data Sheet R143a - ICool USAwww.icoolproductsusa.com › SAF...

 

[Merrill]

It’s the Washington Post!

 

[trayloader]

Tesla uses the legendary R1234yf coolant, which is the culprit for various fires in the car industry for years.
Here´s the list of manufacturers who use it:

Current list of OEs that use R-1234yf refrigerant

It´s called the "killer coolant" over here in Europe, since when emitted in contact with water (read extinguish)
and air its transformed to the highly toxic hydrofluoric acid.

A nice leftover from the Daimler cooperation days.
Daimler themselves banned it in 2017 however:
Daimler employs safety system for R1234yf MAC

 

[CyberGus]

From the story:

The firefighter “looked at me and he said, ‘You’re lucky you got out when you did, because you could have gotten stuck in there,’” Ahmad said. It raised similar concerns to the Florida crash involving Awan.​

Stuck? There's a manual release on the inside of the door. And I'm pretty sure that first-responders are aware that glass the breakable...?

 

[Chaserr]

Agreed. And this fire doesn't seem to be anywhere near the battery. What lives behind the passenger front tire?

The battery "lives" there and the battery heat outlets are there. Look for yourself, that's where your battery has its serial number sticker, and the heat exchangers are the reason Tesla's car cover has ventilated front wheels (so heat can escape even if you cover it while supercharging).

The front doors are completely mechanical inside. the rears have electronic handles with a mechanical backup release but the fronts are just a normal handle. When my 12v died it took days for the new one to be delivered, so I rolled down the windows and opened the door from inside using the handle. No issues with no power, whatsoever.

 

[trayloader]

That´s probably what this " journalist" creatively "condensed" out of the report.
The more I read about it, the more this smells.

Everything this guy EVER wrote about Tesla was demagogic, cliche ridden and false.
Check for Yourself, it´s almost comical:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/faiz-siddiqui/

The white glove from Jeff B. Hopefully Elon addresses this.

 

[Cleo-n-Company]

That´s probably what this " journalist" creatively "condensed" out of the report.
The more I read about it, the more this smells.

Everything this guy EVER wrote about Tesla was demagogic, cliche ridden and false.
Check for Yourself, it´s almost comical:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/faiz-siddiqui/

The white glove from Jeff B. Hopefully Elon addresses this.

You're right !

Elon should go on twitter and ill-advisedly get into a whirlwind back and forth with some reporter from The Washington Post.

Since the guy went to Nebraska - Elon should pull out his book of Cornhusker put-downs.

He shouldn't focus on building new factories... fixing his company's service and customer communications issues... revamping the Model S.

 

[Mhoepfin]

Hit piece or not, it doesn’t inspire confidence in my 85D.

 

[2101Guy]

Hit piece or not, it doesn’t inspire confidence in my 85D.

This is pretty common these days. Persons opt to go with whatever the "news" headline is that day vs using critical thinking skills to research (in this case) if Tesla's are MORE susceptible to fire than gas car.

Because if they did use critical thinking skills and analyze? They would probably find that the numbers/facts show, that you should be in more fear of your ICE car catching fire, than a Tesla...

 

[Mhoepfin]

This is pretty common these days. Persons opt to go with whatever the "news" headline is that day vs using critical thinking skills to research (in this case) if Tesla's are MORE susceptible to fire than gas car.

Because if they did use critical thinking skills and analyze? They would probably find that the numbers/facts show, that you should be in more fear of your ICE car catching fire, than a Tesla...

Thanks for saying I don’t use critical thinking, who do you think you are? I actually own an 85D which I’ve seen get nerfed and the charging curve flattened more and more. There’s a reason and there’s a problem.

 

[SO16]

Thanks for saying I don’t use critical thinking, who do you think you are? I actually own an 85D which I’ve seen get nerfed and the charging curve flattened more and more. There’s a reason and there’s a problem.

Supercharging is hard on the early cells over time. No surprise there. Unrelated to fire after damage though.

 

[brucet999]

A coolant fire? Coolant is not flammable.

The most common coolants like ethylene glycol or propylene glycol can burn, but their flash points are in excess of 200ºF, so would not likely catch fire from sparks. Does anyone know what the battery coolant temperature of a Tesla is? I suspect much less than 200ºF.

 

[Chaserr]

45C max. while chemically possible for coolant to burn at a much lower temperature (it's alcohol in a water mixture, so submerging it in the battery could possibly electrolyze enough water into gas to bring down the ignition temp) it isn't a coolant fire. it's just not probable.

The 85s have had a rash of fires like this for the last few years. Tesla responded to them the same way GM did with the Bolt fires - they reduced maximum charge capacity. Except Tesla didn't recall so some cars never updated, some paid to downgrade, and some keep catching on fire. The next time you see a parked car with an 85 battery, listen to it. if it has an affected battery you will be able to hear it humming if the battery is over 70% charged. Maybe lower, since this car burned at 69%. That noise is the coolant pumps running - not to actively cool, but to cycle the coolant constantly and avoid any cells building up heat internally. Also, to hopefully detect a runaway cell by looking for a section of the battery heating up more than the rest.

Teslas burn far less often than gas cars, but 85s have a known defect that causes spontaneous combustion.

 

[tmyl21]

Interesting! How does that relate to the early MS60 too out of interest ??

 

[Chaserr]

60s have the same battery chemistry but seem to be less affected. The hypothesis right now is 60s don't have the two front modules stacked on top of one another and maybe that is the problem spot (the other 14 are side by side). That's the narrower section of the battery between the front wheels. Until Tesla issues a recall with more info all we know for sure is they know about the fires and took drastic but secret actions in response to fires but these battery fires still happen. We need a recall for disclosure to know if any of it is actually safe and if people who aren't updating are still unsafe. Tesla has done software update recalls before so this one is probably hardware on top of the downgraded software changes, and batteries are expensive do they haven't done a recall.

 

[tmyl21]

That is very interesting and with quite a lot of 85s still in the wild for sure, only time will tell. Thanks for the insight

 

[Fairchild]

Just the facts:

All told, however, car fires happen. With 174,000 fires alone (in 2015) in the United States, that’s about one every 3 minutes. No matter how safe you make a vehicle, it always has the chance to catch fire.

It’s also clear that electric vehicles are less likely overall to catch fire, even with the current Bolt fires. Tesla claimed that gas cars are about 11 times more likely to catch fire than a Tesla. They refer to fires per 1 billion miles driven. With 300,000 Teslas on the road in 2019, and more than 7.5 billion miles driven at the time, there were about 40 fires reported. That’s five fires for every billion miles traveled, compared to 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars.