Crank up the Press - Another Tesla Fire

Airboss,
I understand you "believe" that the older a car is the more likely it is to catch on fire. If this was the single variable fires would be increasing recently instead of decreasing. You can dig through the statistics, but again, you refuse to do that work. That gibberish that you posted seemed to say an 11 year old car has 11 times the chance to catch fire as a 1 year old car. Great. I would think it is slightly more. But that doesn't change the math of how many incidents per hundred million miles. Any idiot can tell that the word problem doesn't follow the proper math at all. You are doing incidents per year, and pretending its for lifetime. 1 fire per 20 million miles. 1 fatal fire per 1000 fires. If a 20 year old car has an empty gas tank, no battery, and never moves, you should not weight it the same in your sample.

I really have not done the work either, but if the NHTSA said what you just did, then Congressman Issa or Kelly would have surely brought it up with the wierd volt fire witch hunt.

All I see is bad logic, but don't you agree absolutely that we won't know the real probability until time goes by so we have a older tesla fleet and more miles on them.

 

See what you want. More Tesla incidents will reveal the core of the issue.

 

Ask the OP, "Hamp".

The US registered fleet average WAS 11.4 years as of August 2013 reports -- a little more current than the 2007 pre-Tesla S cites.

 

I'll bet Musk "hopes". A lot.

 

I certainly understand that desire. However, it is a valid question and I like to test Musk's statements, as I do any other business leader's statements.

It is the best data I have found so far. And I didn't think AirBoss was looking for data.

AirBoss, if you have newer data than 2007 I encourage you to share it.
If you want to discuss my criticism of the article you did share I am more than happy to. I would like to start with his Tesla accident rate changing from 0.00024 to 0.0024 in the very next paragraph.

 

We accept the age of cars. Age apparently increases some fire risks while cutting others.

The only fires by model years I have found are in that 2007 paper I posted.
It showed that fires due to mechanical and electrical failures are very low in the first couple of model years. However, it also showed that fires intentionally set and due to collision/rollover were more common in the first couple of years.

Here is the paper again: http://tkolb.net/FireReports/US_VehFirTrePat2003-2007.pdf
It is on page 18 of the report.

 

So you're saying some Canadian who was underwater on his/her Tesla burned it? Eh?

 

Why not ask "Hamp"? Or refute his thesis.

 

That is an incorrect assumption.
I do not have enough data to state what caused the garage fire in Toronto.
This is about the rates and causes of car fires.
Do you have any data to contribute?

 

Well, he doesn't post here, and you brought him up.

But whatever, he is in error.
"The average ICE vehicle is 11.4 years old (we'll just use 11). During those 11 years, the rate of fire is ~138,600/230,000,000 (controlling for intentional fire, etc.). That means risk of fire over the life of an ICE car is 0.0006. To get the risk per year, we have to divide by 11. We get 0.00005."

The rate of fire is a per year statistic. It is (number of vehicle fires for a year/the fleet size for that year). To determine the fire risk for a car over its life, that calculation needs to be performed for each year it existed. Calculating it for one year, and then spreading it out over the life of the car is just wrong.

 

I believe you may have sent this to me by accident. Certainly no one wants their car to have defects, but if they exist a good ceo will fix them. That is why I bought calls (increased my investmetn) in december.

Now I don't know how good you are with numbers, but its in Tesla's best interest to research and fix problems as fast as possible. Let's wait for the report before you pretend the model S is anouther pinto ( a car that actually didn't have higher fatality rates than other small, unsafe cars). I would expect at least 12 fires to have statistical confidence that the tesla was less safe. These may be coming, but if you are doing your math correctly unlike the idiot that you quoted, we should be seeing 1 a month, so lets see if that happens.

Of the 3 accidents, 2 look like they would have also happened in a "gasoline" car, perhaps not the fires but serious damage. In fact in one of the incidents in most "gasoline" cars there would have been serioius injuries. In one, where the road debris was present, the driver was never in danger of being injured, but it may not have happened in a gasoline car, only under carrage damage. Tesla has examined it and decided they don't need to or want to do anything. In a similar case with the volt gm decided to add bracing, but tesla likely is already built up with more protection than the volt. Its here that I want to hear the NHTSA report. Finally we have torronto, where we know it was not the traction battery since it did not burn. We really need more information here from the investigation.

If there are problems, Telsa only needs to fix them on 30,000 cars, and I am confident they will. Plug-ins are not inherantly less safe as those FUD spreaders will want you to believe, but tesla may have a car specific problem. Toyota had 2 part specific problems and had to recall over 7 million cars for fire damage. I don't think that hurt toyota. The damage to the car company is when they don't work with the safety agencies and deny the problems. This often results in deaths. No sign of tesla doing that.

 

An oldy but a goody, putting fire risk in perspective from the real statistics
While U.S. Probes Tesla, What You Should Know About Car Fires

This may explain why fatalitiy statistics are down from the 1980s in car fires. Newer cars are less likely to roll over in part because of electronic stability. Less rollovers seems to be related to less deaths from vehicle fires. The tesla S because its center of gravity is so low would require a ramp, or other mechanical aid to rollover. Because it doesn't use fuel lines they aren't likely to rupture.
Nat geo doesn't give the ev a pass though, and there are other important things to consider

It sounds like the nhtsa is on a learning curve here.

 

I can't. He was banned months ago.

You are passing the buck, using as your source a FUD post from a first time poster who admitted just two hours later that his math was wrong. He is now gone, so you are the only one left to defend it.

PS: When you copied his post and pasted it here, you had to specifically remove the 'Banned' label. Why did you do that?

 

My bigger problem isn't that hamp was banned, but thst he is obviously off by an order of magnitude or more. Its like quoting a blogger that says a prius battery will die in less than 3 years and will be very expensive to replace. Just false information.

 

Even worse, its like quoting a blogger who soon thereafter admitted to incorrect information. So Air_Boss is left alone to defend that 'information' by himself.

And when Air_Boss passed the buck by telling me to go ask hamp, he had to have known that hamp was no longer available to be contacted, so he was knowingly sending me down a dead end path.

 

LOL. Is he banned here, too?

 

That of course goes for both EV and ICE, so both are off by that factor, and so what's your point?

 

"Hamp" jumped from Tesla fire ratio of 0.00024 to 0.0024. This alone invalidates his conclusion.
Which Hamp himself apparently said was wrong.

Our point is, we found data showing the number of fires in cars that are new. I have shown those numbers here: Crank up the Press - Another Tesla Fire | Page 4 | PriusChat

If you disagree with the findings, please let us know what part specifically.
If you have another source of data, please share it.

 

I don't know what his handle is here. Is it you?

That the section you quoted is garbage, and even the person who wrote it has admitted that the math is in error. You still have no foundation for your claim.