The voting around this chain is really disappointing for a community that at least claims to be more well-versed in technical and math areas. Statistical claims that parrots Tesla's marketing is upvoted, a request for citation is heavily downvoted, and a flawed statistical presentation is upvoted while critiques are downvoted.

The downvotes are because the pessimists are asking for data that doesn't exist (due to how new most EVs are in general), and ignoring data that does exist (that EVs don't spontaneously combust as frequently as internal combustion vehicles).

No one is parroting Tesla's marketing (I'm unsure where they even market "our cars don't catch fire" explicitly), and the only way to accurately make a determination will be to wait until the average vehicle age of the EV fleet arrives at parity to the existing internal combustion fleet (as you mention in your own comment [1]).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190711204039/https://news.ycom...

So in that case, the original claim [1] should never have been made. Why that is being upvoted so heavily, given that the claim is not justified by the numbers, is the real surprise here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414075

Perception is reality and the numbers don't exist to make a concrete claim either way. This shouldn't be a surprise at all, regardless of forum. People will arrive at conclusions with the data available to them.

But saying "the risk is not yet quantifiable" isn't that exciting of a discussion topic.