2,000 cars in the U.S. and Canada were believed to have had fires related to the ignition switches, which were installed in 23 million Ford vehicles. This is a failure rate of about 0.0087% overall, although Ford ultimately argued that it would only need to recall a subset of the vehicles with the ignition switch: 8.7M vehicles.
There are at least a dozen [1] Tesla fire incidents, and 720,000 Tesla vehicles sold through 2019 Q2 [2], which is a failure rate of about 0.0014%. So Tesla has a lower rate, but not by an order of magnitude, because Tesla has sold far fewer vehicles than Ford did over roughly the same number of years. So it seems justified for NHTSA to take a serious look into the issue.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/04/26/f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicle_fire_...
How many modern vehicles spontaneously burst into flame? I could easily believe it's orders of magnitude larger than for Teslas, but when you make comparisons like you did it just discredits your entire argument.
Oh, and the majority of present-day ignitions in automobiles are still the exact same mechanical interlock switching types used since the 60's. Higher-end vehicles have solid state switching, but it's not the majority of vehicles.
Also:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/bmw-recalls-million-vehicles-fire-...
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
Anyway, agree to disagree I guess.
Ford recalled 8.7 million cars for spontaneous fire risk.[1] And that's just one case.
It happens more often than you'd think, and coverage of it in media tends to be subdued. Automotive is the largest source of advertising dollars for many media markets.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-26-mn-63066-...