Re:Federal safety agency launches probe of Tesla battery fires
by danso on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @04:17PM
(#21652215)
Using the numbers from the article you linked, and this WaPo article with more details [0]:
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.
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_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Sales