Leading cause of highway vehicle fires, "mechanical failure" http://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/reports/vehicles.shtm

Are Tesla cars less likely to catch on fire? Maybe. There isn't enough data to determine yet.

Are Tesla cars much safer than gas vehicles when they do catch on fire? Yes! This should be the focus.

Well. There's that chance of the average vehicle burning.

There's a breakdown in the PDF "Highway Vehicle Fires (2008-2010)" that points out a lot of the fires in traditional vehicles (about 40%) are started by arson and accidental, non-malfunction sources of ignition. And that there's reason to believe arson is under-reported:

NFIRS no longer collects information on suspicious fires that may have been intentionally set. As a result, intentional fires may be undercounted. Moreover, due to the volume of fires, many automobile fires are not investigated for possible arson.

Only about a quarter of vehicle fires are considered to be definitely malfunction-related.

I want to see Tesla succeed. But I don't think its hype or alarmist to say that they seem to be malfunctioning in this way a lot, catching fire in everyday situations (like driving down the road) that don't seem to ignite many conventional cars. That's probably perfectly natural; new tech always has growing pains.

Of course, the investor types will sensationalize it all, but I suspect most people are just curious on what the overall statistics will converge to. Are fires more or less likely in Tesla vehicles compared to gasoline vehicles? We don't have enough data to say yet. When a fire does happen, is it more dangerous or less in a Tesla compared to a gasoline vehicle? Again, probably not enough data, but the odds are looking good so far.

Finally, a volatile stock price is to be expected when there's so much speculative trading going on surrounding the company.

So far I would say the most common link between all three events is that people were driving them. People should stop driving them as to prevent these fires.

But according to the report, only 28% of fires started with the fuel igniting. So that's less than I expected.

Take a Tesla to an empty field, pour gasoline all over it, apply flame, watch headlines of "yet another Tesla catches fire" to appear.

You forgot step 1 - Short TSLA

Anyway, this was in jest. But I also wanted to bring attention to the fact that TSLA is in unique position to be sabotaged for gain, more so than just about any other public company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_C/K#Sidesaddle_fuel_t...

(http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/uni...)

The leaf sold 6375 during the same period (us only).

I think Teslas number was global sales. But still Leaf out sold teslas the last quarter in the US.

http://www.hybridcars.com/eight-us-sales-records-in-eight-mo...

Where did you get your numbers from?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_automobile... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S

This fire is related to an accident? Can you help me out, and tell me which of the 21 pages I can skip to to read that part.

I've clicked on most of the pages, and I just see speculation that goes back in forth about whether there was an accident or not, based on a handful of pics someone posted.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/07/autos-tesla-fire-i...

"It's possible that it ran over a piece of metal in the roadway and it got up in the engine compartment," police dispatcher Kathy Bryant said.

Apparently speculation by a police dispatcher now counts as confirmed facts.

They have a confirmation from the driver, but instead of saying that, they include speculation from the dispatcher? I don't buy that.

In an update to that post, Tesla then linked to the Reuters article as a source for the quote from the dispatcher (and quoted the part from the article with the dispatchers comment) and says it looks like it was an accident.

You can't attribute everything to the driver simply because Tesla exchanged a couple of (unknown, unquoted) words with him/her.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/07/autos-tesla-fire-i...

With a gasoline vehicle fire that actually gets going you often see the road cleared so the thing can just burn into a giant fireball leaving behind nothing beyond a steel skeleton and 30 ft of charred ground.

Even at 100+ yds you can feel the heat from a gasoline vehicle inferno.

44% of car fires happen due to mechanical failure. Wire insulation is 28% of car fires. and fuel in the engine area was 18% of fires.

I'd say it speaks to the safety of electric cars. In a case where a gas tank is ruptured and catches fire it can spread through the entire undercarriage as the gas spills out of the tank onto the pavement.

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/23581-Ugh-Anot...

Edit: I was joking, you silly people.

Besides, if Tesla went and crashed a few hundred cars and could not reproduce the fire I'd feel pretty good about their safety. They may have already done this as part of road/crash certification.

In a major accident, gasoline cars are still statistically much more likely to catch fire than EVs, which is exactly why it doesn't make the news when a gas car catches fire.

The car saved his life by not collapsing onto him during an accident.

If you love something, set it on fire.

I'd much rather deal with a battery fire in a Model S than any kind of gasoline-fueled fire in a "normal" car. Battery fires are much simpler to contain, as batteries don't tend to vaporize into massive fireballs.

Don't mind if I do:

  Gas = 132MJ/Gal = 36.7 KWh/gal
  X 20 gallons in your average grocery getter = 734 KWh

  Tesla battery = 60KWh : 12.2 TeslaBattery = 1 Tank gas

The battery is a fire risk because it "contains too much energy" is nonsense.

Yeah but how much electric power it makes when doing it designed chemical reaction is only tangentially related to how much energy(note no mention of electrical energy during normal operation just energy) it contains. Rather akin to saying "a gallon of gasoline doesn't contain that much energy because we are using it to turn a water wheel and a gallon of liquid falling a few feet doesn't contain that much energy."