> How does that keep anything in perspective ?

The Tesla has been available for 140 days, as of the time I'm posting this and using the June 22nd release date[1]. So my back-of-the-napkin estimates say there have been about 63,000 car fires in that time so that 0.005% of the car population is responsible for 0.000048% of the car fires in the past 140 days, which does not seem disproportionate. There are other, even better ways to compare the risk for which I do not have data available. Feel free to research your own numbers and compare.

[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/model-s-has-arrived

But remember we are talking about an expensive, new car with a lot of modern safety features. Which is the complete opposite of most of the cars you see around the world. My point was that comparing Tesla's record with existing cars will never make sense since we simply don't have all of the facts.

It seems obvious though that Tesla being a very different design will have different incident characteristics.

June 22, 2012.

Oops. That makes things even more ridiculous, if there have been 3 battery incidents in all this time. Put 505 days into my calculation instead of 140...

As to the point about them all being new cars, well, new cars are safer. If safety is what we're after then yes, a modern car is a good thing. If you're saying that the safety will decay as they age, well, that's reasonable but only time will allow us to correct our calculations there.

That might mean that we need more time to make a full determinations, but that's not a bad thing. This tells us about their current safety which is what's relevant now.

That leaves approximately 227,250 fires since the Tesla has been introduced, of which Teslas are known to be responsible for three. Or 0.000013% of all car fires in the relevant time.

That said, the other test might be more relevant, as there were more actual Teslas on the road in the past 140 days, rather than at day zero of launch. I don't have the figures to calculate, say, fires/#miles driven.