ofthecaribbean

I'm not saying the Tesla is less safe: I'm saying that, contrary to what the parent post implied in his wording, it's almost certainly more likely for the battery to catch fire than for a gas tank.

That estimate is a little bold: we can reject the hypothesis that the probability is smaller than 1/260 with p-value 0.05 (good confidence), but with your threshold of 1/26 the p-value becomes poor.

Note that due to the lack of selection bias (battery fire was already among the top security concerns before the accident), we don't actually need a very stringent p-value, so we can be fairly confident that the probability is greater than 1/260.

But my point was that even with probability 1/260, it's likely to be much higher than for gas cars, or you wouldn't have to dig up 20-year-old articles about "freak accidents".

If you have an integer random walk and the step sizes are multiples of 3, you cannot reach a location that is not a multiple of 3. The ECC structure they described is similar to the set of multiples of 3: for example, an analog computer trying to simulate such a walk would periodically round the location to the nearest multiple of 3 to counter the effects of noise. The rounding does not change correct computations (becase they would already be multiples of 3), but it increases the likelihood that the result of the computation is correct.

This is possible with a gas car, but the gas tank doesn't occupy the whole bottom of the car and even if it is punctured, it won't ignite unless there is some additional spark or heat source.

Given the number of gas cars on the road, anything described as a "freak accident" must have a very low probability. If this is the 13th serious accident of a Tesla, it's unlikely that the probability is very low.

Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_%28game%29 ?

But I don't see how your explanation is compatible with their claim that found a neat structure like a "doubly even self-dual linear" ECC. If their claim is that all transitions maintain that structure, then you are guaranteed to stay inside the structure no matter how long you wander around the graph.