Tesla Model S, Third Fire

[free_electron]

About 15,000 ICE vehicles catch fire in the UK every year.

15000 fires / 28,700,000 gas cars =0.000523
3 fires / 21,000 Teslas = 0.000143

Teslas catch fire less than non-electric cars. At worst it appears that some fire departments are unaware that they should not puncture the battery pack. In all cases the passenger compartment was fully protected and there was no explosion.

Tesla is at over 35000 cars.. They are tracking VIN numbers on the forums and they are at over 36k now... So adjust that number downward a bit....

[JoeyP]

And to put those figures into context, there are 247.9 million gas vehicles on the roads in the US, and only 17,200 model S on the road in the US. So, gas vehicles burned at the rate of 11.8e-6/car/week, while model S burned at 34.9e-6/car/week, or about 3 times as often.

And to put that into perspective again, not a single Tesla has caught fire due to a non-horrific physical accident. But like you said, only 3 data points so far.
So Tesla's catching fire after horrific crashes is nothing but pure sensationalism. You'd expect some to catch on fire, just like cars do.

I wouldn't call anything the driver could walk a way from an "horrific physical accident". The one which hit the trailer hitch in the road definitely wasn't, and that's an event that can be expected on a fairly regular basis. That car looks bad because of what the fire did to it, not because of what the trailer hitch did to it.

[SgtRock]

Greetings EEVBees:

--I believe Mojo-Chan is correct, in that Tesla Motors has paid back their loan from the US, unlike the vast majority of the Green Loan recipients, who went bankrupt, leaving the taxpayers holding the green bag as usual. It is not Mr. Musk's fault that the US taxes ordinary citizens to help the wealthy to buy a Model S. Mr. Musk pays taxes and produces jobs, and made the money he is investing. He did build that. I wish him and Tesla Motors all the best.

"I've actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don't mean hybrid, I mean fully electric."
Elon Musk - 1971

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[Rufus]

It's no good trying to argue the point for EV's, the simple fact is that their are people around who do not want to see EV's for reasons only known to them.

It's much like trying to educate the religious, it's never going to happen.

Why don't you call them deniers and pull in the holocaust as well?

EVs are expensive, impractical, and not green. They don't solve any current problem. They could partly solve the limited fossil fuel reserve problem but the rest of what is required currently barely exists.

I don't care if technically illiterate eco green tossers want or have EVs what I object to is having to fund the huge cost of tax breaks and subsidies to help them get and use them.

[SgtRock]

Dear Rufus:

--I overwhelmingly agree with the thrust of your post. Indeed they do tend to drag in the Flat Earth Theory, the Holocaust and the Kitchen Sink into any argument, tending to argue by hatred rather than reason. But, by calling them "eco green tossers", you are just imitating them and encouraging them. Get the hence and sin no more.

"When Sagan is old enough to buy his own car, the obvious choice will be electric "
David Leon Jones 19?? -

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[AG6QR]

Fires and roll overs seem to be a particularly American thing, very few cars catch fire in the UK ( I have seen only one and that was 50 years ago) My uncle hit a railway sleeper that fell off the truck in front of him when he was traveling at 60 MPH the whole front of the car was destroyed including front suspension but the car did not catch fire the car was a Ford petrol powered as well.

They're not common over here in the states, either, except in Hollywood while the cameras are rolling.  I've seen only one fire, an electrical one not due to a crash.  It was a very old Camaro driven by a young driver.  I'm guessing some nonstandard and perhaps unfused alterations to the electrical system were the cause, but I don't know.  Anyway, the driver stopped the car, got out, and watched his car burn almost completely in the few minutes it took the fire department to arrive.

By saying they're not common, I'm not saying they never happen, just that most of us typically don't witness many of them.  Hollywood sometimes distorts our perceptions.

[free_electron]

They could partly solve the limited fossil fuel reserve problem but the rest of what is required currently barely exists.

Correct. and that is why only the Tesla model is viable. tesla solves all problems, from energy production ( thru solarcity ) , distribution (existing grids) ,range anxiety ( big battery packs and modern supercharge technology ) to the car itself. This is the only viable model.

remember you are trying to topple the holy trinity : oil producers, carproducers ,and car dealers/petrol dealers.
You need to establish a new trinity : electricity producers , electricity + car dealers / distribution , and car producers.

Tesla is attempting that. They do cut out the man in the middle ( car dealers and electricity dealers ) to drive cost down , but distribution is still a problem , so they partner with existing electricity distribution ( note: distribution ,they do produce themselves .)

It needs to be tackled on all fronts. doing only one thing is a route to failure because the other two missing bits won;t make themselves. If you continuously have to make for the other party to make a move innovation stalls.

That is the key difference between Tesla and the others.

I may have drunk too much of the Tesla kool-aid ... but i do believe it is the only viable approach. and it's still a heck of a car.

[mtdoc]

I don't care if technically illiterate eco green tossers want or have EVs what I object to is having to fund the huge cost of tax breaks and subsidies to help them get and use them.

I guess you would include Dave and free electron in that category?

And I don't want to continue to have my tax dollars being used to support the fossil fuel and ICE auto industry - as it has been doing for the past 60 years...

[free_electron]

They're not common over here in the states

156000 a year...

there was one in a san francisco tunnel a couple of days ago. Car ablaze. 3 people were fried, one in hospital with severe burns... shut down traffic for hours ...

[Rufus]

They could partly solve the limited fossil fuel reserve problem but the rest of what is required currently barely exists.

Correct. and that is why only the Tesla model is viable. tesla solves all problems, from energy production ( thru solarcity )

Solar doesn't solve the problem unless you are prepared not to drive much when it is cloudy or during the winter. Solar generation saves fuel for conventional power plants at the times it is available. It replaces hardly any generating capacity and causes some capacity to stand idle or run at lower efficiency and so increases the cost of reliable energy generation. Solar generators don't pay these costs they get subsidised to make power generation more expensive.

Look at the mess the 100 billion euro of solar power subsidies have made in Germany.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/solar-subsidy-sinkhole-re-evaluating-germany-s-blind-faith-in-the-sun-a-809439.html

Now America wants to do the same and line Musk's pockets in the process?

[mtdoc]

First it was Teslas now ipads are bursting into flames

Oh the horror, the horror...

[free_electron]

First it was Teslas now ipads are bursting into flames

Oh the horror, the horror...

so carrying ipads in teslas in the cargohold of a boeing 787 is VERY dangerous ?

[Rufus]

Well, you have to start somewhere, we can't keep driving ICE's for ever.

Yes "the something must be done" mentality, it matters not if what you do doesn't work or even makes things worse because at least your heart is in the right place.

Nowadays being incompetent or making things worse is seen as a smaller sin than appearing not to care.

[free_electron]

Well, you have to start somewhere, we can't keep driving ICE's for ever.

Yes "the something must be done" mentality, it matters not if what you do doesn't work or even makes things worse because at least your heart is in the right place.

Nowadays being incompetent or making things worse is seen as a smaller sin than appearing not to care.

all right mister nay-sayer. You tell us what should be done then. Not having an answer is even worse than trying mybe the wrong thing...

[ElectroIrradiator]

all right mister nay-sayer. You tell us what should be done then. Not having an answer is even worse than trying mybe the wrong thing...

Thorium powered molten salt nuclear reactors? Back in the sixties the US military had an experimental prototype running for a few years. Dig out the blueprints for that one, and start improving the design toward a commercially viable design.

They cannot blow up, their byproducts are 'only' radioactive for a few hundred years, the radiation created while they are running is much easier to shield, it is nigh impossible to fabricate nuclear weapons from the byproducts, plus they are intrinsically safe. Oh, and we literally have mountains made from Thorium ore scattered all over the world. No scarce resources to go to war over.

The US experimenters shut the experimental reactor down before the weekend by cutting power to the cooling system. Cut the knife switch. *Clunk* Lack of external cooling power plus gravity automagically pushes the core toward a safe state, with the fuel safely stored in an underground storage tank. Unlike the Uranium powered reactors we use today, it actually takes applying power plus time to turn a Thorium reactor on.

[G7PSK]

Fires and roll overs seem to be a particularly American thing, very few cars catch fire in the UK ( I have seen only one and that was 50 years ago) My uncle hit a railway sleeper that fell off the truck in front of him when he was traveling at 60 MPH the whole front of the car was destroyed including front suspension but the car did not catch fire the car was a Ford petrol powered as well.

They're not common over here in the states, either, except in Hollywood while the cameras are rolling.  I've seen only one fire, an electrical one not due to a crash.  It was a very old Camaro driven by a young driver.  I'm guessing some nonstandard and perhaps unfused alterations to the electrical system were the cause, but I don't know.  Anyway, the driver stopped the car, got out, and watched his car burn almost completely in the few minutes it took the fire department to arrive.

By saying they're not common, I'm not saying they never happen, just that most of us typically don't witness many of them.  Hollywood sometimes distorts our perceptions.

Every time I have visited the states I have looked in the local papers and there has been a report or two of rollovers on the interstate or some other main road, I belive that one of the Ford SUV's was infamous for rolling over.

[nctnico]

Most American cars have piss poor handling. Some even have leaf springs like a postal carriage. Over here someone has Chrysler sedan with a big V8. On a road with some roundabouts my little Mazda with its diesel engine literally runs circles around it. I don't even need to try hard or push the engine.

[free_electron]

Most American cars have piss poor handling. Some even have leaf springs like a postal carriage. Over here someone has Chrysler sedan with a big V8. On a road with some roundabouts my little Mazda with its diesel engine literally runs circles around it. I don't even need to try hard or push the engine.

tell me about it. my chrysler does that too. bouncing around

and if you get a late 60's mid 70's you get seasick in em... they call those boat-anchors...

[zapta]

I don't care if technically illiterate eco green tossers want or have EVs what I object to is having to fund the huge cost of tax breaks and subsidies to help them get and use them.

I guess you would include Dave and free electron in that category?

And I don't want to continue to have my tax dollars being used to support the fossil fuel and ICE auto industry - as it has been doing for the past 60 years...

I agree with both of you. Government should stay out of the money redistribution business.

[EEVblog]

EVs are expensive

Yes, but so is every new technology. Prices will come down.

impractical

Demonstrably wrong.
Tell that to the people who use them and have the usage scenario that fits them.

and not green.

Arguably demonstrably wrong.
Full production and use life-cycle assessment is virtually impossible on simple stuff, let along a car.
But assuming both cars use equal energy to produce, it comes down to a matter of which is better:
1) searching for, extracting, refining, and distributing petrol for the entire life of the car (lets say 10 years)
2) producing and installing solar panels (which the user may already have and can get a side benefit from)

As someone who worked in the petroleum search industry for a decade, I can assure you that #1 is vastly more complex than you can imagine.
My money would be on #2 being "greener", probably but a lot more margin that you think.

They don't solve any current problem. They could partly solve the limited fossil fuel reserve problem but the rest of what is required currently barely exists.

That's because the next oil shock hasn't happened yet. It will, bet your house on it.

I don't care if technically illiterate eco green tossers want or have EVs what I object to is having to fund the huge cost of tax breaks and subsidies to help them get and use them.

There are lots of things in society that are subsided by the tax payer, and I for one think that the future of our energy needs ranks pretty high up there on importance. To not at least see to some degree shows a level of ignorance and short shortsightedness in the needs of our society and the finite nature of our current petroleum resources.
EV's are a tripple whammy. They help out with our finite petroleum problem, with localised pollution, and help push the renewable energy future that there is no question we need.

[Corporate666]

There's little that I would like to see more than to rid the world of all of the extra CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere... but there's always a cost, and right now, there's no cleaner fuel technology than hydrogen fuel cells.  When all you're emitting is pure water, I think it's safe to say you're as green as could possibly be.

And that hydrogen needs to be compressed to a few thousand PSI, which happens by way of expending a whole lot of energy, which you don't get back and which does nothing to power the vehicle.

[Corporate666]

@Whales: you are comparing apples & oranges when comparing the efficiency of an electric motor versus combustion engine. Depending on where the electricity is coming from an EV (Tesla S, Leaf, Volt) can produce over 200grams of CO2 per km (if your electricity is coming from coal powered power plants). For comparison: my 14 year old diesel produces about 142 grams of CO2 per km. If you want an EV to be clean you have to source low emission electricity from somewhere.

You keep repeating this inaccuracy.

The fact is that EV's produce less CO2 than combustion cars - period.  The only way that is not true is if you compare the most CO2 efficient of combustion engines against an area with exceptionally high CO2 from electric production.

It's like saying "A Honda Civic is faster than a Ferrari 458", with the qualification being that the Civic has snow tires, and the F458 does not, and the race takes place in Colorado in January with 2 feet of snow on the ground.

The trend is also continuing towards greener electricity production - regardless of EV electric usage.  The state of things today in some places is a very bad basis for what we should be doing in the future, especially when we ignore trends of how things are changing already.

[AG6QR]

There's little that I would like to see more than to rid the world of all of the extra CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere... but there's always a cost, and right now, there's no cleaner fuel technology than hydrogen fuel cells.  When all you're emitting is pure water, I think it's safe to say you're as green as could possibly be.

By that argument, steam engines are as green as you could possibly be.  They only emit pure water.

Unless of course you insist on counting all the other things that were emitted to create the steam.

Likewise, Hydrogen fuel cells produce lots of CO2; not directly during the fuel cell operation of course, but in the course of making the hydrogen.  Hydrogen is usually created in commercial quantities by reforming petroleum, oxidizing the carbon portion of the hydrocarbon and liberating the hydrogen.  There are less efficient ways of doing it, such as electrolysis, but that normally has worse carbon emissions.

If you had a very abundant supply of green electricity, then yeah, you could produce hydrogen via electrolysis.  But then you should compare that with the idea of using electric cars, which would also look pretty attractive if you had that abundant supply of green electricity.  The energy density of batteries starts to look pretty good compared to hydrogen, if you account for the hydrogen fuel tank.  And the safety considerations of batteries, while not perfect, are a lot better than hydrogen.

I don't have an answer.  There's no perfect solution that I can see.  As for me, I figure it's best to use cars less, so I've arranged my work and residence so that I can commute by walking a mile or so.

[Corporate666]

In the sunnier parts of southern Europe and the US, one m² of non-steerable solar panel can be expected to generate about 1 kWh per day. So a home installation for charging your 85 kWh car battery has to have an area on the order of 85 m², if you wish to be able to fully charge your car once per day.

Note that the average annual electricity consumption for a single household is about 4000 kWh (in Denmark, may be different elsewhere), or 11 kWh/day. A single charge per week for your Tesla S would thus more than double your annual electricity consumption.

Suspect Mr. Musk will start building large solar panel farms in the US deserts in the not too distant future...

In the USA we use about 12,000 kHr per year.  These EV's don't use the whole battery capacity when driving, so I don't think it takes 85kWh to charge it up.  But even if it did, the adoption of EV's is going to be a slow process.  In the USA, electricity demand rises roughly on part with efficiencies realized in the generation/transmission/distribution system, which is why no additional infrastructure was needed when people started using lots of computers, bought larger (and more) big televisions, had PC's running 24/7, lots of mobile devices charging, etc.  So I don't think the capacity issue will be an issue, certainly not in the USA.

The cost thing is actually a savings.  In the USA, if you say 85kWh, that gets you around 250 miles on that charge.  Electric averages around $0.12/kWh here, so that's $10.20 to "fill up".  Gasoline is around $3.50/gallon here, and an average well equipped upmarket car would probably average around 20mpg, or about 12.5 gallons to go 250 miles.  Which is just over $43... so a pretty significant weekly savings on that end.

[Corporate666]

Well, you have to start somewhere, we can't keep driving ICE's for ever.

Yes "the something must be done" mentality, it matters not if what you do doesn't work or even makes things worse because at least your heart is in the right place.

Nowadays being incompetent or making things worse is seen as a smaller sin than appearing not to care.

Except EV's do work.

The people who believe otherwise are required to remain willfully ignorant of the facts to keep their beliefs alive.  It's really no different than the flat-earth/global-warming-conspiracy/etc crowd.  You hear mistruths being repeated ad nauseum - like "did you know Ev's actually pollute more" or "you have to replace the battery every 10 years" or "my tax dollars are paying for them" or "they lose money on every one they sell" or "they will have to upgrade the electrical infrastructure to make EV's work", and on and on.  All untrue, but many repeated by folks who do not understand the topic fully.