JDR76

I was also wondering about some underside/battery damage.

Looks to to have taken a nice Audi and an RX out with it.

oldcajun

In charging Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer batteries, the charger must check and maintain balance between cells to prevent such a fire.

mmarshall

So then, a car of the Model S's price does not have a charge-monitor/limiter of its own that will not accept any more current from the charger if it becomes dangerous to do so?

RXSF

No official word from Tesla? There can be so many reasons for this, we shouldn't speculate just yet. I mean we can go as far as to say it had nothing to do with the car, and someone (from a competing Chinese electric car company perhaps?) planted something under it just to make a viral video. The smoke and the fire happening in seconds is a little hard to believe if the car wasn't damaged prior as well.

coolsaber

First rule of Tesla Club, you dont speak of bad Tesla News.

jrmckinley

On Twitter, Musk said there are over a million ICE car fires per year. Tesla has one or two per year and they get so much publicity it's crazy (my words, not his).

My question is why is everyone focusing on this when it's such a rare event for this to happen with Tesla? IMO, it's because Tesla is polarizing and therefore it's easy to hate on them.

mmarshall

I don't think it is a hate issue as much as the company simply having been overestimated and given too much hype.

jrmckinley

OK, but what does that have to do with the media coverage of a single Tesla fire compared to the exponentially higher rates of ICE fires?

coolsaber

My question would be why do Tesla Fans hate to talk about reality? BMW had issues with the diesel systems in its vehicles causing it to combust. Toyota had issues with sudden acceleration, GM with ignition keys. As a person with no vested interest in Tesla, why is discussing the reality of a situation so off limits. If you dont want to talk about, dont, but certainly dont stop others from discussing an incident that actually occurred.

It seems silly that we need to shield a huge corporation from negative incidents. They have huge PR firms to do that job, I doubt they need anyone from CL car chat to help em out.

mmarshall

The media has often been unfair with ICE companies. Are you old enough, for example, to remember when NBC admitted staging the fires/explosions from side impacts on the external fuel tanks of Chevy/GMC pickups? Or when Audi was almost run out of the U.S. market from the media coverage of unintended acceleration?

I would also and that the specific video I posted is not from the media, but a security video from what appears to be a parking garage.

jrmckinley

I'm talking about reality. And the reality is it's not a widespread problem, so why does it get national news when it happened to one car? Everything else you are mentioning above with BMW and Toyota were matters of huge scale compared to this. Toyota's un-intended acceleration "issue" (which was complete BS by the way) was "tied" to 89 deaths and they recalled over 5 million cars. BMW recalled over 1 million cars. I'm not saying it's off limits, and I'm certainly not discouraging anyone from talking about it. I'm saying it's about scale and until this is proven to be a widepsread issue, I view it as a one-off.

GS3Tek

iTrader: (8)

Thanks for the explanation.

703

thats a dumb argument. Every adverse event is worth investigating. It ends up saving life’s and advancing engineering or expose bad practices.

jrmckinley

No one ever said it wouldn't or shouldn't be investigated. In fact, I think it has to be investigated from a legal & regulatory standpoint.

MattyG

Rare? Yes. But one-off? No. There have been three incidents of spontaneous combustion since last December. It isn't the rarity of the event it's how serious these fires are. The firefighters have to respond to these incidents in very different way than a conventional ICE fire. These lithium battery fires take longer to extinguish because the fire department has to stick around for hours and hours to make sure the battery pack doesn't re-ignite - this has happened.

In some cases firefighters have had a heck of time trying to extinguish these types of fires because of thermal runaway, where the battery pack's chemicals are in a chain reaction that keeps heating up the batteries even though thousands of gallons of water/foam may have been poured onto them to douse the flames. The Freemont plant itself has had to call the fire department due to battery fires there.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...bout-fiery-evs

Boeing went through this with the lithium-ion reserve power battery packs on its 787 Dreamliners which were catching fire spontaneously when they first went into service. The FAA grounded the fleet until a fix was in place.