Critical support to Tesla, wish all cars would spontaneously self-destruct
the battery chemistry of almost all electric cars does have the risk of fire or in some cases explosion. But so does gasoline. The difference between a tesla and a less bazinga electric car is more like the difference between a regular sedan and like, a pinto, or one of those jeeps with the rear mounted fuel tanks. The risk is always there but design and manufacturing defects can exacerbate it substantially.
Like I don't have anything definitive, but even if you go looking for them its hard to find examples of nissan leaf battery fires, while there have been a rash of tesla ones. Partly it could be the drivers, but the design also has a role
A good chunk of that reason could simply be numbers. Tesla sold over 5m vehicles, but Leaf was only at 600k in early 2022 (not sure how many have been made since then).
Edit: Got a closer data point for Tesla, they were at 2.3m at the end of 2021.
https://www.tesla-fire.com/ lists 232 known tesla fires. I don't have as good of numbers for the leaf, Wikipedia lists 7 globally, and several seem to have started from e.g. faulty extension cords or other causes, not the car. There was one I know of in the US and it was never revealed afaik whether it was battery-related or not
the leafs on the road also tend to be slightly older, as it launched earlier and sold comparably well for the first several years after tesla went into mass production of the S. Almost half of that 2.3 million number were cars less than 1 year old if I'm not mistaken, so brand new vehicles.
so it's still disproportionate. with a better dataset you could do some fun analysis across car brands
Another possible confounding factor: tesla now uses a more stable, less dense battery chemistry (LiFePO4) in their standard range models, so some of that number may not be a fair comparison against the nissan which I believe has always been a more standard lithium ion with NCM chemistry
Americans: byd bad becos fire and China bad
Also Americans: [bazingamobile ignites when lightly salted]
This hurricane was foreseen a little bit so if electric cars generally present a threat there was an opportunity to remove them from the situation. Unfortunately under a neoliberal two party dictatorship that is not something that could be done.
Apparently in some cities in China, they park the cars on elevated highways before a flood to avoid water damage
They're especially unprotected. Most electric vehicles don't fail as spectacularly or often as Teslas, eg losing power and locking people inside to burn and igniting in crashes. I'm sure some examples of some other models will crop up but they likely got banged around a lot more by the floodwaters.
yeah it's honestly crazy for a stationary car to catch fire from like 8 inches of non-moving saltwater. I don't expect the car to work after flooding but catching fire? That's gotta be poor design right? I've seen how hybrids are designed, and they seemingly have way more safeguards than this, despite having much smaller batteries. things like contactors electrically splitting up the pack when not engaged, shutting everything down if there's any leakage current to chassis ground, etc. I guess I don't know how well all those would fare against salt water but like, the batteries don't catch on fire just from discharging unless it's a short circuit, and just saltwater isn't that conductive to cause a dead short, especially if the battery were electrically separated into several chunks.
And you all laughed when Trump said he was scared of electric boat batteries and would rather fight a shark!
