[rstuart4133]

One example doesn't tell you much.

This week a local freeway was shut down when a driver travelling down it noticed smoke coming out of the air-conditioning. He started to slow down, but then it caught alight. The scary thing was fire took hold so quickly he suffered burns before he could get out. That is the only time I've read about such a thing in the mass media. Which is an interesting statistic in itself - because I heard anecdotes about others peoples cars catching on fire while they were driving them several times. This particular time it shut down an inner city free way for a few hours - so it made the news.

And so it will be with this particular failure. I'm sure the only reason we heard about it is because it's a Tesla. Modern internal combustion engines are entirely computer controlled. They are far more complex to control that battery + electric motor, so the computer systems and sensor networks they have are commensurately more complex. They will not be going anywhere if that computer system fails - jump start or no jump start, so this sort of failure is not peculiar to EV's. Given the millions of cars out there I have absolutely no doubt coming back to a parked car only to discover the ECU has failed has happened many times. I also have absolutely no doubt I would not have heard about it. After all no one died, and "car won't start" is hardly news worthy unless it is a Tesla.

It may be there is a systemic fault with Tesla's - but there is no way you can tell from this one blog post. As for the bad dealer - I'm sort of surprised you think it is somehow exceptional.