[moocowduckquack]

Cars do burst into flames though. There are around 194,000 vehicle fires on US roads each year from around 250,000,000 registered vehicles, which gives around 1 fire for every 1,300 vehicles. There are so far 3 Tesla fires from around 16,000 Tesla cars on US roads, which gives around 1 fire for every 5,300 of them, so they are doing better than the average. 3 fires though is still far too few to consider this a particularly useful statistic.

[aeturnum]

In order to determine how well the Tesla S handled these collisions, the stats you cited are useless. We should not count fires caused by types of accidents Telsas have never been involved in. Also, no one is accusing Tesla cars of bursting into flame for no reason, so the cars that are not in accidents aren't important either.

To really understand where the Tesla ranks in safety, we would need a detailed analysis of: the accident, how non-Tesla cars handled similar accidents, how the Tesla is designed to handle such an accident.

I do agree that we have no where near enough data to draw general conclusions about the safety of the Teslas, so I think it's inappropriate to say, "they are doing better[or worse] than the average."

[rossjudson]

A detailed analysis of "the accident" is precisely how we don't find out how Tesla "ranks in safety".

Once the numbers of cars become large enough we can simply look at the outcome numbers, to determine how likely that outcome is. It doesn't matter if a car is "designed to handle such an accident". What matters is if it does handle a given kind of accident.

A Tesla car is unlikely to ever be involved in a fire at a gasoline station. We probably shouldn't give combustion vehicles a free pass there.

As more and more Tesla cars hit the road, confidence level increases in the stats that are derived. Early data is not meaningless; it can be indicative of later results.

[aptwebapps]

I agree with the rest of the post, and this part might be true of this thread: "Also, no one is accusing Tesla cars of bursting into flame for no reason, so the cars that are not in accidents aren't important either." but not necessarily among the general public.

I think this is precisely the idea they are combating. The initial news reports didn't have any details and just said there was Tesla on fire on the side of the highway.

[001sky]

Correct this a bit and you find 3 per ~100 million miles driven on public highways. that is about ~3x worse than a regular car. 100 million miles is enough data points to be meaningful, but not exhaustive. Also, given these cars are new, the state-space of defects is likely less populated tha for the average car. Historical data show age as a factor in fires, and new cars are less likely than average-age cars to catch fire.

[thecolorblue]

I was surprised that the letter did not go into these types of details. Cars (electric or not) catch on fire. There are statistics on this. The truth about the Model S's safety has not changed. Tesla seems like a more 'sticking to their guns' kind of company rather than a adjusting tactics to handle this situation.