Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Tesla

[Frankie]

Seems like everyone who had a fire, was really thrilled with how Tesla handled it and were all pretty happy about things.

Have you ever talked to a Tesla owner, or visited their forum? 90% would still be pretty happy with their Tesla even if it randomly sprayed battery acid in their face.

If the same conditions that caused batteries to be punctured from below, happened to the fuel tank of a vehicle I imagine the chance for fire would be equal to or higher than what happened to the Tesla?

One of them was caused by running over a trailer hitch. I don't see that causing a vehicle fire in a gas powered car.

This is nothing more than a ploy. There are way more fires on standard gasoline powered vehicles.

More in total numbers, of course, there like 15000x more gas powered vehicles on the road than Teslas. More per vehicle? Not so sure. There were 18,200 Tesla Model S sold globally as of the end of September, and three of them have burned. That's 0.0165%.

NFPA says an average of 152,000 vehicle fires a year, for 255,000,000 or so vehicles. That's 0.059%. But the vast majority of those are mechanical or electrical failures, not collisions. Says collisions were only a factor in 4%, which drops the 0.059 down to 0.0024, seven times less than the Model S. When you consider that there haven't been anywhere near 18,200 Model S on the road for the entire year, that number would get considerably worse. The fact that the NFPA numbers look at data for an entire year, and the three Tesla fires all occured within 6 weeks, is something else to consider.

There are probably a lot of other factors here to consider, and maybe there are more relevant numbers somewhere out there on vehicle fires, and of course the Tesla numbers are so small there are statistical relevance issues to think about, but on the surface it doesn't really look good for Tesla.

 

[wtiger]

How many instances of vehicles fires do you even hear about due to something puncturing it from below? Trust me when I say that if enough petrol or diesel powered vehicles were going up in flames in a similar fashion, the world and lawyers would be all over it.

That said, this is new technology and people should understand that there is always going to be a learning curve in designing new stuff. The fortunate thing is that everyone got advance notice when suffering damage.

Vehicle for vehicle, Tesla's are about 5x less likely to burst into flames than the national average.