The important take-away is that if these performance targets are met, battery electrics will be the most cost-competitive technology by far, validating Tesla’s daring strategy.

Whether Toyota, Nissan and Honda can create compelling cars that compete with Tesla’s successful mix of design, practicality and performance is an open question.

They have the technical chops, but do they have the vision?

Minimal cover on Electric Car Insider on the 19 traction battery fires which Tesla has had.

Certainly no analysis of the fact that they are almost unique in this in the BEV and PHEV world amongst major Western manufacturers, with only a GM Volt catching fire 2 weeks AFTER a crash when improperly disposed of.

Renault - zero traction battery fires after crashes
Nissan - zero
GM - zero
BMW - zero

Tesla use batteries never designed for the purpose, using NCA which is very energy dense but volatile.

And two of them have burst into flames with no crash,

I am tolerant of car sites being unable to comprehend financial 10Q's, although the flannel merchant at Tesla would not have fooled me when I was six years old, but not of zero displayed knowledge of either the underlying battery technology, or the farcical management by panic manufacturing, throwing new hires at a line to somehow bash cars together by hand after the CEO completely screwed up automation.

That is a recipe for the appalling sub 1970's quality Tesla demonstrate.

Inside EVS along with other electronic rags are going to materially damage their readers, who are encouraged to buy these dustbins when even the survival of the company to service them is in question.

That is aside from the intermittently lethal Autopilot.

Tesla are not leading in battery technology.
They use an obsolete and dangerous format.

And their standard of build is sub Third World, whilst their financials are worthy of Enron.

Electric Car Insider:

Apologies for the conflation, I was not aware of your publication, and my remarks refer to Inside EVs.

I would be interested in whether you have addressed the unique problem Tesla have among BEV and PHEV manufacturers of bursting into flames?

Apology accepted, I appreciate the civility.

I haven’t written about Tesla fires, because we’re not an ambulance or fire truck chasing kind of publication. We don’t really do news at all, we do EV education, mostly for consumers, and recently some fleet topics.

As the owner of two Teslas, a Model S with 75,000 miles that’s been from border to border and coast to coast in the US, and a Model 3 that’s already racked up 7,500 miles in five months, naturally I’m personally interested in and concerned about any maintenance issues.

I’m less concerned about Tesla fires than gasoline fires. They seem to be much slower moving and less lethal.

All cars have mechanical issues. What impressed me about Tesla is that they have been incredibly good about any repairs, including out of warranty repairs, that have been needed.

I’m also impressed that they seem to turn around fixes, like the Consumer Reports identified braking issue for the Model 3, much faster than any other automaker (mere weeks in that case).

I was an auto technician as a first career, first British makes, then Japanese, then BMW and some Mercedes. Finished my career in a well-know exotics repair shop. I’ve seen the repair business from both sides of the counter. I’ve never seen better service or faster engineering fixes from any automaker.

Friday and Saturday I hosted an Electric Car Guest Drive in Orlando for two hundred people who were interested in learning more about and driving EVs. We had Tesla Model X, S, 3, BMW i3, Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt and Bolt, Mitsubishi Outlander, Toyota Prius Prime. All the top selling EVs. The week before, we did the same in Kansas City.

The Teslas were by far the most popular cars for drive requests, and people came away with the highest praise for the Teslas after the drives.

That’s not my own bias, that’s what several hundred people experienced and reported.

No one that I talked to was concerned about battery fires.

Renault - zero traction battery fires after crashes
Nissan - zero
GM - zero
BMW - zero
Tesla - 19
ICEVs - OVER 20,000 PER MONTH!!!!!!! Over 40 deaths per month !!! PER MONTH!!!! How/why would any civilized society tolerate these death machines?

Go for it. Defend or dismantle your on logic.

I didn’t realize reading comprehension would be such a challenge and given your fascination with auto fires I presumed you’d be vaguely familiar with those numbers. I’ll see if I can locate some EU numbers.

If try rereading that you might realize I never stated 20,000 deaths per month. I actually explicitly state otherwise but let me explicitly spell it out so as to not confuse you. The 20,000 per month refers to calls for ICEV fires to US fire departments. That was an average over a five year period per the NFPA. The 40 is deaths per month related to US ICEV fires also per the NFPA.

That actually was d data that I grabbed of the internet. Per the NFPA’s most recent report I could locate ICEV fires had dropped to a bit below 15,000 per month and deaths from ICEV fires were down to 37 per month in the US.

Per CNBC There have been 1-3 Tesla related fires each year world wide from 2013 though early May of 2018.

The message the available data seems to deliver is that if you suffer from pyrophobia you should definitely not even think about an ICEV. A BEV should be your first choice as long as it is not a Tesla.

The hint was that it was preceded by your list of info. Sadly the contextual continuation was not enough for all. In the future i’ll Strive to be more inclusive.