Comment by vessenes
4 hours ago
The article is confusing - at one point it says the truck left the road, hit a bunch of stuff and caught on fire. At another it says they don't know if it was a battery pack fire that spread. I'll be interested to read the final safety reports and see if this was just an unlucky crash or something really bad happened with all that lithium.
I think you misread. The article state tesla Semi has had 2 fire in 2 years. The first one because the truck hist stuff and left the road in Nevada, the second (this one, the subject of the article) in California for unknown reasons. This is relevant because the Tesla semi fleet is small (86 vehicles 2 years ago, probably below 500 atm) and because battery fire are hard to stop, so we want to know what caused it. If EV fire last 10 time longer than diesel fire, but happen 10 time less often (we need more studies but it seems this is the initial consensus), this is not really an issue, but if they happen more often, we _need_ to know why and fix it.
Also i don't want trucks to catch fire everytime they hit a cow or a boar, the roads around where i used to live would be consistently closed :/
Approx one (with a big error bar) fire per 100 vehicles per year sounds about right based on my unscientific dealings with auction oil field trucks.
My gut feel is that vehicles of all types seem way more disposed to fire than stuff from the 90s through 2010s.
This vehicle was part of a manufacturer-owned highway fleet. That means it received proactive maintenance by trained personnel on a regular schedule, with full access to engineers for diagnosis and OEM replacement parts, and ran on good roads in the mild California climate. It's practically pampered compared to oilfield haulers, especially the ones that live long enough to be auctioned off. They're not comparable.
As an aside, some of the vehicles I've worked on serve in oilfields and I'd be horrified to discover 1% of them were catching fire annually.
For some other unscientific findings, that'd suggest 5 vehicle fires per year just from residents of my apartment complex. I've seen 1 in 8 years, and that was arson.
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That's a different accident, and the last one involving a Tesla Semi (before the current one). The point they're making is: that one involved an actual crash, but this one did not. So we should investigate this thoroughly to see what happened (as the NTSB is going to do, of course), because large vehicles should not spontaneously combust on a public highway, especially one as busy as the I-880.
On a related note: I wish companies like Tesla, which are conducting live experiments on public highways and thereby inconveniencing 1000s of people when an experiment goes awry, are held accountable and forced to compensate those who got stuck on the highway, missed doctors appointments, job interviews, deliveries, etc. Maybe something like a fine of $5000 per driver impacted should be levied, and given to each driver?
This is the point of insurance no? It's the underwriter's job to figure out what the risk probability of insuring a specific vehicle is, and then to represent that risk in future lawsuits while paying out the named insured in the meantime. If you think the traveling public should be party to insurance from vehicle collisions in general, then that's a legislative framework change for all road users (and you can bet your behind that will mean higher premiums for everyone, which I'm personally ok with. We've externalized far too many costs. Let's ban writedowns for exploratory oil drills too.)
As a driver, how would you track down the insurance company behind this trucking company? People have other things to do.
But there must be some compensation to be forced to become an unwilling participant in Musk's experiments! Otherwise what's the disincentive for these experimenters?
The accident in which the vehicle left the road happened in 2024.
What's confusing? First sentence of article:
> A Tesla Semi caught fire on Interstate 880 in Hayward, California, on Tuesday evening, and there was no crash.
Further:
> The driver told officers the truck caught fire and that they didn’t know why. No other vehicles were involved.
> I'll be interested to read the final safety reports
Are you still confident that the final reports will be free of interference and the agency investigating anything Tesla (Musk) related won't be gutted before it gets the chance to issue anything damaging?