Comment by orwin
5 hours ago
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.
Those trucks are probably doing over 200,000 miles per year and your apartment's cars under 20, so the fires/mile ratio seems comparable.
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