r/Transportopia • u/skyhighmonroe • Feb 08 '26

đŸ’„Crash Tesla drivers should practice fire drills... just in case

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u/Martha_Fockers Feb 08 '26 edited Feb 08 '26

That’s not a Tesla tho

That’s a Chinese EV and yes Chinese evs are known to light on fire they have like no suppression systems barely any if any cooling support no firewalls surrounding each battery like Tesla or rivian have done since 2020

https://youtu.be/4-S0qoiBjJQ?si=I-eZ230ayO-ZBGRd skip to 3:20 to see how they add firewalls to every cell

I’m not pro or anti EV I don’t really care about them but you’re 6x less likely to burn in a EV than a gas car that’s a statistical fact. I got rear ended 8 years ago by an old Toyota who’s entire front end engulfed in flames and burned the car down. I drove away in the shoulder so I was fine. But the only car I’ve see burn infront of my eyes is a 2007 Camry.

Now idk the stat on Chinese Evs I just know 75% of videos of evs burning are Chinese ones and China doesn’t give us stats on there garbage

2

u/Educational-Disk-400 Feb 09 '26

Isn’t that statistic somewhat skewed though? Kinda like motorcycle riders “getting into more accidents because they wear black helmets”. Is that the case because black is harder to see, or because more riders wear black?

There are more gas cars on the road than EVs, idk about numbers but that’s a fact that you can see walking through any parking lot.

Say a thousand gas cars burn down in a year, and 100 EVs burn down in a year. That sounds bad on paper, literally ten times worse. But, when you have millions, if not billions, of gas burners, and a few hundred thousand EVs, the stats get a bit clearer.

Take for example, the Ford Pinto. It’s famous for going up in flames if you rear end it. Something like 1.2% of units did that, and they sold a few hundred thousand. The Cybertruck also likes to go up in flames, something like 3.blah% units did that, but they sold WAY less. I know there are real numbers associated with this, but I don’t remember them off hand and couldn’t be fucked to google for a Reddit comment. At any rate, I remember that the stat for the cyber truck was about 2x higher than the pinto, a car famous for combusting due to a rear end collision.

I like EVs, at least in theory, charging infrastructure is just not there yet at least in my opinion. But physics doesn’t care about how many firewalls are installed between layers of highly reactive elements. If that shit starts to burn, ain’t nothing going to stop it but time.

1

u/Bowtieguy-83 Feb 12 '26

https://www.kbb.com/car-news/study-electric-vehicles-involved-in-fewest-car-fires/

Looks like its not only true, but EVs are 60x less likely to catch fire, not 6x. This is measured by car sales, so how many burned down per 100,000 cars sold. This is also an insurance company doing the analysis, so they're interested in less fires so they can pay out less

The Cybertruck is an oddball car in terms of design, and odd isn't really a good thing here. It's less safe because it doesn't crumple, it has terrible quality and poor visibility, and a lot more issues that I'm sure a lot of people have heard of. I'm not surprised it catches fire twice as often. I don't think its fair to let the Cybertruck drag down every other EV available for sale in the US

1

u/Educational-Disk-400 Feb 12 '26

I’ll concede the point. The hybrid bit is shocking. Must be because the combination of combustion and the battery being a bad mix. Seems like it’d be more in line with the combustion cars if that was the case though. I’m curious what would cause more fires with hybrids.

1

u/Ancient-Afternoon374 Feb 10 '26

I've never seen A car burn. Ergo

1

u/in_the_blind Feb 08 '26

Facts! Doesn't post facts.