The media loves to portray new things as dangerous. Perhaps it actually was too thin because these completely reasonable failures were able to happen, causing bad press that they ought to have guarded against with total overkill undercarriage shielding.
[1] http://www.nfpa.org/news-and-research/fire-statistics-and-re...
Batteries can explode when internally shorted, I had quite a few of 18650's explode on me over the years (usually through a fault of my own) the explosion isn't like a party popper it can be quite big and violent, and while explosions are some what not uncommon the battery flaming out completely when internally or externally shorted is. The Tesla has a few 1000's of 18650's cells even if a small number of those short during an accident it can cause allot of damage.
Another important difference between batteries and gas is that emergency workers (and anyone who's involved in the accident) can identify when the gas is leaking out, it's also much easier to stop the gas from catching on fire as wetting the vehicle or using other fire retardants will usually prevent the gas from catching fire. On the other hand you can have an internally shorted battery pack which can catch fire or explode at any moment and you would have no clue that it can happen.
Now don't take me wrong this isn't some anti-Tesla or anti-EV scare BS, this isn't some conspiracy either but saying that there are no valid concerns about the safety of the battery pack is ludicrous. We know how petrol cars work, we've been using them for 100+ years, we know when to look for a gas leak, we know how to deal with an oil/engine fire, EV's are a whole new ball game, eventually there will be a case where a Tesla or any other EV gets into a car accident and there will be a hot terminal somewhere in that car due to a short and someone will going to get zapped, at some point one of those batteries will explode and cause casualties, and many other things will happen that will be unique to EV's.
Using water on a gasoline or oil fire is a bad idea (the fire spreads since gas and oil are lighter than water), so fighting vehicle fires for ICE vehicles where the fuel tank has ruptured is a non-trivial problem for firefighters. The "easy" vehicle fires are ones where just the engine compartment and maybe the interior are on fire, but the fuel lines and tank are still in tact. In some ways a battery fire is easier to put out since it won't spread the same way and responds well to water.
Exploding 18650s tends to only happen with cheap, poorly manufactured variants. Most of the time if they short they will overheat, bulge, and sometimes catch on fire. Having enough of them actually explode to cause injury to vehicle occupants is probably about as likely as a fuel tank exploding in an ICE vehicle accident. Granted, there might be a higher fire risk for electric vehicles in severe collisions that damage the undercarriage area where the batteries are stored.
1: http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/28/nhtsa-closes-investigation-in...
2: http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/owners/SearchResults?searchType...
Toyota does not see the future in electric vehicles. Their hybrids are a good stopgap but they aren't into EVs at the moment. If you look at their history they went from full electric (ie. Rav4 EV) to hybrids to fuel cells.
Aren't the fuel cells just an alternative to batteries for storing electricity in an electric car?
We'll also need major improvements in electricity generation and distribution. To charge a battery of ~300 kWh in roughly an hour, even over an industrial supply like three-phase 480V AC, would require in excess of 600 amps!
That's more than three times the maximum current a large, modern house can draw at 240V, and requires conductors over 1000 kcmil, or more than 1" diameter copper.
On an ordinary 15A, 120 VAC circuit, it would take an entire week to charge the car.
That might make fuel cells attractive. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes, and never underestimate the energy transmission potential of a supertanker or freight train full of oil or hydrogen.
And importing electricity would be geopolitically very risky (it would have to be from China or Russia), but liquid hydrogen they can ship in from close allies such as Australia.
String wires over the Korea Strait? Undersea cables? The shortest distance from Korea to the Japanese island at the mid-point is 50km and from there to the mainland is even more (by eyeball).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed
Edit: the engineering would be relatively easy, but the politics are the problem.
It's unconscionable to require a NDA as a condition to performing warranty work. Between crap like this and their aggressive, litigious pushback about accident fault analysis, I'd say it's foolish to buy these cars.
I've owned Dodge, Pontiac, Cadillac, BMW, and Honda cars. Each of those companies and their dealers have plenty of noxious behaviors, but nothing as extreme as this.
Suppressing reports to federal regulators was almost certainly not the intent, since the vast majority of cars will be under warranty (meaning they can't use NDAs).
This article seems incredibly biased, selling NDAs on people who are out of warranty as NDAs on people who have some specific problem. Adding in a shield to make their already really low occurrences of fires even lower, while implying (falsely as far as I know) that this was required. Etc.
It isn't warranty work. It's out of warranty work. Any other company would tell you to get lost and wouldn't repair squat.
> I don't understand why you would want to be an apologist for Tesla.
Because of mis-information found in posts like yours. Tesla does plenty of shitty things, but the amount of lies out there about Tesla is incredible.