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Comment by btian | Hacker News Reader

No. "some 250,000 gas-powered vehicles catch fire in real-life settings every year." [Washington Post's WonkBlog, 1/9/12] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/are-elec...

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I don't know if that number means anything on its own. There are many more conventional cars including some older ones often maintained by shade tree mechanics.

Newer electric cars are relatively expensive and have owners who probably don't fiddle with things like that.

I'd be more interested in what percentage of electric cars catch have fire as compared to the percentage of late model conventional cars catching fire.

Gas cars could be more dangerous. It's just that the number 250K doesn't mean much without more information.

As this article points out, the facts aren't what's at stake here -- it's media/public perception.

To heck with that noise. Push the public and media to perceive that facts are important.

You make it seem so easy.

Let me ask you: How well did that work for Toyota?

Tesla's got two things going for it that Toyota didn't. It's an American company so it's not fighting against any xenophobic tendencies in the media or public. It's a singular incident, not a series of incidents. If more minor accidents similarly result in fires then they've got a problem, if they can show that most of the minor accidents (might be hard to get statistics on, but they can try and collect them going forward) result in nothing worse than needing repair work then they won't have an issue. It also helps that, in general, they're perceived as a very transparent company when it comes to safety.

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