This kind of reminds me how the media reports every single airplane crash. How about report every car crash with fatalities. According to Wikipedia over 2,500 per month.
Gasoline gars don't catch on fire in non-fatal accident with any frequency
Now let's talk numbers.
Ford Fusion fleet, in the US: 1,520,000 vehicles. Tesla Model S fleet, world: 18,300. If 300 Ford Fusions caught on fire in a 6 week span I guarantee NHTSA would be investigating.
>Gasoline gars don't catch on fire in non-fatal accident to begin with.
That can't be true. I live in a relatively small town and I've seen 2 car fires(or the aftermath) in the past year, as a result of an accident.
There were 187,500 car fires in 2011 (http://www.nfpa.org/research/fire-statistics/the-us-fire-pro...), that's just over 3600 a week, which is about 0.07% of the total cars (~254M, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...).
3 of 18,300 Model S vehicles have caught fire. That's 0.02%.
As for running over debris, again it is not important because who cares if gasoline cars have different causes for their fires vs the causes of the model S. What matters is the percentage that actually do catch on fire with a large enough population.
After that, the next question that should be asked is, what is the difference between the danger of these fires. Are gasoline fires more or less dangerous.
There are pressure relief valves on the tank that prevent that from happening in the vast majority of cases.
They burn, sure. They almost never explode.
If your tank was punctured while driving it's quite likely the first you'd know was when you ran out.
However, last year the 2013 Ford Fusion was recalled (over 89k sold) after 13 fires caused by engine overheating: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/best-cars-b...
It's not clear whether the Tesla catches fire more often than other cars from road debris, 2 instances could be coincidence (I've never run over something that caused actual damage to my car after years of driving, crosses-finger).
However, that is the government's job, to examine the fire and determine whether they should have been prevented.
Straight from the article.
The volt had one, rather famously when it was tested by the NHTSA. In that test (which was pretty ludicrous if you dig into the details) as in the recent Tesla crashes, I don't think they're really reflective of the engineering quality of the car.