Tesla Inc (TSLA)

[XFundManager]

Elon Musk Replying to @elonmusk

Over a million combustion engine (it’s right there in the name!) car fires per year & thousands of deaths, but one Tesla car fire with no injuries gets biggest headlines. Why the double standard? This is a real question.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk

Reality is a Tesla, like most electric cars, is over 500% *less* likely to catch fire than combustion engine cars, which carry massive amounts of highly flammable fuel. Why is this never mentioned?

Most of these Tesla fires seem to be caused by the electric vehicle's battery suffering some kind of trauma, sometimes by crashing at high speeds. In the Davie incident, the driver was going between 75 mph and 90 mph on a road with a 50-mph speed limit. The two teens who died in Fort Lauderdale were going 116 mph.

Whether it's Tesla fires, or BMW or Fisker, if you look at the ones that caught on fire, almost every single one of them was operating outside of agency testing parameters," the auto-extrication and fire-rescue expert Brock Archer told Business Insider over the phone. "They were going too fast and ended up crashing.

Tesla vehicles achieved the lowest probability of injury of any vehicles ever tested by U.S. government [NCAP] safety rating program," Tesla said in a statement to Business Insider, "and based on our fleet of over 500,000 electric cars, we know that a Tesla vehicle is approximately 10 times less likely to experience a fire than a gas car.