Well, as most of Tesla's stock performance has been based on rampant speculation, I'd say this has been coming for a while.
I did the math on Tesla when I invested in it early this year, and it should have topped out at around 44-46 a share, calculating in the difficulty of reaching their goals over the next two years with no significant issues. Then, after different stages were reached, it should have risen. This did not happen. Instead, it rocketed up immediately.
That was all flash in the pan investment and not real analysis of the company, so it's no surprise that it's decreasing when there are minor problems.
Gasoline powered vehicles are not exempt from fire issues. Fact is, one of the best selling vehicles[1] in the U.S. had a recall due to how it would catch fire while parked. I personally saw one on fire on a parking lot. It was baffling.
The recent ford recall had nothing to do with gasoline. I think people keep missing that point. If tesla's cruise control switches were the parts catching fire, this wouldn't be a big deal.
>The recent ford recall had nothing to do with gasoline.
I disagree with this point. A fire in a gasoline powered vehicle always has to do with gasoline. Even if the fire did not start due to an issue in the fuel delivery system. This system is commonly laid out in a way that most of the vehicle is near a fuel line at all times.
I am not defending Tesla, but pointing out that gasoline powered vehicles also carry fire risks. Do realize that gasoline powered vehicles also carry batteries that may explode/catch fire under given circumstances. I've had a battery or two blow up near me before, and it is not fun.
The obvious difference being that if a random switch goes wrong and catches fire, it is not going to set the batteries alight. It was the fuel tanks of these cars that burnt them out, not the switch fires.
That happened to my parents' ford. They were at a stoplight and it caught fire, and were able to put it out in a nearby parking lot. At the time Ford was denying there were any fire problems with their model (an F150), but it seems like they eventually admitted there was an issue with their cruise control wiring.
Isn't it pretty standard for a vehicle to catch on fire when significantly damaged?
I've personally witnessed a few that were the result of wrecks, and just the other weekend I drove by a couple guys trying to put out a flaming engine on a beat up old truck.
How exactly do these compare to gasoline/diesel powered vehicles?
* I posted this comment on the same story elsewhere.
Face it, battery technology is not sufficiently advanced to deliver good range without some serious trade offs. The trade off of the Tesla may prove to be the wrong choice long term.
No one would ever suggest lining the bottom of a car with a gasoline tank, fortunately we don't have too because the power density is so high. Hence they can put tanks where a collision or road debris damage are least likely to damage them.
However Tesla needs a stupendous amount of battery to get its range. Hence we get large cars where they have chosen to isolate the entire pack at the floor of the car. They made the choice to dispense with a central tunnel which could hold more batteries, not use the front engine area or any trunk space.
There were two or more reasons for their design choice, first because of the sheer amount of batteries needed and second because of pack swapping. I don't think the trade off is worth it.
They can use some of the front "frunk" area to have a raised stack of batteries where the traditional firewall is and do similar in the rear. The could have a raised tunnel down the center line and reduce the need of having batteries so far forward. There were many choices available but they wanted swappable packs.
What statistic I want to see is, how many penetration events have their been versus how many fires. How many cells have to be penetrated to create a fire? Is there some flaw that another component is failing during these minor accidents that is causing the fires?
How many cells have to be penetrated to create a fire?
Just the one: 'if crush or penetration occurs perpendicular to electrode edges, that deformation is likely to result in high impedance shorting between electrode layers and initiate cell thermal runaway.'[1]
This is an incredibly thorough piece of research:
[1] Celina Mikolajczak et all, (2011), Lithium-Ion Batteries Hazard and Use Assessment (p. 57, paragraph 5)
I don't think placement could solve the points you mention.
Sure, debris can damage the underside and cause the car to catch fire, but putting the packs in the front or rear of the car can cause it to explode on impact as well. Having it on the underside will probably cause fewer fires than having it in the front for example.
That said, consider gasoline cars: The fuel needs to travel from the tank to the engine. Effectively, an impact anywhere on the fuel line can cause a fire.
packs in the front or rear of the car can cause it to explode on impact as well
Uh, yeah. Are you sure Li-ion batteries really explode, or do they just burn really fast? (In much the same way it's very, very difficult to get a gas tank to explode, but not so hard to get it to burn very fast.) I'm pretty sure it's hard to get them to explode.
Regardless of whether they explode, catch fire, burn slowly, burn quickly, the point still stands. Their placement on the underside of the car could probably be the best choice considering everything.
No one would ever suggest lining the bottom of a car with a gasoline tank
You would be amazed the places people have put gasoline tanks on cars. Just behind the rear axle has been one of the stupidest, so it goes boom when someone drives into the back of you. http://www.autosafetyexpert.com/defect_fueltank.php
As a short term fix, raise the car 1/4", reinforce the front battery section with kevlar, and include a system that can flood at least one of the packs with some kind of fire retardant foam.
As a longer term fix, move the battery pack rearward and design in a little more protection.
Just do the foam thing, but do lots of it all round the battery so in the event of a battery fire the battery pops out and is enclosed and the car ends up sitting on a couple of feet or so of foam.
The main reason gasoline engines catch fire is they overheat - i.e. not due to an accident, but rather poor maintenance.
So when you read statistics on car fires you should try to exclude those if you can.
Then to be fair, one should also take into account the increased reliability of the electric drivetrain.
There have been a lot of problems with fuel tank placement, with some designs being responsible for spraying passengers with flammable fuel, which subsequently catches fire.
The design criteria for internal combustion cars seems to be to place the energy storage such that it minimizes the chance of damage, and to take steps to ensure that the contents do not endanger the passengers. Gas tanks are not designed to withstand highway speed collisions with pointed steel objects and never burn. To apply such standards to electic cars is a double standard.
By the general standards of passenger cars, I'd say that the Tesla model S is a bit fragile, but still quite safe.
I'd say that the Tesla model S is a bit fragile, but still quite safe
What's fragile about 6mm armour plate? And what's safe about 100% of the fires having a single source? It sounds like TSLA needs to put the battery somewhere more protected. They have it exposed right now (presumably for lower CoG and better handling). That might just be a design flaw. I think we can still keep an open mind on LiIon untill the designs are iterated upon more.
Urgh. Nice context switch. To be fair, the system as a whole seems to be a bit fragile, which is what I was actually saying. But in this specific strawman context: Lots of things are "fragile" when a piece of steel has a significant fraction of the momentum of a car behind it.
To me, still very dependable and robust for something with sportscar performance.
But is it completely improbable that a gasoline-powered car could suffer from the same result?
It just feels like somebody's looking for an excuse to go after Tesla. I read these articles about people leaping over concrete barriers and wrapping their car around a tree and just wonder "what the hell did you expect would happen?"
Good Lord no. This isn't about going after Tesla. Just think of it in terms of %. 3 fires in 5 weeks. If they Toyota Camry had the same ratio that might be something like 3000 fires in 5 weeks. I'm a big Tesla fan and hope they succeed but this is starting to look like a real issue.
> According to the U.S. Fire Administration, there are around 194,000 vehicle fires on U.S. roads each year.
So 194,000 vehicle fires per year, or 18,602 within any given five week period.
Toyota's market share is 14.2%, so if the fires are evenly distributed, there would've been 2,641 vehicles of that brand catching fire. That's pretty close to 3,000.
Well, you are changing the subject of conversation. This is the second time that a fairly minor accident (nothing like the Mexican crash) resulted in a fire because of the placement of the battery. If the Tesla were gas powered, it is almost completely improbable that either of the two American fires would have happened as they don't have large amounts of flammable material under the front of the car where road debris can cause damage.
Tesla isn't the victim of a smear campaign, this is fairly minor news that gets amplified in the HN/tech bubble.
I had the entire oil pan emptied out in a Volvo 850 because of an unfortunate rendezvous with a piece of rebar -- at low speed in a parking garage. The oil pan on that particular Volvo 850 was also aluminum, and from what I remember around the same thickness.
The key is that in both cases, the entire mass and momentum of the vehicle were contributing to the intrusion of a piece of steel into an aluminum vessel. No engineering in the world is going to stop that steel from penetrating in that case. A different material and/or different placement will be needed to improve the situation.
We've all known that the correction was coming for a long time. TSLA was an awesome stock, and it will be again.
But I'm glad it's happening now, the sooner the correction is over with, the sooner we can get a sane valuation, and the sooner people can focus less on how ridiculous the price is, and more on how freaking awesome the cars are. (Fires and all)
I think you're mixing up some fundamental issues here. I don't think cars catching on fire is a stock correction from a frothy market. Stock corrections come from missing earnings by 5 or 10% and taking a 30% haircut. Your car's catching on fire can destroy your company if it goes on too long. It likely will cost you large sums of money's in recalls.
Petrol is way safer. The tanks are protected behind the second axle, and the fuel lines are either hardened or flexible, and in any event also well protected. That is why data show only 2% of fires are caus by problems relating to the fuel system. Tesla would need to have 200 more fires that did not involve the LiIon to become safer (on an apples to apples comparison). Something tells me that proving that case wouldn't do them any good.
Yes, but with petrol cars, we're benefitting from over 100 years of experience and engineering -- with many, many horrific fatalities included in the "experience." Considering how recently the Tesla engineers started off, I'd say they're doing a stellar job. (For heavens sakes, the system tells you what's up and warns you to pull over and get out!)
Depends on the chemistry. Notice a lack of any Leaf or Volt fires, despite many more being on the road? Li-manganese and li-phosphate go into thermal runaway at 2.5C and 3.4C respectively (C being the rate at which a battery would be depleted in one hour). The Tesla batteries do it at about 300C. Tesla gets a cheaper and much more energy dense battery in exchange for that risk, but they also have to deal with PR events like this.
As an aside, I'd totally drive a Tesla if I could afford it. I'm not trying to say the car is unsafe. They use a riskier chemistry, but they've also gone to extraordinary lengths to manage that risk with really aggressive thermal management, barriers, etc. There have yet to be any injuries.
Tesla's battery is engineered to prevent cascade failures. That system worked OK in the first fire, and the short duration of the latest fire probably means it worked there, too.
It might be useful to see some data on how many Tesla cars have had front-end accidents and not had fires. To ask it another way, do 100% of accidents result in a huge fire? Or 0.01%?
It just seems odd that you prefer some conspiracy theory over the simpler explanation that Model S has an unforeseen flaw involving battery fires, which are a decades-known risk of lithium batteries anyway.
It just seems odd that you're reading Musk/Tesla-love, or an exclusion of the possibility of flaws, into my comments. It's like you're responding to someone else.
I'm mentioning another non-exclusive possibility... and one that would work synergistically to expand the stock impact of any actual flaws. (It becomes more likely once the initial idea is planted, be it by flaw or random coincidence. Turn 2 or 3 real fires into twice as many with a little help, collect a billion dollars.)
Or do you think high-flying volatile stock values are never unethically manipulated in either direction?
Hey, where were you during each of the fires so far?
I thought it was odd that you were positing conspiracy theories when they were not the Occam-optimal explanation. Musk worship is common around these parts so it seemed the more likely motivation for believing crazy conspiracy theories over more likely explanations.
From my Google terminal, I can see the same thing. :D
What's more important is the percent of the company you're getting with a share. (Obviously the same information in a different form), but I think more important to the small investor than share price.
121.45M - TSLA
4.56B - ORCL
So you're getting significantly more share of the company for your investment when you go for TSLA.
That is completely irrelevant. That's like saying "There are more micrograms in this one-gram object than there are grams in this one-kilogram object, and therefore the one gram object is heavier."
Share price is an irrelevant number when you aren't taking the shares outstanding into account. Oracle's market cap is $159B, Tesla's market cap is $17B. Oracle is worth nearly 10x Tesla currently.
