The Tesla Firebomb Problem
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=233457
Tesla isn't alone in this risk, incidentally....it's common to
all electrical vehicles.
The risk is fires immediately following a collision -- fires that
cannot be put out.
A fuel-fed fire, such as one in a gasoline vehicle, can be mitigated in a number of ways. There isn't much fuel in the vehicle in other than the fuel tank itself, which is mounted and designed to make it very hard to rupture it. This became important after the Pinto fiasco, where the tank was mounted in a fashion that the differential could easily puncture it in a crash.
The fuel pump is designed to be disabled when a crash is detected (e.g. airbag deployment) or the engine is stopped, minimizing the risk of feeding fuel into the fire.
But with an electric car you have a battery in it which is the store of energy. Anything that shorts that battery internally or otherwise
is an instant disaster, because electrical fires are nearly impossible to extinguish
as long as the system is energized.
Unfortunately in a battery-powered car
the battery is always, by definition, energized. If it is shorted internally by a crash then the resulting fire will burn until
all the energy in the pack has been consumed; it is nearly impossible to put it out because the heat source (the short circuit) cannot be removed.
There's not much you can do about this because of the size of the pack that's required. As such protecting it from taking enough damage in a crash to violate its integrity is basically impossible.
This risk of fires is not unique to Tesla; it exists with
any battery-powered vehicle and there is little or nothing you can realistically do about it, since a short in the pack
itself will heat the surrounding cells sufficient to cause
them to short. The energy density requirements make it essentially impossible to eliminate this risk. In a serious accident the occupants of the vehicle are frequently stunned, severely injured or the vehicle is sufficient damaged that they cannot immediately get out under their own power, and the amount of time available before a fire occurs in the event of a serious internal short-circuit may be just a few seconds.
There's no real fix for this,
and a wreck that was almost-certainly survivable in Florida is just one example -- a Model X was also recently immolated as a result of essentially the same process.
In short all EVs are essentially Pintos in that if the battery pack integrity is damaged during a collision the risk of fire is quite high and there's little or nothing you can do about it in the vehicle's design -- unlike a gasoline or diesel-powered car.
