I'm not sure you really grasp the state of "current battery tech." More Ferrari's and Lambo's have caught fire in the past few years than EV's. There have been a few post-crash EV fires, but precious few instances of un-instigated thermal runaway or batteries blowing up. You WILL see this with consumer-grade products, but battery management and thermal management systems are standard for automotive applications, and very effective these days. Admittedly, the prevalence of EVs on the road isn't there yet to have decades of historical data, but here's something for perspective:
About 174,000 vehicle fires were reported in the United States in 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available from the National Fire Protection Association. Virtually all of those fires involved gasoline powered cars. That works out to about one every three minutes.
Tesla claims that gasoline powered cars are about 11 times more likely to catch fire than a Tesla. It says the best comparison is fires per 1 billion miles driven. It says the 300,000 Teslas on the road have been driven a total of 7.5 billion miles, and about 40 fires have been reported.
That works out to five fires for every billion miles traveled, compared to a rate of 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars. (
Source)
New things always scare people until they figure out how to deal with them. Formula E has been going a couple of years now and have an *impeccable* safety, AND *reliability* record when it comes to their batteries. The TT-E class has also been going quite swimmingly for years, the "professional" outfits have had plenty of teething issues, but I have yet to hear of a total loss of a bike due to fire... whereas several traditional bikes are crashed, burnt to a crisp, and written off... each year.
Also worth noting, the electric hypercar that Hammond totaled in the hill-climb burned down to nothing, but the technical
debrief was pretty amazing and the company has learned new ways to make their cars safer. A natural byproduct of failures is engineering solutions and implementing appropriate protocols. I'm sure Tesla is constantly learning each time their car is involved in an accident or has a failure. ICE's have a good century head-start, and yet by most accounts EV's are likely *already safer* than gasoline cars both in terms of crash-worthiness and fire risk.
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Originally Posted by Paul_E_D
99 + 02 SV650 ex-race - 91 FJ1200 street - 03 KDX220R woods - 12 WR450F motard/ice
