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Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

teslamotors.com

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Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#241

Post by stcredzero »

bborud wrote: post #223
abalone wrote: post #110

This is all very good PR.... BUT. The critical safety concern with the Tesla is....... You guessed it. The high voltage system. It can kill you or a first responder with a touch. It's not just about batteries catching fire, although that's gotten a lot of press lately. A chief concern during a Tesla accident is the exposure of high voltage components. It's a big concern for first responders. Read it from the horse's…

Good thing regular cars don't contain high voltage components or volatile, flamable fluids that can cause intense fires and even explosions...

Car explosions have been thoroughly busted by Mythbusters. They are as busted as "Enhance!"

Car fires are very real and nasty, though.

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#242

Post by Someone »

jacquesm wrote: post #145
Someone wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of a crash test is not to keep the car intact, it is to keep the driver intact. On "keep the car intact", today's cars do way more badly than those of the 1950's.

> On "keep the car intact", today's cars do way more badly than those of the 1950's. I don't think that is true. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g

Nice video, deserves my upvote, but I am going to call it just anecdata ;-), so that I can add some partial counterarguments.

The video is a commercial, so they will have chosen an impact angle and speed that makes the newer car look best). For example, you can see that the newer car is heavier than the old one from the video; its front wheels still move forward when the wheels of the old one already go back. Because of that, the new car has a much longer braking distance than the old one. Things would have looked relatively better for the old car if they had chosen a collision with a concrete wall.

Also, Reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone, the crumple zone was patented in 1952; chances are this 1959 car doesn't have a good one.

If its crumple zone is bad or absent, chances are that the older car would have survived way better in a frontal collision, where the beam carrying the engine would be elastically compressed without deforming permanently.

That would be just the car, though; those old cars could be lethal at incredibly low speeds, for example by impaling them on their non-collapsible steering column.

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#243

Post by sixQuarks »

philip1209 wrote: post #116
sixQuarks wrote: post #93

There have been several real-world crashes of the Tesla S, and none, as far as I know, have resulted in any injuries to the driver. One was even a head on crash at fairly high speeds which killed the other vehicle's driver. The Tesla S driver walked away. Tesla never fails to amaze me.

Source on the head-on crash story?

I was mistaken. Two people were killed in the other car, and the Tesla driver was taken to a hospital with minor injuries. Still, amazing aftermath to a terrible accident.

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#244

Post by Florin_Andrei »

notaddicted wrote: post #62
ISL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask a rocket scientist to make you a car that passes the crash test ratings alone, they'll build you a tungsten dump truck. If you're going to win, you might as well reach the destination without noticing that you've had a collision.

I believe one of the tests is crashing into a wall that yields very little, so the tungsten dumptruck would fare poorly, exciting as it would be to drive. EDIT: this one: http://youtu.be/V5R80yUUVNk

Given a heavy enough tungsten truck...

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#245

Post by abalone »

outworlder wrote: post #231
justin66 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope very much the industry can improve electrical safety over time. With regard to the electrical aspects, isn't the safety record on these cars perfect or close to perfect up until this date? That means it's only going to get worse. That does not mean electrical cars are unsafe, it just means there isn't much of a record yet. My expectation is that there will over time be a small number of electricity-related a…

Aren't those the same concerns people had when gasoline cars were introduced? It was considered to be too dangerous to use. Fast forward to today, cars are not exploding. Battery safety issues will be dealt with. Considering the fact that Tesla batteries are made for lots of really tiny cells, I can't imagine it is impossible to disconnect them from each other in the case of a crash.

I don't know about individually disconnecting each cell, but there is a loop that emergency responders are supposed to manually cut to disconnect the battery. However there are still components that retain power and remain hazardous such as the converter and capacitors. Firefighters need to take great care to cut around them. Plus there's the possibility of the battery compartment being compromised in an accident as well. Tesla's training video covers all this.

Nobody's arguing that Teslas are unsafe, just that the "safest car" claim sidesteps the electrical safety issue. You can't really argue that everything's fine because nothing bad has happened yet, because there are so few Teslas on the road. And it should be noted, a lot of people were hurt along the path to making gasoline cars as safe as they are today. Look at Ralph Nader's work on automobile safety for example.

I actually believe progress demands that we work through electrical car safety. But what irks me is it's just a little premature to be trumpeting "SAFEST CAR EVAR" when you've got a novel set of serious safety issues that the test suite doesn't even try to target.

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#246

Post by gargoiler00 »

lutusp wrote: post #239
gargoiler00 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take an AA battery. Now go back in time 30 years and look at an AA battery. Identical. Why has battery technology not improved one bit in the last 30 years? Well, obviously there's a massive disincentive - the better the battery, the less people buy, but I don't think that's the main limitation. I don't think conventional batteries can improve all that much more.

> Take an AA battery. Now go back in time 30 years and look at an AA battery. Identical. Why has battery technology not improved one bit in the last 30 years? That's completely false. I might have said, "Look at a basic mousetrap 30 years ago. Now look at one today. Identical." What's missing is any examination of the alternatives. 30 years ago, there weren't any NiMH batteries, or commercial lithium-ion batteries (t…

> lithium-ion batteries (the latter were under active development), but they're now the primary power sources for portable devices, and lithium-ion batteries power the Tesla Model S.

What does that mean for the user. Do batteries today last twice what they lasted 30 years ago? Nope. Are rechargeable batteries any more viable today? Nope.

Even batteries in laptops only last a year or so before they are just dead and need replacing.

If you think battery technology has really massively improved in the last 30 years, please let me know what real world improvements there have been...

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#247

Post by lutusp »

gargoiler00 wrote: post #246
lutusp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take an AA battery. Now go back in time 30 years and look at an AA battery. Identical. Why has battery technology not improved one bit in the last 30 years? That's completely false. I might have said, "Look at a basic mousetrap 30 years ago. Now look at one today. Identical." What's missing is any examination of the alternatives. 30 years ago, there weren't any NiMH batteries, or commercial lithium-ion batteries (t…

> lithium-ion batteries (the latter were under active development), but they're now the primary power sources for portable devices, and lithium-ion batteries power the Tesla Model S. What does that mean for the user. Do batteries today last twice what they lasted 30 years ago? Nope. Are rechargeable batteries any more viable today? Nope. Even batteries in laptops only last a year or so before they are just dead and n…

> What does that mean for the user. Do batteries today last twice what they lasted 30 years ago? Nope. Are rechargeable batteries any more viable today? Nope.

You are flat wrong on both counts. Modern batteries provide much more energy per size, weight and cost than their rechargeable predecessors. As to "viable", how can you make any kind of claim about batteries that didn't exist 30 years ago?

> Even batteries in laptops only last a year or so before they are just dead and need replacing.

Yes -- compared to no batteries and no laptops, 30 years ago. What kind of comparison do you think you're making?

> If you think battery technology has really massively improved in the last 30 years, please let me know what real world improvements there have been...

Today, batteries exist, and applications exist, that did not exist 30 years ago. Modern battery applications could not be filled by the technology that existed 30 years ago. How difficult is that to decode? Thirty years ago, the Tesla Model S could not exist, period, full stop. The battery technology didn't exist.

Chart of battery energy density by year:

http://www.akbars.net/images/battery%20energy%20density.png

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#248

Post by TallGuyShort »

OGC wrote: post #73
ra88it wrote: post #50

Elon Musk clearly writes these things himself. That, or he's got a bunch of other folks like him working at Tesla. Either way, it's exciting times. It's fun to be inspired by a company. To find something that keeps getting better as it unfolds...

> Elon Musk clearly writes these things himself. What the fuck? Get a grip, PR is _an_ industry.

And Elon Musk is notoriously unconventional. Automotive manufacturing is also an industry, and he doesn't keep with tradition there either.

Now, do you actually have anything intelligent to contradict this suggestion? You've made several negative comments on this article, and although I agree Tesla's hype is large and growing, you haven't actually added factual content to the conversation.

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#249

Post by TWAndrews »

abalone wrote: post #142
agumonkey wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I guess it's unrealistic to think of a special draining device to be brought on crash sites to exhaust the car battery. All in all, are electric vehicles more 'instable' energy wise when crashed, compared to petroleum based one ? or is it different flavours of similarly sh*tty situations ?

That's a very big question and probably only time will tell. Without getting into it too much, a very basic difference is.. Gas can explode like a bomb but (a) it needs an ignition source and (b) there can be visible signs when the fuel is leaking to let you know to take extra precautions (like spray fire retardant). You can actually get fuel on you and you'll be fine. High voltage systems don't (usually) explode, bu…

Technically they only claimed "ACHIEVES BEST SAFETY RATING OF ANY CAR EVER TESTED" which is completely true.

The "unaware of any Model S or Roadster occupant fatalities in any car ever" is also a pretty strong argument for actually being the "safest car" too.

Re: Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested

#250

Post by moocowduckquack »

JshWright wrote: post #212
James_Duval wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your response, is this not what the specialised tools would be primarily designed for?

What sort of tools are you envisioning?

maybe insulated ones
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