DAVIE (CBSMiami) – A driver is dead after he lost control of a Tesla and slammed into a tree in Davie.
It happened on Sunday afternoon on South Flamingo Road near 12th Street.
Davie police said the four door 2016 Tesla Model S burst into flames on impact. Arriving officers tried to get the driver out but couldn’t.
“They attempted to break the window in an attempt to get the driver out but the flames were too strong and too big and they were unable to and so there was no doorknob and they were unable to get into the vehicle that way,” said Detective Vivian Gallinal.
Man Killed In Fiery Tesla Crash In Davie
I am not just trying to exaggerate things, it seems Teslas do like to become bonfires on impact. It also happened last May in Fort Lauderdale and the only survivor was not wearing a seat belt and got ejected from the car before it went up.
Maybe they just don’t like the weather in South Florida. Too hot or something and it is impact-driven spontaneous combustion.
If Tesla cars use batteries similar in tech to the LiPo batteries that RC models use (just scaled up), them batteries do not like impacts. Like at all.
Tesla did a whole lot of work to contain fire in the battery compartment. But there’s a limit to what can be done when you have thousands of lithium batteries — lithium is quite reactive, as it must be to make for an effective battery.
One wonders how fast the guy was going. Teslas have been in crashes, including high speed ones, with little problem. Just a week or two ago there was a video of a Tesla running a red light at very high speed, T-boning a large pickup truck hard enough that the truck flipped several times. (Also in FL, I think.) The Tesla looked like it kept going. I think the reporter said it was going over 100 mph at the time of the crash. Max speed is 130 so that’s possible.
If you crash a car with flammable content — meaning any of them, gasoline powered ones in particular — hard enough, the containers can be breached and a fire result. Race cars are built so even a crash at race speeds is unlikely to do this, but consumer cars are not. I wonder if a BMW or Chevy crash at the same speed would have fared any better.
Tesla has retractable door handles, but a lot of other cars have locking doors that wouldn’t open either after a crash. Don’t first responders have hammers that break through tempered glass?
Short answer, yes any modern gas powered car would have fared better in that crash.
Long answer: The fatality was related to how quickly and hot the fire burned, and that is because the batteries were ruptured. If you wreck a gas powered car and puncture the gas tank, the gasoline still needs both the correct fuel air mix and an ignition source to burn. Both are possible in a crash, but it is not the automatic inferno of a ruptured battery. The other big difference is the rate at which the fuel burns, with a battey cooking of in a matter of seconds vs minutes.
That being said Tesla does a pretty good job of engineering the battery compartments to protect the battery, but the nature of the batteries is pretty much all or nothing. If the battery damaged in the crash, all the fire protection built into the car probably is as well. You end up with two types of crashes, ones where everyone walks away, and instant creamatoriums. I don’t know what the numbers for those look like but the car-b-cues always makes the news.
The amount of energy stored in those lithium ion batteries is roughly equal to a full tank of gasoline. Put that through a dead short in a crash and what do you expect?
Consider how many go up in flames vs how many are on the road. Is it just a handful that have burnt up? Additionally, the media has biased coverage and posts stories about individual Tesla accidents, but when was the last time you saw a story about a 4Runner getting into an accident?