I've seen this same effect a lot when talking about Teslas. Any failure on their part is instantly chalked up to alleged poor practices, laziness, and general lack of care or professionalism, whereas an identical failure on the part of an established manufacturer is shrugged off as "oh well, sometimes parts fail."
(Take the issue with fires, for instance - Teslas catch fire far less frequently than conventional cars, but every time it happens it's global front-page news.)
And what's their resulting failure rate compared to what it would have been if they'd used existing auto-rated parts?
I see a lot of "they should have done X and they didn't so they're wrong" but not a lot of "they should have done X but they did Y and Y worked worse than X by these measures".
> Any failure on their part is instantly chalked up to alleged poor practices
If this article is accurate (let's assume it is, those quotes from Musk will get the lawyers coming so fast if they were false), then it just proved that this actually is the case! Their arrogance that "pah, who needs automotive grade?" has now come back to bite them in the ass...
> Parked gas cars don't usually burst into flames.
Usually not, no. But every now and then, they do, just like electric cars. It's hard to say which type of vehicle burns down more often, the sample size is small and there are so many more petrol powered cars than electric powered cars.
Electric and petrol powertrains have different failure modes. An electric car can fail while being parked, which is less likely to happen on petrol cars (and if so, it's usually caused by an electrical failure in the car). However, petrol powered cars have a higher chance of bursting into flames while in operation due to the compination of high temperature components and pressurised fuel being close to each other.
A car (being petrol or electric) has a high density energy storage. Whenever that enegry can no longer be contained, bad things happen. Personally, I'd prefer my car burning down while being parked over bursting into flames when I'm driving it.
Parked car burst into flames "mercedes" -tesla -bmw
1M for
Parked car burst into flames "tesla" -mercedes -bmw
0.5M for
Parked car burst into flames "bmw" -mercedes -tesla
Unscientific I know but surely an indication that at least some parked cars do burst into flames. Not usually I'll grant you, but a bit more frequently than one might think.
(Take the issue with fires, for instance - Teslas catch fire far less frequently than conventional cars, but every time it happens it's global front-page news.)