I don't know what's going on but I sometimes wish someone would tell Elon to cool it and really think things through before making public statements. I realize there's a lot of emotion involved. His competitors are loving every minute of him flying off the handle and making dumb statements.

> Based on the Model S track record so far, you have a zero percent chance of being hurt in an accident resulting in a battery fire

This is right up there with Bush's "Mission Accomplished", his Dad's "Read my lips. No new taxes.", Obama's red line and "You can keep your plan. Period".

It's not true. Or put in better terms, the data is not statistically significant. And he knows it.

These are the kinds of statements you really regret making when reality catches up with you.

> There are now substantially more than the 19,000 Model S vehicles on the road that were reported in our Q3 shareholder letter for an average of one fire per at least 6,333 cars, compared to the rate for gasoline vehicles of one fire per 1,350 cars. By this metric, you are more than four and a half times more likely to experience a fire in a gasoline car than a Model S!

Again, he knows this math is wrong. To make this comparison stick you'd have to aggregate data going back to the very introduction of gasoline powered vehicles. You'd also have to include every kind of vehicle --trucks, vans, busses, not just cars. And then you'd have to remove the percentage of fires that were caused intentionally which, from what I was able to garner, could represent a massive 20% to 30% of fires. Fires due to collisions represent a smaller fraction of all automobile fires.

Further to that, you'd have to also consider vehicle age, maintenance and environment. Is it fair to compare a fire on a a 15 year old truck in a rural setting on substandard roads against a brand new Tesla in the city on great roads? How are Tesla's going to perform (in terms of safety) when they are five, ten, fifteen or twenty years old?

Perhaps the comparison should be restricted to fires caused by collisions (not intentional or other non-collision causes) on new cars operating in the same urban centers where Tesla's are found.

In other words, he is grabbing numbers without any though given to applicability.

Again, these are statements that obviously come from anger and frustration and you could end-up regretting them.

> you are more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime than experience even a non-injurious fire in a Tesla.

From [1]:

"The odds of becoming a lightning victim in the U.S. in any one year is 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1 in 3,000."

So we are comparing the odds of something happening over someone's lifetime (50 to 90 years?) with a fire in a car that's been in the market for ONE YEAR? Really? How about we compare it to the 1 in 700,000 yearly case? It's still a bullshit comparison. But, hey, since we are slinging bullshit.

Again. Please. Think before saying such things. All you need is one fire where someone gets hurt or killed and this statement could be thrown back as an utter joke. With only 20,000 cars on the road every incident has the potential to change numbers in a radical way. If that happens you now have a 1 in 20,000 chance of being killed in a Tesla in any one year. See how stupid it is to make such statements?

> The far more deadly nature of a gasoline car fire deserves to be re-emphasized.

Who do you think you are talking to? Who's your audience? Children? There are a BILLION cars in the world[0]. A BILLION. That number might not include motorcycles, trucks and other variants. I would suggest gasoline powered vehicles are pretty damn safe, particularly when you consider markets where they might not have pristine roads, regular maintenance and where cars are used for ten, twenty and thirty years rather than flipping them every few years as is often the case in affluent communities in the US and elsewhere.

Anyhow, the point is that sometimes you have to lead by not reacting to things with emotion and by not saying things you know you will have to regret. The strongest statement he could make right now is to crash several Model-S's (as painful as that might be) into concrete walls, into each other and into gasoline cars and show --in a very public way-- just how safe they might be. If they are not. Fix it and then show the public. Release the videos and let people sort it out.

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/23/car-population_n_934...

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_...