The recent weeks have seen an increase in news alerts about electric vehicles bursting into flames. These stories have concentrated on a couple of Teslas that have caught fire after being involved in an accident or some other special circumstance.

The media is reporting this as a service of course, but it seems to me that they are trying to instill that some sort of pattern is emerging. They won’t come out and say it but they seem to imply that “here we go again, another Tesla fire” headline would apply.

This of course is wrong.

Tesla and other extended range electric vehicles are built to extreme safety and construction standards.  They knew going in that because of the battery and potential shock concerns upgraded structural elements were needed. This is why these vehicles are typically more rigid than most other vehicles.  In fact the battery pack adds to its structural rigidity.

From a safety standpoint an electric vehicle may be safer in a collision than the typical fossil fuel vehicle. Both of the recent news worthy electric vehicle fires involved rather extreme collision or impacts. The type of occurrence that would have resulted in the same if not worse results if it was in a gasoline vehicle. But of course a similar incident in a gasoline vehicle would not have resulted in a nationwide newsfeed of the car burning on video.

Relax everybody. These vehicles are okay. Like other cars they do require updates and improvements as time and instances reveal themselves through real world driving. This is nothing new. We will post a story about the current market in the coming weeks. It should help us take a good look at the current offerings and their potential advantages. So stay tuned.

Now I’m beginning to wonder if the gasoline industry is secretly searching for ANY instances of electric vehicle problems only to force-feed them to the media. Hmmm.