[jyl]

"We have been in contact with the driver, who was not injured and believes the car saved his life"

There is a Telsa owner who has drunk the Kool-Aid. In a conventional car, driing over a trailer hitch on the road would result in a loud noise and a dent in the belly pan, maybe some damage to an underbody component. Not life threatening.

I think the problem is that the Tesla battery is spread out over such a large area (the whole belly of the car), that it is vulnerable to damage if the car runs over a metal object. How vulnerable? Well, not "very vulnerable", I imagine Teslas are driving over stuff all the time without incident, but certainly much "more vulnerable" than a fuel tank, which is a relatively compact object that is usually packaged up higher, often protected by other components, and can be deformed without being punctured. Further, if a fuel tank is punctured by driving over an object, it often merely results in leaking fuel along the road, not a fire, because you need an ignition source. The Tesla battery, when punctured. seems able to provide it's own ignition source.

There are 20K to 30K Teslas on the road by now, so three fires isn't an epidemic or anything. But maybe they should start developing stylish cow catchers.

"each year there are about 6,000 passenger vehicle fires resulting from crashes"

Assuming 230MM cars on the road in the US, 6,000 fires per year is 0.000027 fires/car-year. Suppose there are 30K Teslas on the road, 3 fires in half a year is 0.0002 fires/car-year. An order of magnitude worse for Tesla?

Edit: actually there are about 18K Tesla model S on the road, since they are selling about 5K/quarter and significant deliveries started 4Q12.