Genuine question. I thought cars were engineered to be resistant to this?
It can’t just be as simple as holding a lighter next to it, right? What exactly are they using to achieve this?
Is this specific to Teslas? If not, why aren’t cars engineered to be resistant to whatever they’re using to light them on fire?
Furthermore, wouldn’t the protestors get caught? If not, then how are they evading all of this?
Just to be clear, I’m not fond of Musk. I’m just trying to understand the situation from both an engineering and social science perspective.
Accelerants and or/ firestarters placed near the tires. Once you get the rubber burning the rest kind of takes care of itself.
If it were a sunny day and I wanted to conduct an innocuous experiment with my own property, on my own property, and it were legal to do so in my municipality, I’d place a magnifying glass, via powerful magnet and flexible arm, such that it concentrated sunlight on the tire’s sidewall. Then I’d sit back and watch until I either got bored or had to put out any resulting flames with an NFPA-approved extinguisher and/or garden hose. Then I’d record the results in a logbook and drink a beer.
Fresnel lenses (like the kind you can tear out of old projection tv’s) work great for that, but they’re kind of a pain and bulky, and very impractical. I have one I took out of an old 55" projection tv. I think charcoal firestarters by a tire works better and can be “deployed” in seconds, but concentrated light is still pretty cool. This vid shows how well they can work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbrXUBU_gkM
That’s awesome! I’ve tried looking for these giant lenses in the past, but never encountered any on the side of the road, unfortunately. Projection TVs are a treasure trove of awesome optical components.
This makes me wonder how well a 1W 980nm Infrared Laser would work for burning/igniting a rubber surface.
I once read an article many years about how arsonists were burning expensive cars in Berlin. The journalist indeed reported that they would light barbecue starters under the tires.
If I recall correctly, they would even place it a little bit further under the car (i.e. not the outside) so that any passerbys wouldn’t notice anything until the tire was properly burning.
This was before Tesla’s though, which have a sentry mode
With the more recent cases, I have read that they smash the windows and throw Molotov cocktails inside, but I think that would draw a lot of attention and make alarms go off.
On the other hand, I think this method might have less risk of the sentry mode filming.
Sentry mode records to local storage. It’s pretty difficult to recover data from a pile of ashes.
Filming only helps so much though. Cover your face and anything identifying, wear clothes and shoes from a thrift store, put a pebble in your shoe (to force you to walk differently) etc, and it’s pretty hard to link you to anything without some solid evidence.
Leave the phone also.
Good point. I didn’t think to add that because I rarely carry my tracking devices with me.
Be sure to read the full story of how people are being caught.
Automatic license plate readers are everywhere.