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.
As far as I can find there have been 0 reports of teslas catching fire AND THEN locking the driver inside. There are a few instances of teslas catching fire that have been non arson related, but no deaths. There have also been news reports of people getting locked inside their teslas, but they also made no attempt to use the manual release.
One criticism is that in some models the manual release of the back seat doors is near impossible to find, rendering them a death trap.
https://sfist.com/2025/03/11/testimony-reveals-doors-would-not-open-on-cybertruck-that-caught-fire-in-piedmont-killing-three/
I have no idea what sources are credible anymore at this point, so my apologies if I got this wrong. https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/people-are-still-being-burned-alive I will admit that the wording of my previous statement was not the best. It’s certainly not them doing it in their own, it’s the result of a crash or the like, but to clarify I meant without accelerants. And it’s not them locking the doors, but the power to the locks failing because of the fire or damage in the crash and them not having manual locks.
I wasn’t paying very close attention to the stories when they first started circulating, I imagine I’m not the first or last to have that the away just from casual observation.
I would imagine that with the Elon hate right more that if these were legitimate they would be front page news