In 2018, a Twitter exchange about fire involving Tesla’s CEO raised questions about appropriate messaging around public safety concerns.
His tweet should have immediately raised DoJ concerns about the messaging around fire safety.
Perhaps this rhetoric established a pattern where Tesla fires were normalized, even celebrated by the CEO, setting the stage for what has come since then.
Finally, after years and years of Tesla fires, the Justice.gov website has a powerful statement out today that they are cracking down on Tesla “arsonists”.
…face the full force of the law for [those who] set fire to Tesla cars and charging stations.
The sudden concern with fire naturally got me curious about the frequency of fires recorded for Tesla, prior to the DoJ saying they have seen enough. As my wise old ethics professor Gunderson once said to me:
Outcomes of injuries and deaths are indeed what matter most to real justice, regardless of cause. Whether fires result from external arson or internal design flaws, the harm to people is the same.
According to the site tesla-fire.com tracking the data, Tesla has blown well beyond the Ford Pinto with a shocking 83 fire deaths by the end of 2023. The reliability of using tesla-fire.com is that it’s a collection of local qualitative news in a quantitative ledger, perhaps the highest integrity of any dataset possible.
We’re not talking reports of property damage alone, although those have apparently been bad.
Walmart sues Tesla for negligence after solar panels catch fire at 7 stores. […] As of November 2018, at least seven Walmart stores, including in Denton, Maryland and Beavercreek, Ohio, had experienced fires due to Tesla’s solar systems, according to the lawsuit. One of the fires happened months after the system was de-energized, Walmart said.
The stores were at risk of burning down, and while the news reported no injuries or deaths it still went to court. Notably in March 2018 Tesla CEO tweeted that everything is better with fire and then in November 2018 Walmart sued Tesla for multiple fires related to Tesla equipment.
Giant Tesla fires destroying things are bad, for sure. But we must really talk about the fact that there have been over 100 deaths related to Tesla fires, and apparently there’s no end in sight!
Tesla Fire Deaths Analysis
After the Tesla CEO tweeted in very prescriptive tone that he thought of fire as “better“, I noted he suddenly in 2025 switched into a passive observer tone, as if watching the world from a driver’s seat without grabbing the wheel:
“I can’t walk past a TV without seeing a Tesla on fire,” said Musk.
Remember that 2018 wasn’t just a single Tweet promoting fire. Elon Musk at the same time deceptively branded a flamethrower as “Not a Flamethrower” and sold tens of thousands of them. Of course there is no established connection between one product and another promoted by the same CEO, but perhaps you can see reason for concern here:
After two days locked up in an Italian prison, American Max Craddock was finally able to make his case to a judge. “It’s not a weapon of war,” his lawyer told the investigating magistrate. “It’s a toy they sell to children.” Craddock had been arrested in the Sardinian port city of Olbia in June 2018 after trying to board a private party bus with a collectible flamethrower from Elon Musk… […] More than 1,000 flamethrower purchasers abroad have had their devices confiscated by customs officers or local police, with many facing fines and weapons charges. In the U.S., the flamethrowers have been implicated in at least one local and one federal criminal investigation. There have also been at least three occasions in which the Boring Company devices have been featured in weapons hauls seized from suspected drug dealers. The upshot: What Musk and his army of fans thought was just another of his money-spinning larks is having real-world consequences for people and countries not in on the joke.
The TechCrunch article highlights how the marketing of certain highly flammable products as jokes can still have serious legal and safety repercussions for consumers. The ideas stated about a flamethrower and harms from fire are in fact no joke.
“We are told that various countries would ban shipping of it, that they would ban flamethrowers,” Musk told Rogan in 2018. “So, to solve this problem for all of the customs agencies, we labelled it, ‘Not a Flamethrower.’ “
According to the CEO of Tesla, a product he knew had been classified as a highly dangerous flamethrower (and therefore illegal) in many countries had its name changed by him to evade global safety laws that were meant to prevent harm from fires.
The juxtaposition between the CEO’s tweet that “everything is better with fire” and the subsequent marketing of products like “Not a Flamethrower” raises questions about his overall concerns and messaging around fire safety since 2018. These public statements and product decisions beg nearly a decade of data of who really is to be held responsible for safety from many, many Tesla fires.
Is he not going to take some heat? Even if he has been asleep at the wheel this whole time, while the Tesla fire incident and fatality rate steadily increased, where does the responsibility go?
I still remember when Ford was investigated for just 27 deaths from Pinto fires. That’s three times less than the Tesla over the same period.
27
83
3.1x
1971-1980 (10 years)
2013-2023 (11 years)
Note the data set ends before 2024 so we’re not including the many Tesla fires happening more recently.
Total Fire Incidents
232
Total Fatalities
83
Incidents with Fatalities
58
% Fatal Incidents
25.0%
For example, about a year ago nine Tesla fires were recorded just in one night in Berlin, Germany. NINE fires in 24 hours! Did you see it plastered all over the news as headlines? No. It’s not in this data set.
And over the past year there have been many, many other parked Tesla combusting at dealerships, multiple vehicles destroyed suddenly. These also are not in the data.
To make a finer point about this Cybertruck fire on December 31, everyone was talking about the Las Vegas political protest and self-immolation by a Green Beret. Nobody but very local news mentioned the other Cybertruck on fire at the same time, burning in a Tesla dealer parking lot.
Beyond the property damage being so common through 2024, there were many people killed in Tesla fires such as Georgia (2), Canada (4), Wisconsin (5), France (4), California (3), Korea (1)… we see there were at least 102 deaths if taking just a quick look at local news, where many blame the Tesla door design for death.
The DoJ focus on investigating damage to electric vehicles should evaluate incidents based on factual evidence, and prioritize cases involving loss of life.
Observations:
- Tesla fire fatalities (83) occurred at a rate 3.1 times higher than the Ford Pinto (27), which was known for public outcry, major recall and safety investigation that changed the industry
- A sharp increase in fatalities began in 2021, with 65 deaths (78% of total) occurring from 2021-2023
- 2023 had the highest number of fatalities at 29, indicating the issue may be worsening over time
- About 25% of all Tesla fire incidents involve fatalities, a significant safety concern
- The data suggests structural or systemic safety issues that may require DOJ attention
All of that is so awful, it deserves a closer look to understand plausible causes of Tesla fires.
Tesla Fire Cause Analysis
Tesla vehicles have experienced a significant number of electrical-related fire incidents not related to crashes, with a clear pattern of spontaneous combustion and fires occurring while parked.
Anyone familiar with ICE car fires would recognize this immediately. The second-leading cause of ICE fires is the electrical system. A car without petroleum fuel means electrical fires will be front and center like they have always been, and any design defect would result in a rapid increase in fire incidents and danger.
The data for Tesla suggests potential electrical issues that merit thorough investigation, drawing parallels to how the Pinto’s fuel tank design eventually received deep scrutiny.
In other words, Tesla will have significantly higher rates of fire than an ICE vehicle (susceptible to electrical fires itself) because the Tesla has such fundamental safety design flaws.
- 61 incidents (26% of all Tesla fires) appear to be electrical in nature rather than crash-related
- Spontaneous combustion was mentioned in 25 incidents
- 20 incidents occurred while vehicles were parked and not charging
- 10 incidents happened during charging
- 13 incidents took place in garages
Looking Ahead: The Future of Tesla Fires
Our analysis shows a disturbing trajectory, whether we use conservative or aggressive modeling:
From “everything is better with fire” in 2018 to “I can’t walk past a TV without seeing a Tesla on fire” in 2025, we’ve witnessed a shift in public statements by the CEO of Tesla over time. What hasn’t changed is how justice is inconsistently applied to different people facing responsibility.
When a CEO promotes a culture that normalizes and even celebrates fire, then produces vehicles with documented electrical fire risks, it’s cruelly labeled a “joke”, or declared a “necessary” deadly path to achieve some desired future state of business. However, when someone allegedly takes direct action against those same vehicles to stop harms, they’re instead branded “arsonists” who will face “the full force of the law.”
The contradiction raises questions about the consistent application of legal standards across different contexts. Consider, for instance, if the Finnish justice system had prosecuted its citizens for arson when they used Molotov cocktails to defend against Soviets deploying tanks. Imagine Finnish citizens being told they must accept that Soviet tank manufacturers were merely delivering “futuristic assets,” and that Finnish casualties should be viewed as an unfortunate “price of doing business.” Such a comparison highlights the troubling inconsistency in how we judge resistance to very real and present existential threats versus protecting even the most extreme corporate abuses of society.
In a world of corporate power hiding within carefully crafted messaging and legal maneuvering, traditional balanced analysis becomes inadequate. Elon Musk repeatedly sued a well known and highly respected car expert on the BBC for daring to review a Tesla accurately on exactly what it was: unreliable and unsafe.
The first model he reviewed broke down after just 55 miles when the brakes failed and the second overheated. Musk was deeply embarrassed by the verdict and swiftly launched a lawsuit over it. […] “I said it was unreliable, which it was; that it was ridiculously expensive, which it was; and that because it weighed more than most moons, it didn’t handle very well. Which it didn’t. Musk was very angry about this and sued us for defamation…. He lost the case, and the appeal, and he’s never really got over it.”
The stark reality of subsequent Tesla fires—and at least 100 lives lost—demands communication that matches the gravity of the situation, against aggressive legal intimidation and threats by Tesla. When a CEO can casually tweet “Everything’s better with fire” while selling products branded to evade regulations, and simultaneously oversee a company whose vehicles are linked to numerous fire incidents, conventional discourse fails us.
The rhetorical approach used here isn’t about inflaming emotions on their own, and about instead piercing the veil of gamified corporate normalization that would have us accept potentially predictable deaths as inevitable “disruption” rather than obvious tragedies. When a plane crashes does the manufacturer say “but how many miles are flown and how many planes are in the air”? No, we treat the deaths as they are, a death toll that should not have happened because we have the technology and regulations to prevent them. Sometimes only direct language can cut through layers of deflection to expose the contradictions between a company’s public persona and the consequences of its actions. In the face of cavalier attitudes toward public safety, measured tones become complicity.
This post reveals there has been a long-running fundamental ethical contradiction that allows assaults on public safety to be ignored in a very curated and specific way. Corporate decisions that may lead to dozens of deaths have been allowed to play as business as usual, while direct actions against those corporations—even those motivated by safety concerns to reduce or stop harm—are criminalized with extreme prejudice.
…the Bisbee Deportation. On July 12, 1917, roughly 1,200 copper miners, who’d been striking for better wages and safer working conditions, were rounded up at gunpoint, some by their own relatives, and sent via cattle car to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to die. […] 1897 Lattimer massacre saw Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German miners killed by being shot in the back; a sheriff decided to end a labor protest by murdering the protesters.
The Truth as Necessary for Justice
Back to the point my ethics professor made that “outcomes of injuries and deaths are indeed what matter most to real justice, regardless of cause”, people who have died in Tesla-related fires aren’t less dead because their deaths came from Tesla treating fire as a “joke”.
When the CEO himself acknowledges he’s seeing Tesla fires on TV, while the DoJ apparently focuses on prosecuting alleged arsonists instead of that CEO overseeing a decade of unexplained escalating fires, it presents what appears to be an imbalance in how accountability is distributed.
The contrast between casual social media messaging about fire and the serious consequences threatened for vehicle fires deserves critical examination. When companies treat fire risks so lightly in public communications, they may directly undermine the prosecution of the real-world safety issues by them and others. And there’s nothing “better” about that.
The conflation between individual responsibilities and individual actions isn’t accidental in this analysis—it’s precisely the point. As long as we treat them differently when the outcome (death) is the same, we should examine how we assess responsibility for tragedy across related yet different contexts.
