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Eberhard 21 (1:07)
Topic(s): Electric & Hybrid
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Video Transcript
Safety is, of course, critical to Tesla Motors. Not only is it
a legal requirement—there's a Federal Motor Vehicle
Safety Standards put a pretty high standard about what a car
has to do to put it on the road—but the new technology
in the car, the battery system especially, has been a major
focus of safety. We've all heard about lithium-ion batteries
causing laptops to catch fire. Of course, the number of times
that's happened has been fairly limited, but nonetheless, it's
fairly dramatic when it goes. Of course gasoline burns pretty
nicely too. You don't have to wait very many days listening to
the radio before you hear about a car fire on the freeway
someplace or other.
But one of the neat things about building a battery pack out
of many, many small cells, as we did, is that the amount of
energy in any individual cell is relatively small. And if you
design it right, which we did, you can design the battery pack
in a way that if one of those cells were to catch fire, even
spontaneously, as happened with some of these notebook
computers, it won't set the neighbors on fire and you won't
have a giant conflagration, as these notebooks demonstrated.
That was actually, that's probably a third of our engineering
work at this company is to make that battery pack work that
way and it took a lot of work to do that and is, of course,
the subject of quite a few of our patents.
