Batteries Are Coming. We Saw Lots of Them at CONEXPO and GIE+Expo
Recently I was at a dinner with visiting members of my family discussing the noble transition that many manufacturers are making from producing their typical goods to producing essential goods and equipment for the coronavirus fight.
One that came up was Tesla’s transition to making ventilators, and one member of my family began to say that they wouldn’t want a Tesla ventilator if they were hospitalized, because it would probably catch fire and explode.
My fiance is in medicine rather than in our industry, so she took that to be a serious comment about the risk of ventilators sparking in an oxygen-rich environment. But it quickly became clear that this critic just has a deep and abiding skepticism of battery technology, because they repeatedly brought the conversation back to battery fires and cars exploding, despite there having been only 14 reported cases of Tesla vehicles catching fire between 2013 and 2019, with most of those happening after accidents.
