Let’s set aside the fact that what Elon Musk says about cars is a provable lie.
Focus on his math here.
over 500% *less*
That’s Elon Musk math. On fire safety.
Now look at Trump, November 2025, announcing the GLP-1 deal with “tremendous cuts, 200 percent, 300 percent, 500 percent, 700 percent and even more than that”. Then in his prime-time address he claimed negotiated reductions of 400 to 600%, with the July version running to drug price cuts of as much as 1,500 percent, numbers he himself called beyond what anyone thought achievable.
These grifters, obviously operating as cruel con-men, converged in the public eye and then… kept on grifting.
A percentage decrease past 100 means the drug seller pays you to take it, or that the Tesla extinguishes nearby fires.
Idiots?
No. Historians study how Hitler used a strategy of being considered an idiot, a clown, to disarm his targets and kill them.
The problem in the West isn’t just one man, one speech, one product. The problem is how markets run unregulated, without sufficient safety against those spreading hate through “free speech extremist” tactics of targeted fraud.
Now let’s talk reality.
The US fleet baseline is vehicles with a median age over twelve years, plus arson, plus parked junkers, plus carbureted antiques. Out of that ancient and often unmaintained fleet, electric fires are a leading or second cause of fires. Electric fires, as in combustion engines have batteries and wires that start fires. Take the combustion away and you still have the exact same cause of the fire. Electric fires.
The NFPA cause data for highway vehicle fires puts electrical distribution and mechanical failure at the top of ignition sources. The gasoline is the accelerant, rarely the ignition. Fuel tanks don’t spontaneously combust; frayed wiring harnesses, failed alternators, and leaking fluids onto hot exhaust do the igniting. So Musk spread dangerous lies, as his “massive amounts of highly flammable fuel” framing inverts the mechanism. An EV carries both the energy store and the electrical system, and when the energy store itself enters thermal runaway you get a fire that reignites for days and resists suppression.
Tesla is the massive amounts of highly flammable fuel (volatile chemical cells), with a known unsafe and unnecessary design flaw. Read the “nail in Tesla coffin” report, and you will see how and why other electric car makers don’t burn. Fire is a big Tesla problem.
Teslas, at the time Musk blew the most smoke about fire, were almost all under five years old, garaged, owned by affluent early adopters who didn’t know enough about him or cars in general to see the fraud. New gasoline cars, excluding electrical causes of fire, against Teslas was the honest comparison. More to the point, Tesla engineering grows worse over time, so their design flaws not only don’t get investigated, they compound and increase in likelihood and severity.