Tesla simply buys battery cells from Panasonic and CATL and calls itself an innovation company.
Tesla simply has Siemens build factories for it, assembles parts, and calls itself a manufacturing company.
Tesla simply suppresses death, fire and crash data, and treats safety failures as PR problems rather than engineering problems.
All in all, Tesla has turned out to be the worst car company in history, with numbers of unnecessary and predictable deaths in the hundreds that continue to rise.
To understand the significance of the Tesla fraud, let’s rewind to when Musk in 2011 laughed nervously on camera when a reporter asked him about BYD as a competitor. The reporter let him off the hook and didn’t hold him to any real explanation. Why was he so scared? Why did he keep laughing?
Today we see BYD, unlike Tesla, dominates the market with real innovation and real engineers. They manufacture their own cells, motors, chips, and software. And most notably, they have progressed significantly while Tesla has not at all. You could buy a 2012 and a 2026 Tesla and wonder what changed if anything.
BYD had a fatal battery fire in 2012. But BYD admitted the failure was theirs, and spent eight years engineering it completely out of the physics. Their cells don’t burn now. Tesla had fires starting in 2011 and by comparison did nothing. They have since had hundreds of battery fires and Autopilot fatalities. They responded only with a fog of PR, NDAs, and data suppression. Tesla cells burn dangerously sudden and hot and everyone knows it.
Total Tesla Fires as of 4/4/2026: 232 confirmed cases.
Fatalities Involving a Tesla Car Fire Count: 83
The BYD battery nail test is the difference made visible. The NMC chemistry Tesla uses detonates like a bomb on puncture and occupants are burned to death. BYD’s LFP Blade Battery does NOT burn. That’s not a marketing claim. That’s the physical property of the cell. Tesla can’t pass the test.
This is because of two completely different institutional responses to killing people with a product. Wang Chuanfu lost sleep, pulled his engineers together, and demanded they reproduce the failure mechanism until they understood it completely. Musk slept like a baby, increased his social media ranting, played video games, laughed at journalists and just kept shipping cars that predictably crash and catch fire.