of the 253m cars on the road, 172,500 had a fire.
the odds of your car having a fire is about 1 in 1467
another factor in these numbers would be miles driven, which is not available.
there are about 450,000 electric cars on the road. there are no stats in miles driven or total number of electric car fires. anything less then 300 would imply a better car-on-fire stat... but miles driven would have to be factored in to be accurate
the one interesting Ning to note about electric cars... you could dnload software via the ‘pump’ when they are refueled. they are also very susceptible to remote shutoff and remote take over (there’s a reporter that has personal knowledge of this fact)
In order to make a statement that they are very susceptible, don't you think you could provide even a single example of it ever happening? No, you can't because there have been zero reports of this happening.
As a computer engineer, I can tell you that using a battery instead of gasoline has absolutely no bearing on whether a car can be remote controlled.
Elon Musk’s “five times lower” figure was actually based on miles driven, not on number of vehicles. This from about a year ago:
“There are now substantially more than the 19,000 Model S vehicles on the road that were reported in our Q3 shareholder letter for an average of one fire per at least 6,333 cars, compared to the rate for gasoline vehicles of one fire per 1,350 cars.”