One cool fall afternoon in Minnesota, as we were just finishing up football practice during my sophomore year of high school, our coach came over and gave us a “pep talk”. With his bloodshot eyes, veins sticking out of his neck, he began telling us how in Texas, high schoolers “bleed” football. Unfortunately to his disappointment, at five feet ten inches and 145 pounds (listed as 6’-1”, 195 lbs.), I didn’t bleed football.
Of course, when our coach made this comment, he didn’t literally mean that if someone from Texas was cut that football would come gushing out of them. He was just illustrating the passion, the commitment, the tenacity these kids had for football; the “football is life” mindset, as Dani Rojas would say in Ted Lasso.
I thought about that moment today as I scrolled through my social media and saw a repost from a connection, belittling the safety of electric vehicles, by showing multiple clips of them catching fire. I know it was meant to highlight the negative sentiment towards this technology, but it somehow struck a bad chord for me, as someone who has dedicated more than 20 years of my life to making vehicles safer for people I’ve never met. I may not bleed football, but I do bleed safety.
After I let my initial feelings subdued, the engineer in me wondered if there was any truth in an increased risk. I was able to find the yearly number of reported highway vehicle fires in the U.S. from a National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) report. This report states that in 1980 there were 456,000 reported vehicle fires, 415,000 in 1990, 325,000 in 2000, 184,500 in 2010 and 173,000 in 2020. Not only has there been a staggering reduction of 283,000 vehicle fires a year over this 40-year period, but also the number of vehicles, miles driven, and average age of vehicles have all increased. Additionally, in 1980 there were nearly zero vehicles with some form of propulsion coming from high voltage, in comparison to 2020 were there had been a total of 5.8 million electric and hybrid electric vehicles sold in the U.S., according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This was reassuring and made me proud of all those others in automotive that bleed safety.
I don’t fault the person that made this social media post. It’s more exciting to show a video of a car on fire in the middle of the highway, rather than a video of someone getting out of their car at the grocery store with the caption “human survives car drive”. It reminds me of one of my favorite signs I saw near the employee break room at a Home Depot that read, “Safety is when nothing happens”. When we do our job correctly, safety should be boring. As safety enthusiasts, we don’t thrive on awards, or fame, or to hit the mass media, but we are passionate and driven by safety; “safety is life”. Do you bleed safety?
