Electrics don't.. all of the intense heat from an internal combustion car comes from the combustion process itself. There's probably some heat built up in the drive components on the Tesla and surely by the wheels from the braking, but not in the 'engine bay'/frunk.

This is literally attached to a cooling system.

Right.. but the liquid cooled condenser that the wood is attached to isn't going to approach anything close to the ignition temperature of wood... whereas the temp inside the cylinder of an ICE car can reach 2,500ºC. I think the Tesla hack in the article is ridiculous but 100x safer than a similar hack in an ICE engine bay would be.

the "official" part is a piece of clear plastic, which is probably acrylic, which melts around 160C. (it could be something else, but it's transparent and there's no reason to make it transparent other than that's what's cheap. and making transparent non-acrylic plastics isn't cheap)

wood won't burn at 160C.

…an electric car? Unless there’s a V8 Hemi option for the Model Y I’m not aware of.

And anyway, this is seemingly taking the place of a plastic part, and if the heat exchanger wasn’t melting the factory-spec plastic, I imagine it’s not hot enough to start this wood smoldering.

(I still would prefer my fancy car have the proper, automative grade plastic.)

Wood will not self-combust until reaching around 300°c. Hopefully that temperature is never reached.

> Wood will not self-combust until reaching around 300°c

Staying below the "fail fast" temperature does not make it safe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA

The question is, how will it handle years of the daily heating and cooling cycles that the cooling system will undergo? I don't know and likely no-one does ... because it hasn't been rated or approved for that task. it isn't even a standardised part, how can it be?

>The question is, how will it handle years of the daily heating and cooling cycles that the cooling system will undergo?

...you'll find out at the regular inspection and service that you are required by law to have at intervals far more frequent then "years"? That's part of the point of them, both to notice fleet issues that will be reported back up and conversely to implement directives ("it needs to be replaced with this updated strain relief at the next service") coming down.

This is only visible by substantially disassembling the car (the person who originally reported it found it when fixing panel work). As far as I know that's not routinely done _anywhere_.

A great many places, including the majority of states in the US, have zero requirement for vehicle safety inspections.

Even the states that do require inspections are inspecting things like brakes, mirrors, and signal lights, not disassembling vehicles. Here's an example of what Massachusets does: https://www.mavehiclecheck.com/motorists-basicinfo/