'Thermal incidents'

Ferrari doggedly referring to vehicular fires as 'thermal incidents' and wanting to avoid the use of the more common and also more obviously alarming term (ie 'fire') is not exactly without precedent in the PR world.

American mobile phone company Kyocera once had a problem with overheating batteries that exploded. The PR people referred to  batteries in the phones that might be prone to 'rapid disassembly'. And the term 'uncontrolled thermal event' has been used in the aerospace business before.

Other possible terms for explosions include 'spontaneous rapid disassembly event' and 'unplanned loss of containment'.

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