Tesla’s fiery problem
The last week has not been great for Tesla, with a burning Tesla Model S having been spotted near Seattle. The official story is that the vehicle hit a large metallic object in the middle of the road, which lead to major damage.
The crash then ignited a fire witch thankfully did not spread to the rest of the car, the flames remaining contained on the battered front end.
Now if it were any other type of car, this incident would’ve been overlooked but this isn’t just your run of the mill car, this is a Tesla, an electric vehicle which was voted as being the safest car ever tested by the NHTSA. The initial result of the fire lead to a 6.2 percentage drop in Tesla’s stock prices, and this has lead to many comparing this to the Fisker fiasco.
This happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, on Friday the founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk responded with a long statement in which he explained the cause of the accident was that a large metal object had fallen off a truck and impaled itself into the Model S’ thick underbody panel.
In the statement he said that the impact caused the front battery module to catch on fire and also he put some of the blame on the firefighter for making the fire worse because they punched the metal firewall.
Musk assured Model S owners that they shouldn’t be concerned about fire risks because it is “safer to power a car with a battery than a large tank of highly flammable liquid”. He also added that the owner of the torched car is “still a big fan” of the Model S.
We don’t know what the long term consequences of this event will be, the Tesla stocks did go up again on Friday, but not to their initial point.
