Authorities reported that a Tesla Model S caught fire “spontaneously” on a California highway over the weekend, requiring almost 6,000 gallons of water to douse the flames.
Saturday around 4 p.m., an electric car heading eastbound on Highway 50 in the vicinity of Rancho Cordova reportedly caught fire while going at motorway speeds.
According to officials, nothing out of the ordinary occurred before the battery compartment of the Tesla spontaneously caught fire.
During the blaze, which blocked two lanes of traffic, two fire engines, a water tender, and a ladder truck were dispatched for assistance.
Firefighters utilized jacks to get access to the car’s undercarriage in order to extinguish the flames and cool the battery, an operation that ultimately required 6,000 gallons of water because the lithium-ion battery cells continued to ignite.
The fire department tweeted a video of firefighters dousing the blazing automobile with water while other vehicles drove by.
The fire resulted in no reported injuries, although the Tesla received catastrophic damage.
A Tesla Model S caught fire “spontaneously” in June 2022 in a junkyard in Rancho Cordova, California, where it had been sitting for three weeks following an accident.
Firefighters were required to dig a small trench, fill it with water, and submerge the flaming car within it in order to extinguish the battery fire, despite numerous attempts to douse the flames. In this occasion, some 4,500 gallons of water were utilized.
In November, firefighters in Pennsylvania used 12,000 gallons of water to extinguish a brand-new Tesla Model S that caught fire after driving over a huge piece of road debris.
The owners of the fateful electric vehicle and their dog escaped without injury.
The local fire department later posted on Facebook that the Tesla burned “so hot and for so long that if it weren’t for the wheels, you might not have even known it was a car.”
Saturday’s incident near Sacramento occurs just days after Tesla reported a fourth-quarter record profit of $3.69 billion.
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