Tesla has reported the third fire in its Model S luxury electric car in six weeks, this time after a freeway crash in Tennessee, send
The Tennessee Highway Patrol said the 2013 model sedan ran over a broken tow hitch on Interstate 24 on Wednesday, that hit the underside of the car and caused an electrical fire. A highway patrol dispatcher described the damage as “extensive”.
The Model S undercarriage has armour plating that protects the lithium-ion battery pack. Tesla said it did not yet know whether the fire involved the car's battery.
The first Model S fire occurred on 1 October near Seattle, Washington, when the car collided with a large piece of metal debris in the road that punched a hole through the protective armor plating.
After that fire, officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said they found no evidence to indicate a vehicle defect.
The second was later in the month in Merida, Mexico.
According to reports, a Model S drove through a traffic circle, crashed through a concrete wall and hit a tree.
The Tesla Club website has pictures of the latest, and a company spokeswoman confirmed the accident, which occurred in Smyrna, Tennessee - ironically the home of the Nissan plant where the Leaf electric car is made.
Spokeswoman Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean said Tesla had been in touch with the driver involved in the Wednesday crash, Juris Shibayama, 38, of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who’d escaped without injury.
“Our team is on its way to Tennessee to learn more about what happened,” she said. “We’ll provide more information when we're able to do so.”
Tesla's battery pack is made up of small lithium-ion battery cells that are also used in laptop computers, an approach not used by other automakers. The battery pack stretches across the base of the vehicle, while General Motors uses large-format battery cells in a T-shape in the centre of the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid.
Other automakers have also had battery fires in electric vehicles, including GM's Volt and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV.
The highway patrol report did not say how fast Shibayama was traveling, but he was able to pull off the roadway and get out of the car.
A woman who answered the phone at the lot where the Model S was towed said Tesla officials had arrived there on Thursday morning and were inspecting the car.
Neither driver was injured in the earlier accidents, and in all three cases the owners have asked for replacement cars.
After the first fire, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk defended the safety performance of electric cars.
“For customers concerned about fire risk,” he wrote in a blog post, “there should be absolutely no doubt that it is safer to power a car with a battery than with a big can of highly-inflammable petrol.”
‘POLE-VAULT EFFECT’
Company executives called that first fire a “highly uncommon occurrence,” probably caused by a curved metal object falling off a semi-trailer and striking up into the underside of the car in a “pole-vault effect”.
At the time, Musk did not say whether Tesla would make any changes to the Model S battery design as a result of the first accident. Jarvis-Shean had no immediate comment when asked if such changes were being considered.
Tom Gage, former CEO of AC Propulsion, which developed the drive train for Tesla's first model, the Roadster, said petrol engines were dangerous, but drivers had learned to live with the risk over the years.
“Obviously, petrol can be lit more easily and burns more fiercely than a battery can, but a fuel tank in a car now benefits from 120 years of fairly intensive development and government regulation regarding how you make it safe,” he said.
Gage, now CEO of EV Grid, a company working to integrate elelctric-vehicle batteries with the power grid system, said Tesla could consider raising the battery higher in the car or further reinforcing it. - Reuters