A Tesla burst into flames on a busy highway on Monday in the Southern Highlands region of Australia, sending firefighters on a difficult mission to battle the blaze. The fire started after the electric vehicle built by Elon Musk’s company hit debris that fell off another vehicle.
The Tesla Model 3, which costs upwards of $60,000, likely caught on fire due to a lithium battery that was damaged after a piece of debris fell from a truck onto the battery shell, according to a report by Daily Mail.
Both the driver and passenger of the Tesla were thankfully able to safely escape the electric vehicle that soon turning into a battery-fueled inferno on the side of the Hume Highway, about two hours southwest of Sydney, Australia.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveils the new Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010. The new Tesla factory is the former NUMMI plant. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
Australian Tesla Fire response (Penrose Rural Fire Service)
But it took firefighters at least half an hour to get the fire under control. They had to bring a bulk water tanker and ended up using more than 1,585 gallons of water before the Tesla fire was extinguished.
Penrose Rural Fire Service referred to the incident as “a very interesting call-out last night with our first call to an electric vehicle fire.”
“The car had hit debris from a vehicle in front of it and was well alight when Penrose Rural Fire Brigade arrived,” the fire service added.
That same day, five luxury cars in a parking lot at the Sydney Airport reportedly had to be razed after a lithium battery caught fire.
Putting out a fire on an electric vehicle is no easy task, as the electrolyte fluid reaction in lithium batteries makes the blaze extremely hard to put out as the incident achieves what experts call “thermal runaway.” Moreover, the fires have been known to spontaneously reignite up to a week later.
As Breitbart news previously reported, electric vehicles have proven themselves to be a new and difficult challenge for firefighters after several of them caught on fire in Florida last, after becoming waterlogged during Hurricane Ian.
“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start. That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale,” Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer and state fire marshal, said at the time.
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