A Tesla Model S caught fire out of the blue as it was being driven by the husband of actress Mary McCormack.
A video was posted by the actress of the car with visible smoke and flames.
“This is what happened to my husband and his car today,” McCormack wrote. “No accident, out of the blue, in traffic on Santa Monica Blvd. Thank you to the kind couple who flagged him down and told him to pull over. And thank god my three little girls weren’t in the car with him.”
@Tesla This is what happened to my husband and his car today. No accident,out of the blue, in traffic on Santa Monica Blvd. Thank you to the kind couple who flagged him down and told him to pull over. And thank god my three little girls weren’t in the car with him pic.twitter.com/O4tPs5ftVo
— Mary McCormack (@marycmccormack) June 16, 2018
A tesla spokesperson said that the battery fire on Friday was “an extraordinarily unusual occurrence”.
“Our initial investigation shows that the cabin of the vehicle was totally unaffected by the fire due to our battery architecture, which is designed to protect the cabin in the very rare event that a battery fire occurs,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“While our customer had time to safely exit the car, we are working to understand the cause of the fire,” they added.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said they will send a technician to observe a Tesla examination into what caused the battery fire.
A spokesman for the NTSB was quoted by Reuters as saying that observing the cause of the fire will “provide the agency with an opportunity to learn more about fires in all types of battery-powered vehicles.”
