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posted by Cactus on Tuesday February 18 2014, @02:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the plays-with-fire dept.
danomac writes:

Earlier this month, a Tesla parked in a Toronto garage caught fire. This does not seem to be charger related, as the Model S was not plugged in to a charger at the time. While Tesla fires have been in the news lately, this one was unique in that there was no collision involved.

Tesla said it has definitively determined that the Toronto fire did not originate in the battery, the charging system, the adapter or the electrical receptacle, noting that these components were untouched by the fire.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by danomac on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:32PM

    by danomac (979) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:32PM (#1686)
    Submitter here - I submitted this article because there was no collision and the charger was not being used at the time. As I do not know the layout of the car (is the front a storage area? battery area?) I thought this could be more interesting than the "car crashed and caught fire" stories.

    Pretty sure the fire department would have indicated something if they thought the fire was caused by something else. I really like the idea of a Tesla and would love to own one (fires be damned! have to wear a couple layers of Nomex ;-) ), but they're way out of my price range. Some of these are growing pains for electric cars no doubt, and I hope that they sort them out ASAP.

    I've known a regular vehicle to catch fire after sitting for a while, there was a carburetor fire, so it's not like this happens only to electric vehicles.

    I hope Tesla sorts this one out, and fast.
  • (Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:09PM

    by DECbot (832) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:09PM (#1969) Journal

    The battery is the underside of the car, somewhere between 5 to 10 cm thick. Placing the battery pack under the body will allow you (some time in the future) to drive to a battery swap station, and in 5 to 10 minutes, the entire battery pack for another one with a full charge.

    Petty much all of the Tesla fires are either the result of a puncture to the battery pack (large, metal road debris or various types of collisions) or related to the charger. The fires burned in a controlled manner and put out by untrained firemen not prepped to combat a lithium fire in a vehicle. Most of the charging issues have not been fire related, but rather dead batteries after a night of charging, or vampire charging of unreasonable magnitudes (leading to bigger than expected electric bills). The charging issues have been address so far with software updates, and in a few cases new hardware.

    When it comes to construction, the body and the side panels are all aluminum, joined by rivets, spot welding, MIG welding, and ridiculous amounts of adhesive. These things are build like aluminum tanks. I don't recall seeing any significant amount of composites on the body.

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base