- A Tesla vehicle caught fire in Plano, Texas on Friday, local news outlet WFAA reported.
- The owner told WFAA he heard a hissing sound coming from the battery before it caught alight.
- He said he had the new battery installed the day before the fire, that took hours to distinguish.
A Tesla owner said he heard a hissing sound coming from the battery the day before it caught fire in his garage.
The vehicle, a Model X, caught alight Friday and took firefighters hours to put out after they threw a tarp on it and rolled it out onto the street in the city of Plano, Texas, local ABC affiliate station WFAA reported.
The Tesla owner told WFAA he had the new battery installed Thursday at a Tesla dealership in Plano, which is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metro area.
When he checked the car in the early hours of Friday morning, he saw flames coming from the battery and called the fire department.
A video shared by the BBC from the incident shows the vehicle engulfed in flames with multiple firefighters attempting to put it out using hoses. It then shows the car jacked up on one side covered in ash after the fire was extinguished while smoke still comes from the vehicle.
“The guys were quick thinking. Once they put the tarp on the car and were able to contain the fire underneath that tarp, they quickly hooked some tow chains underneath and dragged it using one of our battalions,” Daniel Daly, a Plano Fire-Rescue lieutenant, told the news station.
Daly said the cause of the fire is still being investigated. He added that they knew that they “had to get on that battery” because it is an electric vehicle.
Fortunately, the fire rescue team in Plano are specially trained on how to contain a lithium battery fire and cool it, per WFAA.
EV fires are “extremely difficult to extinguish”, according to a UK-based fire and rescue service. That’s because lithium batteries release heat from the energy they store as well as toxic gasses.
The batteries are also at risk of catching fire multiple times after the first incident, posing as a fire hazard for several days, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service said in a July press release about adapting to the new hazard.
Another Tesla “spontaneously caught fire” on a California highway in January and it took about 6,000 gallons of water to extinguish it.
“A fully involved traditional combustion vehicle can be extinguished with a single fire engine’s 700 gallon water supply,” the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire Department said in a Facebook post at the time.
They added that the fire originated in the battery compartment of the Model S.
Tesla Plano didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, made outside of normal working hours.
