The Tesla Model S car is apparently a hot car. Not just in terms of sales, but literally the heat it generates when its lithium-ion battery explodes.
On Thursday morning, a Tesla Model S vehicle crashed into a tree near 16th Street in North Illinois, Indianapolis, killing the driver and passenger of the ill-fated electric car. The crash caused the battery to explode, Mashable reported. A video of the incident showed the accident resulted in the creation of a colossal fireball from the car wreck and the battery.
WTHR identified the fatalities as 27-year-old Casey Speckman, the car owner and driver, and 44-year-old Kevin McCarthy, the passenger. Speckman worked at McCarthy’s software company at Pennsylvania and Washington Streets. She was declared dead at the scene, while paramedics rushed McCarthy to the hospital, but he eventually died from injuries.
According to Indianapolis Fire Department Battalion Chief Kevin Jones, hybrid or electric vehicles and fires related to high-voltage lithium batteries need large amounts of water to extinguish. The blaze it creates burns at extremely high temperature, he said in a press conference after the accident.
The fatal crash resulted in debris and battery cells strewn up to 100 feet radius from the blaze scene, Jones said. He noted that some of the smaller cells when broken apart started to fire off almost projectiles around the rescuers. It is the first time that the veteran firefighter saw anything of that magnitude, Jones admitted.
Al Finnell, a witness, said the Tesla Model S car hit the tree before it bounced around and exploded. All the car parts went up in the air that Finnell, who was driving, had to step on the gas pedal to get away from the fireball the accident created.
The driver lost control of the vehicle will moving at a high speed. Jones said overspeeding vehicles, whether petrol-powered or electric, would burst on impact. “To say it was simply because it was an electric vehicle, you can’t say that because we’ve seen collisions that are non-electric vehicles with just as bad of damage or fire,” the fire chief said.