Whether you’re a fan of Tesla or convinced that the company is destined to fail spectacularly, it’s impossible to deny that Tesla manufactures some of the safest cars the automotive world has ever seen. With that said, it’s a bit peculiar that we’ve seen a handful of stories involving Tesla vehicles spontaneously catching fire for no apparent reason over the past few months.
The latest incident comes to us via the Tesla Motors Club forum where a member relays that a 2016 Model S in caught fire out of the blue while parked in Hong Kong. Details surrounding the incident — which hasn’t been officially confirmed, we should note — still remain a bit hazy. And while we’d ordinarily gloss over such a seemingly incredulous story, the reality is that we’ve seen a handful of similar stories hit the news over the past few months.
The most worrisome example occurred less than a month ago when a Model S parked in a Shanghai parking garage burst into flames whereupon it took local firefighters about an hour to extinguish the flames. The entire ordeal was captured on video via a security camera.
A similar story unfolded about four weeks ago when a Model X spontaneously caught fire while being transported to a repair shop. In that particular instance, the fire raged on for nearly four hours before being put out.
As we’ve mentioned previously, these incidents are far from widespread but are quite jarring nonetheless.
Recall this story from June of last year:
@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
And if we go back even further, you might recall that a Model S caught fire at a Shanghai Supercharger station in March of 2017. Tesla has investigated a few of the aforementioned fires but we haven’t heard an explanation as to what prompted them.
