Canadian officials said on Friday they were investigating the cause of a fire in a Tesla vehicle, owned by billionaire Elon Musk. The driver had to break the window to get out of the vehicle.
Transport Canada said following the May 20 Tesla Model Y fire in Vancouver that its collision investigation and forensics team “located and isolated the vehicle”.
The agency added that it “notified Tesla of the incident and is currently making arrangements for a joint inspection of the vehicle in an effort to determine the cause of the fire.”
Expert website Electrek posted a video of the incident, in which the owner said he received an error notification and then smelled smoke.
According to the website, Jamil Jutha was driving the Tesla, which he bought just eight months ago. The driver said that to get out he had to break the window. “I kicked the window, because everything stopped. The power was cut, the door wouldn’t open, and the windows wouldn’t go down.”
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Reuters on Thursday that it “is aware of the incident and has contacted the manufacturer for information”.​
Also according to the website, after a few minutes with smoke coming out of the vehicle, the Tesla started to catch fire inside. Firefighters arrived minutes later and managed to control the fire.
Once safely outside, he asked some workers at a nearby construction site to help him divert traffic because he feared the battery could explode, according to CTV News.
Under normal circumstances, the doors of a Tesla Y open at the touch of a button. There’s a mechanical option available for emergencies, but Jutha said it’s not entirely intuitive and it was difficult to find the mechanism during the fire, according to CTV.
Tesla did not respond to a Reuters interview request.
On the 23rd, the manufacturer said it plans to restore production at its factory in Shanghai, China, to the level at which it operated before the lockdown.
Tesla aims to more than double daily production at the Shanghai factory, impacted by the city’s Covid-19 restrictions, to 2,600 electric vehicles.
Also this month, S&P Dow Jones excluded Tesla from its S&P 500 ESG Index, citing issues such as racial profiling and collisions linked to the automaker’s autopilot system.
The decision triggered a series of angry tweets from Musk, the company’s chief executive.
Tesla’s exclusion from the index marks the growing debate over the metrics used to judge compliance with environmental, social and governance issues, grouped together under the acronym ESG.
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