West Wing star films burning Tesla Model S: why electric cars catch fire

Actor Mary McCormack has posted a video of her husband’s Tesla Model S on fire after the saloon burst into flames while sitting in traffic in Los Angeles.

The footage appears to show a jet of flame shooting out of the electric car’s underside, which is where Model S’s battery is stored.

West Wing actor McCormack tweeted that the car had not been involved in an accident and that her husband, director Michael Morris, was “barely moving in traffic” when the fire broke out.

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“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,” McCormack wrote.

West Hollywood Sheriff’s Lieutenant William Nash said that Morris escaped from the car without injury before firefighters extinguished the flames, The Guardian reports.

Nash said a car log entry indicated that the vehicle may have had a faulty battery.

What causes electric car fires?

The cause of this latest incident is not yet known. A Tesla spokesperson told US broadcaster ABC News: “This is an extraordinarily unusual occurrence, and we are investigating the incident to find out what happened.”

There have been previous cases of Tesla cars bursting into flames, but most of the fires occurred after some sort of crash. In March, a Model X SUV caught fire after striking a concrete barrier in Mountain View, California.

Concerns have been raised about the lithium-ion batteries used in most electric cars. Often located underneath the cabin, lithium-ion batteries can “have a sudden and unstoppable increase in temperature” under certain circumstances, Reuters reports. This causes a “chain reaction” that can lead to fires, the news site adds.

According to a 2013 report on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Technology Review, Tesla reinforces its batteries with a 6mm-thick hardened aluminium plate to prevent battery fires.

EV transport website Electrek says Tesla’s vehicles catch fire “significantly less often” than the US national average for all production cars.