At this point, it’s a pretty well known fact that electric vehicles — and, at least in the popular imagination, Teslas especially — have a nagging habit of erupting into flames.

One Tesla owner in Maine evidently has that concern hovering in the back of their mind every time they leave the driveway.

While driving around the town of Tremont in a sleek red Model S, an unnamed driver hit an object on the road which punctured the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery, local station WABI5 reported. As most EV drivers are hopefully aware, any kind of damage to a car’s battery can easily spark a fire fueled by thermal runaway, resulting in a uniquely dangerous inferno that can be difficult to put out.

Luckily, this driver kept their head, driving straight to the Tremont fire station where the high-voltage battery immediately burst into flames, Bangor Daily News reported.

With help from the nearby Southwest Harbor Fire Department, the crew of the Tremont Volunteer Fire Department sprang into action, shutting down the road and dousing the Tesla using an arsenal of firehoses.

Based on photos of the incident, it seems the Tesla was totaled, but the driver is said to be doing alright.

The Tremont fire comes just days after an exploding Tesla in Seattle sent two firefighters to the hospital. That particular EV was parked inside an attached garage at the time, resulting in a two-alarm housefire that displaced an unfortunate family.

All told, if you drive an EV, it’s probably smart to have the address of the nearest fire department drilled into your head — especially if it’s a Tesla.

More on Tesla: It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History

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On today’s super simple episode of Quick Charge, we talk about GM’s new Energy Pass, SpaceX’s big bet on fossil fuels, and Tesla’s long-promised Roadster set to arrive “real soon.” Again. For what is nearly the tenth year in a row.

Tesla’s chief designer says the new Roadster is coming “very soon.” We are talking about the same car Tesla revealed in 2017 and promised to build by 2020.

Franz von Holzhausen said it on the latest episode of Jay Leno’s Garage. When Leno pressed him on it, he doubled down: “very soon.” Leno’s deadpan reply, “10 years… just shy of 10 years,” said the rest.

Tesla ran through its entire share of California’s new MyFirstEV rebate program in just five days.. The rebate only went live for Tesla buyers on August 3.

Buyers claimed roughly half of Tesla’s allocation in the first three days and drained the rest by August 8, spending an estimated $18 million in state and matching rebates on Tesla vehicles alone.

Tesla’s robotaxi account posted photos today of what it’s calling the first Cybercab with a Starlink antenna built into the vehicle.

The pictures show a gold Cybercab parked at Gigafactory Texas, with a low-profile satellite antenna integrated into the roof. It’s the physical version of an integration Tesla teased with a diagram last month.

San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan crashed his Tesla Model S on July 14 while the car was running on Autopilot. He was reaching for a phone that had dropped out of reach, and he took his eyes off the road.

The crash left him with a concussion, a broken nose, three broken ribs, a broken left hand, and 40 stitches over his right eye. And to his credit, he isn’t blaming the car.

SpaceX confirmed it will power Terafab, its $16.8 billion chip megafactory in Texas, with its own natural gas power plants and “very large battery arrays.” Tesla solar isn’t in the plan.

That’s despite Tesla being a partner on the project, and despite Tesla selling solar panels, Powerwalls, and grid-scale batteries built for exactly this kind of load.

Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time Shanahan said only that the accident was his fault. But during a recent press conference he shared more details about the incident, including the fact that he had his Tesla's Autopilot engaged at the time. Shanahan was not passing the buck, however, saying it was his fault regardless of whether or not Autopilot was engaged.

"I've had Autopilot for nine years, so I'm pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That's somethi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Two firefighters were rushed to the hospital on Wednesday, after a Tesla parked in a family garage exploded.

According to local station KING5, the incident happened in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, after a massive fire spread from a family’s garage to the rest of their home.

The Tesla explosion set off what ultimately became a two-alarm fire, requiring emergency crews to battle back flames for hours. Thankfully, the two injured firefighters were discharged with non-life threatening injuries, and nobody else was hurt, though the single-family home was pretty much totaled.

The ultimate cause of the fire is still under investigation — whether the Tesla combusted on its own, setting off the blaze, or was the result of a fire which started elsewhere isn’t known.

Still, it’s fair to assume the explosion contributed to the severity of the fire, the latest example of an all-too-common situation plaguing Teslas and other electric vehicles.

Thanks to their massive lithium batteries, Teslas have an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames, often after being involved in collisions, but occasionally entirely on their own.

Regardless of what sparks the flames, battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out, requiring specialized hazmat units and thousands of gallons of water to end the battery’s combustion.

More on Tesla: Tesla Whistleblower Describes Wildly Dangerous Safety Lapses While Developing Full Self-Driving

The post Tesla Explosion Sends Injured Firefighters to the Hospital appeared first on Futurism.

Tesla has officially acknowledged that the power conversion system (PCS) in pre-2026 Cybertrucks is defective, and it’s extending the warranty on those trucks to 8 years or 150,000 miles.

The reversal comes after months of owners paying up to $7,200 to replace a part Tesla now admits “does not meet our reliability standards.” The automaker sneakily tried to let the clear manufacturing defect pass warranties.

On today’s brain-addled episode of Quick Charge, President Trump says electric car drivers have a disease, Full Self Driving won’t stop earning Tesla drivers tickets, and Waymo’s CEO spends over forty minutes explaining why Tesla’s tech won’t ever beat a human driver.

Tesla and SpaceX have confirmed where they’ll build Terafab, the semiconductor megafactory Elon Musk first teased in March. It’s going to Grimes County, Texas, about an hour northwest of Houston.

The companies put the initial phase at roughly $16.8 billion and said the finished site will span more than 100 million square feet, which they’re calling the largest chip manufacturing facility on the planet.

A police department in Parker, Colorado, pulled over a Tesla going 64 mph in a 45 mph zone whose driver insisted they weren’t responsible, because the car was running “Full Self-Driving.”

Of course, Tesla will never take responsibility for that incident, but the frustrating part is that Tesla already has the solution and yet it refuses to implement it.

Tesla has started building its next-generation Megapack 3 grid battery, with the first units rolling off the line at the company’s new Megafactory in Brookshire, Texas.

The plant went from groundbreaking to production in 16 months and is designed to build 50 GWh of Megapack 3 a year. That’s the version Tesla says packs roughly 28% more energy into the same footprint as the Megapack it replaces.

Tesla is suing the Canadian province of Manitoba for cutting the automaker out of its electric vehicle rebate program, and the fight has now reached a courtroom.

The province is asking Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench to throw out the challenge. Tesla says the ban has already cost its Canadian customers at least $560,000 in lost rebates.

SpaceX shares dropped on Wednesday after Elon Musk’s plans for blockbuster spending to position his AI and rocket company as a data center developer spooked investors.

SpaceX surpassed analysts’ expectations in Tuesday’s debut earnings report, posting quarterly revenues of $7.8 billion, well above analysts’ estimates of $6.82 billion and up 92 percent from a year earlier. It posted a net loss of about $541 million, better than estimates of $2.12 billion.

But shares in SpaceX fell 10 percent in early trading after it reported capital expenditure of almost $16 billion on AI, double the previous quarter and well above Wall Street’s expectations. It said spending would persist at current levels for at least two more quarters.

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Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance.

He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.