Tesla Agent Tells Owner of Model Y That Caught Fire To Tow It to Service Center

Malla first shared his story on Reddit. He wrote there that he was close to South Sacramento, driving on a ramp toward Highway 99, when he heard a noise coming from the bottom of the BEV. Soon after that, "the car started shaking really bad." Malla's guess was that he had the fourth flat tire in a year, so he pulled over to check what was wrong with his Model Y.

"The moment I opened the door, I saw the smoke coming from the bottom. Apparently, I've read multiple stories of Tesla being on fire. So that came to my mind, and I quickly ran over to the safe place and called 911."

The Model Y owner shared a picture of the fire, but the moderators erased it – a decision that was harshly criticized. Malla shared he has been trying to find an explanation from Tesla for what happened since the blaze destroyed his car. Aware of how active Elon Musk is on Twitter, some commenters suggested that the Model Y owner told his story there and tagged the Tesla CEO. As Malla did not have a Twitter account, he created one on May 18.

That was enough for the usual investors and advocates to claim that it was a fake account. They also said the Model Y owner did not exist or was just a FUDster, short seller, Big Oil advocate, and all the old list of pretense insults these guys coined to discredit anyone with something bad to say about the BEV maker – including fellow owners facing hairy problems like Malla.

As the Model Y owner told KCRA 3, he was running errands and was about to pick up his wife, 3-year-old, and 1-year-old children when everything happened. Although he was shocked, he was glad his family was not in the Tesla with him, a car that he thought would be safer for him and his family.

On Reddit, some other commenters told him that he had nothing to worry about because the insurance company would take care of the problem. That was not the question for Malla: the car was predictably totaled, and he will receive the money to buy another one. However, he wants Tesla to help him understand what happened to his Model Y. On Twitter, he wrote this:

"Is my life so cheap that it keeps happening, and they just simply don't care and hold no responsibility(?) I'm physically exhausted and mentally devastated and traumatized."

What adds insult to injury is an agent from Tesla Roadside Assistance telling the Model Y owner to take the remains of his car to a Service Center. Ironically, some of the Reddit commenters loved the suggestion and urged Malla to do precisely that. One of them told him he'd better not put it inside Tesla property but rather right in front of it. Would the company care about the bad publicity the charred steel skeleton would provoke and try to give him the answers he seeks? Perhaps not, but even Malla thought it was worth a try if it was not already too late for that.

Apparently, even Tesla advocates suggest that the fire was caused by road debris hitting the battery pack from underneath. If that was really the case, that is also something Tesla allegedly addressed in the past and did not solve.

After writing about armoring Tesla vehicles, I discovered that the company installed a "triple underbody shield" on the Model S after it got involved in two fires in 2013. Elon Musk announced the measure on Tesla's blog without mentioning that the company did that to dismiss an investigation the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had opened to probe the fire risk they could offer. It worked: the safety regulator ended the investigation right after that.

In the blog post, Musk said that the "two extremely unusual Model S collisions resulted in underbody damage that led to car fires." He also seemed surprised that "these incidents, unfortunately, received more national headlines than the other 200,000 gasoline car fires that happened last year in North America alone." That was seemingly unfair to him because "the occupants walked away unharmed," and Tesla had "a track record of zero deaths or serious, permanent injuries since our vehicles went into production six years ago." If that were true at the time he wrote that, it definitely is not the case anymore.

From the top of my head, I can remember two crashes in which people were burned alive in Tesla vehicles. The first happened on April 17, 2021, and killed William Varner, 59, and Everette Talbot, 69. As the police did not find a body behind the steering wheel, they suspected Autopilot could be involved. National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) investigations confirmed someone was driving due to deformations on the steering wheel. The most robust explanation for that is that the driver moved to the back seat when trying to evade the car, but that was not possible. The second one killed Nicholas G. Garcia, 20, and Jazmin G. Alcala, 19, on September 13, 2021, after the Model 3 Garcia was driving hit a tree in Coral Gables. Sadly, many more people died in these circumstances.

Ton Aarts keeps track of all fires and their victims on Twitter. In his last update, there were 462 blazes and 67 deaths. The website Tesla-Fire has different numbers: 182 fires and 53 casualties. Aarts compared that with how many people died in Ford Pinto blazes (27), and Tesla was "winning" by a large margin. To make matters worse, Elon Musk said on October 4, 2013, that "no fire ever entered the passenger compartment thanks to internal firewalls integrated within the battery pack."

On March 14, when he announced the triple underbody shield, he elaborated even more on that. According to the Tesla CEO, the "onboard computer warned the occupants to exit the vehicles" that caught fire in 2013, "which they did well before any fire was noticeable." Musk also argued that "even if the occupants had remained in the vehicle and the fire department had not arrived, they would still have been safely protected by the steel and ceramic firewall between the battery pack and the passenger compartment." It is as if the Tesla CEO was not familiar with how pans work: if they are put in a heat source, anything inside them will cook. That's precisely what happens to a BEV if the battery pack catches fire: flames will come from underneath it and engulf it.

From what Malla shared, he was not warned to leave his car by the computer: he just decided to stop to check the damage. An over-the-air (OTA) update may fix that, right?

My Tesla Y caught fire on Saturday, May 6 at the California hwy. I was driving on a ramp to enter the freeway when I hear a noise from the bottom. I opened my door and saw smoke coming from the bottom. It’s been 2 weeks and not a single follow up. I need answers. pic.twitter.com/kW4wTp6V2U

— bishal malla (@bishal_malla1) May 18, 2023