With shares of Tesla (TSLA) testing the $200 barrier before closing at an all-time high Thursday — and just in time for next week’s Q4 earnings report from the car company — another fire involving the Model S is raising new questions about the popular electric car.
The fire happened in a Toronto garage this month shortly after the car’s owner returned from a drive, according to a report by Business Insider. The report said the parked Model S caught on fire after it was taken for a spin and was not plugged in to recharge.
“After a few moments, the owner’s fire detector went off and the fire department was called,” Business Insider said.
The fire was reportedly ‘intense’ but the firefighters got it under control quickly. Tesla confirmed the incident and down played the event to the Insider, issuing the following statement:
“The Model S continues to have the best safety track record of any vehicle in the world. In this particular case, we don’t yet know the precise cause, but have definitively determined that it did not originate in the battery, the charging system, the adapter or the electrical receptacle, as these components were untouched by the fire.”
Tesla sent seven employees to review the Toronto fire, Business Insider said. “The company also offered to take care of the damages and inconvenience caused by the fire, but the owner declined,” the report said.
The fire in Canada is the fifth fire incident involving a Model S in the past five months. In an interview at the New York Times’ DealBook Conference last November, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has repeatedly defended the design of the Model S, said the high-end electric sports sedan is five times less likely to catch fire than average gasoline cars.
“We have never had a serious injury or death in any of our cars”, Musk added. “Maybe there is a car as safe as the Model S, but there is certainly not a car that is safer.”
There are approximately 29,000 Model S on roads today.
TSLA’s Thursday closing price of $199.63 gives the company a market cap of $24.5 billion. The maker of luxury electric sports sedans, which closed at $120.5 a share on Nov. 26, also hit a new all-time high of $202.72 earlier in the day. TSLA has a 52-wk low of $33.80 set on Feb 26, 2013.
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