If you own a Tesla, this Model 3 engulfed in flames in downtown San Francisco may convince you to find a new set of wheels ASAP: It’s impossible to tell whether this Tesla is on fire because protestors vandalized it or because of its own manufacturing defects.
Yeah, given all the problems Elon Musk’s car company is facing, this is a total toss up.
The insurance claims adjuster in charge of this one is in for a real headache, because it’s anyone’s guess whether this Tesla was set ablaze by anti-Musk dissidents or the car’s own shoddy engineering. Any sign that this Model 3 was destroyed at the hands of political protesters, like swastikas spray-painted or keyed onto its exterior panelling, has been melted away by the 1,650°F flames produced by the Tesla’s lithium-ion battery cells, which are notoriously faulty and prone to overheating and combusting anyway.
Unfortunately for the owner of this smoldering Tesla, he’ll never be able to confirm if it was protestors who attacked his car or if his vehicle just burst into flames when its electrical wiring short-circuited out of nowhere. So long as Teslas are engineered poorly and Elon Musk keeps giving people reasons to vandalize his company’s cars, any hope of finding out the truth here is pretty much out the window.
What a mind-boggling mystery. Show this burning Tesla to anyone, and it’s a coin flip whether they see an inferno started by angry protestors or a blaze caused by the car’s own design flaws—does the Internet have new “Yanny or Laurel” on its hands?!
These days, if you come across a burning Tesla, the odds that it exploded by itself are equal to the odds that someone disgusted by Elon Musk’s right wing pivot hurled a Molotov cocktail into it. There’s just no way to know. In fact, the only thing we can say for sure is that if it’s a Tesla, it’s probably going to catch fire one way or another.
