When police first saw the burning Model S, they said electric vehicles “have a tendency” to catch fire.
April 28, 2023 at 4:52 am ET
The owner of a Tesla Model S had a very unpleasant experience after visiting a friend in Spokane, Washington.
One night during his visit, JR Harriston’s electric sedan caught fire and it was pretty much a write-off. But the story does not end there because after going to the police to try to solve the mystery of how the fire started, he received the undocumented answer that it was probably a fire related to a battery.
The Spokane Police Department told him that electric vehicles “have a tendency” to catch fire, to which he disagreed, but the officers assigned to the case stood by their position. However, that all changed when Harriston was able to retrieve videos from Tesla’s Sentry Cam, which records video of what’s going on around the car.
And to everyone’s surprise, an unidentified man was caught on video pouring gasoline on the parked Model S and then setting it on fire, which is shocking, to say the least.
As expected, evidence from the video convinced police that it was an arson fire rather than batteries and they are now looking for whoever is responsible.
The owner of the Tesla Model S says he doesn’t even live in Spokane and there was no clear reason why someone would want to start his car. But this wouldn’t be the first time an angry EV critic would do something like this out of spite, with plenty of cases in the past showing that people sometimes do stupid things to prove a point.
Another theory is that it could simply be a random act of vandalism, and an expensive one at that, as the Tesla Model S now sells for over $87,000 in the US.
But until the police catch the bad guy, we won’t know for sure what the motive was. What we do know, however, is that Tesla’s cameras have proven to be very useful tools for catching vandals and malicious drivers, and it’s nice to see other brands like Rivian offering similar features.
As always, we’d love to hear what you think, so after watching the video embedded at the top of the page, scroll down to the comments section and let us know what you think.
