Third update: Ope, “most likely” arson, according to official documents!
Updated with video from reporters on-site at the bottom of the post!
Late Sunday night, four Tesla Cybertrucks caught fire in a Seattle holding lot near 2nd Ave S & S Spokane St, just five minutes from the local Tesla dealership. Initially, reports indicated two burning Cybertrucks, but as the fire spread, the number grew to four.
Seattle’s public fire dispatch logs confirm that nine fire department vehicles were dispatched starting at 11:13 PM PST on March 9. More than an hour and a half later, the response was still active.
Thank you to the Seattle Fire Department for their fast work in containing the situation! Fighting EV fires is no joke, so we appreciate their hard work.
Eyewitnesses first reported the fire on the Citizen app, with radio scanner listeners catching the details as the flames spread to multiple vehicles. The holding lot appears to be one of the many overflow locations Tesla has, like those being used to store unsold Cybertrucks, based on my quick peek on Google Maps.
Here’s the holding lot in happier times… Not exactly high security. Credit: Google Maps.
Spontaneous Combustion, Arson, or Something Else?
This incident raises immediate questions. Just a few months ago, a Cybertruck mysteriously caught fire at a Tesla dealership in Georgia. That case remains under investigation by fire officials, but they preliminarily believe that the Cybertruck’s battery started it. Now, another cluster of Cybertrucks has gone up in flames.
The timing is real tough as the temperature rises for Tesla around the world. Everyone has seen the increasing reports of vandalism, and that’s not the only kind of hostility Tesla is facing. During Mardi Gras, Cybertrucks were pelted with trash and booed by parade-goers. In France, Tesla dealerships were recently targeted in arson attacks.
So what happened here? Did these Cybertrucks catch fire on their own, as in the Georgia case? Or was this a deliberate act? There is no evidence yet to suggest foul play, but in the current explosive atmosphere, it’ll probably be a very exciting week for Tesla Inc.
Stay tuned… we’ll have an update on this one in the morning!
Update on the Investigation in Progress
Third update on March 10th at 10PM CST: The Seattle Times has some excellent photography of the scene. We can see federal agents from the ATF present on-site with investigators from Seattle Fire Department’s Fire Investigation Unit.
The fact that no pronouncements have been made rules out a few things, in all likelihood. We have live security camera footage, so if it were something simple, like a Molotov cocktail attack as seen at other Tesla dealerships, we would probably already have footage of the suspects. If the Cybertruck itself had positive telematics data, Tesla would probably have announced that the Cybertruck didn’t cause the fire, just like we saw with the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion, where Elon made that exact sort of pronouncement on Twitter a few hours after the fire.
Right now, it looks like either a complex bomb, something with a fuse where a potential arsonist could get away unnoticed by cameras, or one of the Cybertrucks just did what Teslas sometimes do and spontaneously combusted. In any case, I think it will be a lively couple of days for Tesla Inc, if today’s performance was any indicator!
Video update:
Update at 2:40AM CST March 10th: An enterprising Redditor found video of the incident… for sale! Haaah, what a time to be alive, I’ll let a better financed journalist than me buy that. Hard to tell if it is arson just from the stills, but looks like one heavily involved Cybertruck ignited the others parked tightly in a row nearby. No one around to be injured, so that’s good. More on this Monday!
Second update at 1:00PM CST March 10th: Oh boy, it really IS an exciting Monday for Tesla! Local news has video. No cause determined yet. Local news also has threats of violence on-site from unknown individuals who appear to be related to nearby businesses in the SoDo district of Seattle. Wild! Kudos to the reporters of KIRO-FM for standing tall and exchanging “a lot of bad language” with knife-brandishing interlopers.
