The Orange County Fire Department (OCFD) believes a garage fire that occurred last month in Irvine, California, might have started when a Tesla-supplied wall-mounted electric vehicle charger overheated.
“The most probable cause of this fire is a high resistance connection at the wall socket or the Universal Mobile Connector from the Tesla charging system,” explains the OCFD’s report.
The owner of the house told the OCFD that she parked the Model S in her garage, plugged it into the charger and programmed it to start charging at midnight. She reported the fire at roughly 3 am.
The fire department has spent the past few weeks determining the exact cause of the blaze. The fire happened on November 15th but the report was only made public a couple of days ago.
A spokeswoman for Tesla says the company adamantly disagrees with the OCFD’s report.
The fire caused $25,000 of damage to the garage but the no one was injured and the Model S sustained only minor damage.
Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a formal safety evaluation of the Model S after three examples caught fire in the United States and in Mexico over the course of five weeks.
Photo by Ronan Glon.
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