Pre-checking found battery short circuit behind Tesla fire

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Preliminary checks have shown the recent Tesla incident in China may have been caused by a battery short circuit, an auto expert who is part of the investigation team told the Paper.

The wreck had been sent to undergo further examination at Tesla's Shanghai test center after bursting into flames when parked in an underground lot on Sunday evening, igniting two nearby vehicles.

But no concrete evidence can support the current checking result. "No record can be found since the battery, and the chip had been burned out," said Tao Wei, an auto defect expert at China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine who is also part of the investigation in the incident.

When asked about the final investigation report, the expert explained he is not sure when it would come out.

A post from Tesla's official page said that it had come to no preliminary conclusions yet and that it would announce the results of the investigation shortly. Tesla asked its followers not to spread any rumors at the end of the statement.

Screenshot from Weibo

On Tuesday, a user asked the company's CEO Elon Musk to release their statistic regarding vehicle fires in its quarterly reports on Twitter, saying it may help with transparency and denouncing false information after the boss complained about the "double standard" of the media when talking about Tesla incidents.

The CEO said there were over one million combustion engine vehicle fires every year, but only when it is a Tesla car, the incident will make big headlines.

Screenshot from Twitter

A Twitter user retweeted Musk's statement, explaining that there was a cognitive bias against anything new and unfamiliar.

The user said when a traditional car goes up in flames, everybody knows it's not common. But when a Tesla does it, they wonder if it's a harbinger of a dystopian future where everybody's cars blow up because of weird technology.