Tesla CEO Defends Electric Cars After Battery Fire

"For consumers concerned about fire risk, there should be absolutely zero doubt that it is safer to power a car with a battery" than a conventional gas-powered vehicle, Musk said in a blog post on Tesla's website.

Tesla shares fell more than 5 percent this week, the sharpest weekly decline since mid-August, after images and a video emerged Wednesday of a Model S on fire after an accident near Seattle Tuesday morning.

The fire occurred after the driver struck a large metal object on the highway. The object punched a hole three inches in diameter through the quarter-inch armor plate protecting the battery pack with a peak force of about 25 tons, Musk said.

The alert system onboard the Model S instructed the driver to pull over and he left the vehicle before the fire broke out. There were no injuries.

The video of the burning car was posted online Wednesday by auto blog Jalopnik and has been widely disseminated by other media. News of the accident sparked a sharp decline in the company's stock on Wednesday and Thursday.

Shares rebounded Friday and were up 4.4 percent at $180.98 on the Nasdaq.

The accident that led to the fire stemmed from a "highly uncommon occurrence," Tesla's head of sales and service, Jerome Guillen, said in an email exchange with the owner of the damaged Model S that was included with Musk's post Friday.

Guillen said the Model S drove over a "large, oddly shaped metal object" which hit the leading edge of the car's undercarriage and then rotated into its underside. Guillen described this as the "pole vault effect."

The driver, identified by the emails as Rob Carlson, said he was a Tesla investor and that the battery underwent a controlled burn that was exaggerated by images online.

"I guess you can test for everything, but some other celestial bullet comes along and challenges your design," Carlson wrote in the email.

A curved metal object that fell off a semi-trailer likely caused the damage to the car, Musk said. If a gas-powered car hit the same object on the highway, "the result could have been far worse," he added.

"A typical gasoline car only has a thin metal sheet protecting the underbody, leaving it vulnerable to destruction of the fuel supply lines or fuel tank, which causes a pool of gasoline to form and often burn the entire car to the ground," Musk wrote in his blog post.

Musk did not say if Tesla would make any changes to the Model S battery design as a result of the accident. A Tesla spokeswoman did not immediately respond to an emailed question asking if such changes were under consideration.

The fire was the latest in a string of problems for lithium-ion batteries, which are used heavily in electric cars sold by various automakers. Such batteries are lighter and more powerful than lead-acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries, but they pose an increased safety risk.

This was Tesla's first battery fire. General Motors Co's Chevrolet Volt and Mitsubishi's i-MiEV have faced similar problems in the last couple of years. Boeing Co also dealt with lithium-ion battery fires in its new Dreamliner plane earlier this year.

Emergency officials at Tuesday's accident said firefighters struggled to extinguish the flames in the Model S.

Musk said in his blog post that firefighters were right to use water to douse the fire, but they erred in puncturing the battery's metal firewall. Doing so created holes that allowed the flames to vent upwards into the front section of the car.

(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman; additional reporting by Ben Klayman; editing by Matthew Lewis and Andrew Hay)

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Israeli Electric Car Company’s Chief Steps Down

Mr. Agassi founded the company five years ago with the ambitious goal of replacing the world’s gas pumps with battery-swapping stations for electric cars. But despite vast publicity, the idea has gained little traction so far.

The announcement of Mr. Agassi’s departure fed speculation that the company’s widening losses were the cause. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the company has posted $477 million in cumulative losses since the beginning of 2010. The paper reported that Better Place has $181 million in cash reserves, which at the current rate of spending would last four and a half quarters.

Joe Paluska, a spokesman for Better Place, declined to comment on the reason for Mr. Agassi’s departure. Mr. Agassi will stay on as a board member and remains a major shareholder in the enterprise.

Mr. Agassi amassed more than $800 million in private capital since the company’s founding. He used lofty rhetoric about the need to rid the world of its addiction to oil to persuade investors and powerful leaders to back his plan.

But the business feasibility of the battery-swapping network has always been uncertain.

“Battery swapping is applicable to certain markets where you have higher fuel cost and smaller geographic profiles, like Israel and Denmark,” said John Gartner, research director at Pike Research, a clean-technology research firm. “But it’s not a model that’s going to work in a lot of places or give the company the ability to scale the technology in the same way that the company’s been investing money and receiving capital to this point.”

In a September 2011 interview, Mr. Agassi said that the global electric car market, and Better Place’s network, would take time to grow. “The first flight after the Wright brothers took off in the air, for about 10 feet, wasn’t to the moon,” he said. “What you do is slowly move up, gradually.”

Mr. Paluska said the company was operating 24 battery swapping stations in Israel, and 12 in Denmark. He said these locations give more than 750 customers the ability to drive across those tiny countries. The process of swapping a depleted battery with a fully charged one takes about five minutes.

Better Place subscribers buy their cars, but not the expensive battery packs that provide power to the vehicles. For a fixed fee of about $350 a month, customers lease access to the batteries, swap stations and charge points.

To reach scale, Better Place needs car companies to build battery-swapping capability into their vehicles. To date, only the French automaker Renault has signed on, adapting its Fluence Z.E. sedan to enable battery switching.

Mr. Thornley, the new chief executive of Better Place, is a former Australian legislator who founded the Internet advertising company LookSmart in 1995. In 2008, he left government and soon after joined Better Place, where for the last three years has overseen the company’s efforts in Australia.

On an Electric Highway, Charging Into the Future

LAST Monday I drove the Model S, a full-size sedan recently introduced by Tesla, the California electric-car start-up, from Lake Tahoe to Los Angeles. I covered 531 miles and the drive took 11.5 hours, during which the car consumed zero gasoline and produced no tailpipe emissions.

My route, the first a Model S owner might take using Tesla Motors’ network of so-called Superchargers, previewed a significant advance in the practicality of battery-electric cars. Tesla’s string of strategically placed high-speed chargers made possible something that has not been available to American E.V. drivers: the ability to make a long-distance drive in a single day.

The Supercharger, Tesla’s name for a proposed nationwide network of electric-car filling stations, outlines the most tangible blueprint so far of petroleum-free driving in the United States. “The one big holdout with most E.V.’s today is that you can’t take a road trip,” said J B Straubel, Tesla’s chief technical officer. “What happens if I want to go across the country? I can’t tell you how many times we get that question.”

Tesla’s answer is to install powerful charging stations — pumping electricity at 90 kilowatts, adding about 250 miles of range in an hour — at key locations between major cities. There’s plenty of range for intracity travel. The goal of the charging network is to enable intercity journeys, eventually on a nationwide basis.

Before the end of October, the company plans to open its first charging locations to customers who have bought the Model S. Owners with the 85-kilowatt-hour battery, which comes equipped to use the Supercharger system (the fast-charge capability is optional on the 60 kilowatt-hour model) will receive free electric fuel for life at the stations.

Mr. Straubel said he saw the high-speed chargers as “the final piece of the whole technology suite” enabling Tesla to “take on an enormous part of the market we couldn’t reach before.”

My journey began at 6:55 a.m. at Kings Beach, Calif., elevation 6,000 feet, on Lake Tahoe’s north shore. The 85-kilowatt-hour battery pack, which has an E.P.A.-rated range of 265 miles, was only three-quarters full when I left, but the Model S had no trouble with the 100 miles, much of it downhill, to the first charger in Folsom, Calif. When I arrived, the battery pack still held 40 percent of its capacity.

At 9:25 a.m. in Folsom I pulled the Model S close to the pedestal that carries the charging cable, which is only four feet long to ensure that it never falls to the ground and gets run over. The Supercharger itself, about the size and shape of a small refrigerator, sits 30 feet away. Plugging in was as easy as charging at home and simpler than using a gas pump.

On the Model S, the fast charger connects to a port hidden behind a door in the driver-side taillight — the same one used for lower-power refueling at home.

Amenities near the Folsom charger, as with other Tesla network locations, were not an obvious match for the automaker’s upscale demographic. Tesla identified places close to chain restaurants, restrooms, Wi-Fi and motels.

Twenty-two minutes after plugging in, the charger had restored 100 miles of range in the Model S. It took another 20 minutes to add the next 50 miles because the rate of charging tapers down as the battery fills. Think of it as electrons having more difficulty squeezing into an increasingly crowded space. The smart strategy for fastest charging is to arrive at a destination with a nearly empty battery.

Another five minutes of charging brought the estimated range to 254 miles, enough to make it to the next stop, Coalinga. Tesla engineers advised holding my speed to 70 miles per hour just to make sure. No restrictions were placed on air-conditioner use, though.

The Supercharger is clever in its construction. It starts with the same 10-kilowatt charger that is onboard every Model S. To build the Supercharger, the company strings together 12 of the same units, which were designed from the beginning as building blocks.

“It’s good modular engineering,” Mr. Straubel said. “We configured all the circuitry, the power and the communications so we can just stack them up.”

Each Supercharger can serve two cars, and most locations will have three units. With solar panels planned for many locations, operating costs are expected to remain low, perhaps explaining the free recharges.

My lunch stop at Harris Ranch, a hacienda-like restaurant, added 153 miles of range before my burger even arrived. So I cleared the charging spot for another Model S, a Tesla company vehicle that had joined the trip, and returned to lunch. With way more energy than I would need to reach the next station 115 miles away, I made up time by flying along with Interstate 5’s speedy traffic.

At 4:30 p.m., at the Lebec station — the first Tesla station to incorporate solar panels — I was content to add 117 miles of range in 25 minutes.

The final run to Tesla’s Southern California design center in Hawthorne was uneventful. I arrived at 6:30 p.m., almost 12 hours after leaving Tahoe. The Supercharger concept worked.

Driving a gas-powered car averaging 60 miles per hour, stopping one hour for lunch and twice for 15-minute rest stops, would have cut my travel time by one hour.  In my electric test car, if I had eaten my lunch on the go, the duration would have been much the same.

The transition from a day on the Interstates to an evening in Los Angeles, where a ceremony to introduce the Supercharger concept to a crowd of Tesla fans, was jarring.

After delivering a stilted, ad-libbed speech, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, dropped the curtain from a glowing 40-foot object, apparently a charging location roadside sign, but unmistakably phallic in shape. I didn’t see anything like it on my trip.

Let’s hope that the cheap theatrics will fade, to be replaced by a more realistic image: thousands of E.V. owners on electric road trips, eating at highway fast-food restaurants and experiencing the open road like other Americans.