The fiery crash of a Tesla electric semi truck this week on the Sierra Nevada stretch of Interstate 80 has prompted a National Transportation Safety Board investigation.
The Tesla tractor-trailer ran off the road around 3 a.m. Monday, Aug. 19, on I-80 near Emigrant Gap. No one was injured, but the vehicle caught fire and ignited brush, and the truck’s batteries continued burning for four hours, the NTSB said.
While truck traffic was held on both sides of the Sierra Nevada, a 25-mile stretch of the freeway remained closed and a California Highway Patrol aircraft dropped fire retardant on the burning wreck.
Westbound lanes between Yuba Pass and Colfax were finally reopened shortly before 5 p.m., and eastbound lanes at 7 p.m., the CHP said.
Tesla makes the semi at its factory near Reno and uses it to transport parts to its auto plant in Fremont. Though the semi was unveiled in 2017, it’s still considered to be in pilot production.
The NTSB said in a statement that it decided to investigate “due to its interest in the fire risks associated with lithium-ion batteries.”
The agency has long been concerned about electric-vehicle fires, in part because of the challenges emergency responders can have with extinguishing the burning batteries.
A separate NTSB study — launched in 2021 and upgraded to an engineering analysis the following year — is focused on 17 crashes in which a Tesla using Autopilot ran into a stationary emergency vehicle on a highway. In one of those, a woman was killed on Interstate 680 in Walnut Creek.
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