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The article is confusing - at one point it says the truck left the road, hit a bunch of stuff and caught on fire. At another it says they don't know if it was a battery pack fire that spread. I'll be interested to read the final safety reports and see if this was just an unlucky crash or something really bad happened with all that lithium.
> I'll be interested to read the final safety reports

Are you still confident that the final reports will be free of interference and the agency investigating anything Tesla (Musk) related won't be gutted before it gets the chance to issue anything damaging?

That's a different accident, and the last one involving a Tesla Semi (before the current one). The point they're making is: that one involved an actual crash, but this one did not. So we should investigate this thoroughly to see what happened (as the NTSB is going to do, of course), because large vehicles should not spontaneously combust on a public highway, especially one as busy as the I-880.

On a related note: I wish companies like Tesla, which are conducting live experiments on public highways and thereby inconveniencing 1000s of people when an experiment goes awry, are held accountable and forced to compensate those who got stuck on the highway, missed doctors appointments, job interviews, deliveries, etc. Maybe something like a fine of $5000 per driver impacted should be levied, and given to each driver?

What's confusing? First sentence of article:

> A Tesla Semi caught fire on Interstate 880 in Hayward, California, on Tuesday evening, and there was no crash.

Further:

> The driver told officers the truck caught fire and that they didn’t know why. No other vehicles were involved.

I think you misread. The article state tesla Semi has had 2 fire in 2 years. The first one because the truck hist stuff and left the road in Nevada, the second (this one, the subject of the article) in California for unknown reasons. This is relevant because the Tesla semi fleet is small (86 vehicles 2 years ago, probably below 500 atm) and because battery fire are hard to stop, so we want to know what caused it. If EV fire last 10 time longer than diesel fire, but happen 10 time less often (we need more studies but it seems this is the initial consensus), this is not really an issue, but if they happen more often, we _need_ to know why and fix it.

Also i don't want trucks to catch fire everytime they hit a cow or a boar, the roads around where i used to live would be consistently closed :/

Are battery fires like this more damaging to the road surface vs a diesel fire?
Regular cars usually burn out in 30 mins or less. It's a fair assumption that a 10-15 hour fire would be more damaging.
I’d think it really depends on the heat and proximity to the road

If a battery pack burn less hot and sits higher off the roadway, I can see it being less damaging

I'm not sure, but diesel fires are definitely more of a risk to people. Fuel can quickly spread and ignite before people in the vehicle (or bystanders) have a chance to escape. Lithium battery fires are more contained because individual cells spew flame, which heats up nearby cells, which then undergo thermal runaway. This means that battery fires take longer to release their energy, which is annoying for extinguishing them, but good for anyone who needs to get out of the wreck.
With Elon’s blame game with Ukraine and starlink, it wouldn’t surprise me if he planned this so that regulators shut down the Tesla Semi project and he doesn’t have to admit that there never was a path to profitability after ten years of development because he never intended it to be anything more than his regularly scheduled vaporware announcement to prop up his share prices.
Is there an article every time a Mack Truck catches on fire?
You know a Tesla was involved in an accident because they always make it part of the headline.
Wow, not much left of the semi - would love to see a photo of the metallic puddle it's presumably become...