Burned Up Toasted Tesla On Lake Champlain Getting Lots Of Attention

A burnt up Tesla on the ice, Shelburne Bay, Lake Champlain
 

Vermont seems to be a bit of a magnet for weird mishaps.

Which is why I wasn't totally, 100% shocked when a 2019 Tesla Model X recently went up in flames atop the ice on deeply frozen Shelburne Bay in Lake Champlain.  

I guess it was such a big deal that web sites all over the place picked up on the story. This includes Jalopnik and Popular Mechanics wrote up articles about this unfortunate Tesla.

Popular Mechanics had this likely explanation for the blaze

"The specific cause of the fire is as yet unknown. People on Tesla forums who saw the crazy pictures began to speculate about insurance fraud or someother oddball explanation, but the most likely explanation would be battery failure. If damaged, lithium-ion batteries can rapidly discharge their stored energy in the form of heat, leading to an inferno. The bigger the battery, the bigger the fire.

Teslas necessarily have a giant battery pack, so if the car suffers sufficiently severe impact, it can go up in flames."

The driver of the car reported hitting something on the road, perhaps a rock or a big pothole or frost heave, reports Seven Days. The motorists said he smelled something odd after hitting whatever he hit. That might have damaged the battery, leading to the Tesla fire a little later on Shelburne Bay.

As the fire raged, the Shelburne Fire Department wisely decided not to drive their 50,000-pound fire truck out onto the ice to put out the blaze, notes Seven Days.  So the Tesla burned to a crisp.

By the way, the fire didn't melt too much of the ice and let the Tesla fall through because most of the heat of the blaze was directed upward, away from the ice.

It's the owner's responsibility to get the Tesla off the ice. And you wouldn't want it to sink into the water when the ice melts, due to a pollution risk.

The Burlington Free Press says a towing company got the wreckage off the ice a few days ago, but it wasn't easy. It had frozen back onto the ice, and had to be pried loose.

Here's a YouTube video, taken on the day they were trying to get the remains of the Tesla off the lake: