Electric vehicles have a few glitches that have not yet been worked out. The batteries rapidly lose their charge in cold weather, and drivers need to be cautious driving through flooded ares after rainstorms. However, there have also been a few instances of the vehicles catching fire for no obvious reason.

On Sunday, The U.K. Daily Mail reported the following:

Firefighters used 6,000 gallons of water to extinguish a Tesla Model S that spontaneously burst into flames on a busy highway outside of Sacramento on Saturday. 

The driver, who was not injured, was on Highway 50 in Rancho Cordova at around 3pm when smoke started to come out from the front of the car. 

…The horrific blaze wasn’t the first Tesla S fire that Metro Fire of Sacramento officials had to extinguish. 

A white Tesla model burst into flames in a Rancho Cordova wrecking yard in June after the car had spent weeks sitting there after a collision.

Firefighters arrived at the wrecking yard to find the Tesla fully engulfed in flames. Each time the firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames, the Tesla’s battery would reignite the fire.

The fire department posted an Instagram video of the ordeal, saying that even when firefighters moved the Tesla onto its side to spray the battery directly, the car would burst into flames again ‘due to the residual heat.’

Eventually, the firefighters dug a pit near the Tesla and moved the burning car into it and then filled the pit with water, ‘effectively submerging the battery compartment.’

The technique worked, and the fire department was able to put out the fire with no injuries and 4,500 gallons of water used – about the same amount of water used for a building fire.

As I have previously stated–green energy is not entirely ready for prime time. We have a lot to learn before we leave our fossil-fuel-based economy.