Authorities in San Francisco said they were investigating what caused a pair of Teslas that were parked in the city's South of Market neighborhood to go up in flames over the weekend.
A few minutes after midnight Saturday, fire dispatchers received a call saying a Tesla parked on Bonifacio Street near Mabini Street was on fire, San Francisco Fire spokesperson Lt. Mariano Elias told The Standard. The car's location was close to Folsom and Fourth streets.
A second caller told dispatchers that the blaze was sending up black smoke and igniting a nearby tree.
Firefighters arrived a few minutes later and managed to knock down the fire before clearing the scene at 12:31 a.m.
But less than an hour later, just before 1 a.m., authorities said more callers dialed in to report another vehicle that was ablaze on Shipley Street between Fourth and Fifth streets, a little more than a block away from the first car, with at least one caller reporting that ashes were rising from the street and floating onto the balconies of nearby apartments.
Firefighters arrived and extinguished the Tesla Model 3. Tow trucks hauled off the charred remains of the totaled vehicles to a yard for storage.
The police department did not respond to a request for comment Sunday, but Elias told The Standard that arson investigators were working the case.
In each incident, firefighters responded with a truck and engine and were able to extinguish the fires quickly, in part because only the vehicles' contents, not their lithium-ion batteries, caught fire.
Fires involving the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles burn hotter and longer than other types of fires. In rare cases, there have been reports of Teslas "spontaneously" igniting. In 2021, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration declined to open an investigation into Tesla car battery fires, calling them "rare events."
The Tesla fires over the weekend followed a widely publicized incident earlier this month in which an unruly crowd set a Waymo robotaxi on fire on a crowded North Beach corner by breaking a window tossing a firework into the vehicle.