Up in Smoke
In Northern California, a group of recent high school graduates have died in a Cybertruck inferno.
As San Francisco’s KTVU reports, four young people who graduated high school last year in the town of Piedmont had been inside the Tesla vehicle when it slammed into a barrier and caught fire in the middle of the night.
Another driver reportedly pulled off the road to help after the Cybertruck crashed, and managed to pull one person out of the fiery wreckage. That lucky grad survived and was taken to a nearby hospital, while the other three — none of whom have been identified by name — died at the scene.
According to local police, the Cybertruck fire was so hot and burned so fast that water wasn’t able to douse it out.
“The heat was just too intense,” Piedmont police chief Jeremy Bowers told KTVU.
Getting Warmer
Though the report didn’t speculate as to why the fire burned so hot, the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles like Cybertrucks caused consternation among firefighters.
During another fire involving one of the vehicles in Texas earlier this year — which ironically occurred after its driver crashed into a fire hydrant — the blaze took more than an hour to extinguish due to the high temperatures at which those mega-combustible batteries burn.
Notably, that debacle was the second Texas Cybertruck to catch fire in less than a month — and in the first instance, the driver lost their life.
While Cybertrucks’ crappy paint jobs and clueless owners are easy to dunk on, we’re increasingly seeing that these low-poly vehicles can be extremely hazardous. In the case of the Piedmont Cybertruck fire, that danger cost three recent high school graduates their lives.
More on Cybertrucks: Thousands of Cybertrucks Recalled for Bricking While Driving