The Highway To Hell Facebook channel posted photos of a car fire that was allegedly of a Lucid Air, where the car would keep catching on fire over and over again despite the fire department putting out the fire. The car would just restart and catch on fire again. That is until the fire department brought in a dumpster, lifted the car into the dumpster and doused it with water until it really went out.
Initial reports suggest that the fire originated in the engine compartment of the truck during transport, according to Len Devanna from Lucid Motors. Len Devanna posted on April 25th at 8:30pm ET on Twitter that this incident occurred near Bridgewater, MA. He said the EV company is waiting for more details from authority.
Here is that tweet:
There is no evidence that the Lucid Air caused any fire here, however a Lucid Air may have caught on fire from a car transporter it was in. This is now somewhat confirmed above with Len Devanna’s tweet. It appears that the Lucid Air may have posed a challenge for the fire department to extinguish but that fact has not been confirmed by authorities yet.
There now confirmed reports that there was a Lucid Air on the transporter, along with a number of other cars. This must be sad for the person who was about to receive his or her Lucid Air – supposedly a Dream Edition.
This was posted on Saturday, they wrote:
I hear over the Fire Dept over my scanner “we are clearing the scene now the vehicle has been put in the proper trash receptacle “🤣 This is the result of an electric car fire that took 4hours to clear because the battery kept restarting the fire. So a pretty smart tow company brought in a dumpster and drowned it to make sure it was over. Was not a Tesla was a name I never heard (Lucid) and the car was worth $100k
Here are more photos:
I originally found this via the Lucid Owners Forum.
Postscript. CarScoops has an updated story based on the official report from the fire department. They wrote:
According to the report, whose author was on the scene, interviewed witnesses, and consulted security video footage, a truck towing a car carrier with a Lucid Air inside pulled up to a rest stop at around 10:00 pm on April 22. The driver said that he and his wife had stopped to use the restroom and to grab a coffee.
While inside, he noticed smoke coming from the engine compartment of the truck pulling the trailer. At 10:38, he went out to the truck, popped the hood, and noticed smoke coming from the air intake to the turbo but saw no flames. He used a dry chemical extinguisher but was unsuccessful at stopping the fire.
The driver then went to the cab of the truck in order to retrieve his wallet and his dog and subsequently went into the rest stop building to call 911. By the time fire crews arrived on the scene, the truck was completely engulfed in flames, which were spreading to the trailer.
According to the report, security video from the area reveals that it took the flames just three minutes to consume the truck and spread to the trailer. Once the fire got there, a spare tire appears to have exploded out of the top of the trailer and landed on the ground outside.
Although the fire was not started by the Lucid Air, its batteries did experience thermal runaway, which complicated efforts to extinguish the flames. Once crews had put out the fire in the truck and the trailer, popping could be heard from under the EV, which sounded like fireworks going off and the trailer was in flames again.
Crews worked to extinguish the fire to the extent that was possible before using a tow truck to pull the car from the trailer and prop it up against its ramp in order to make cooling the batteries easier. Even then, with the car out of the trailer and lifted to make the underside of the vehicle more easily accessible, though, the crews report that reaching the battery cells was difficult because of a carbon fiber panel that protected the battery pack. It wasn’t until the fire had compromised it that crews were able to breach the panel and put water on the cells to cool them. Eventually, the crews requested a “roll-off dumpster” in which to put the Lucid.
The dumpster, the department reports, made it easier to contain the vehicle in the event of re-ignition, would protect other vehicles at the tow yard once it was pulled away from the scene, and would contain the vehicle while it was being towed to the tow company’s storage yard. There is no mention of crews using the dumpster to “drown” the car, as had been previously been claimed by a witness.
Further complicating extinguishing efforts was the fact that the fire didn’t occur near a hydrant. In all, crews used more than 8,000 gallons of water to put out the fire in the Lucid. “This is important due to the lack of fire hydrants on the highways and service areas and the resources needed for future events of this type,” Lt. Craig Nedell wrote in the report.