Actress Mary McCormack says her husband’s Tesla car suddenly caught fire while he was sitting in traffic in Southern California.
The former “West Wing” actress says the fire happened “out of the blue” and she posted a short video on Twitter.
“This is what happened to my husband and his car today. No accident, out of the blue, in traffic on Santa Monica Blvd. Thank you to the kind couple who flagged him down and told him to pull over. And thank god my three little girls weren’t in the car with him,” she wrote.
The video shows flames shooting out from under the car by the driver’s side door.
Deputies called in firefighters, who quickly put out the flames. No one was injured.
Tesla called the incident “an extraordinarily unusual occurrence” and said it is investigating. A Tesla spokesman told People magazine, “We offer our support to local authorities and are glad our customer is safe. This is an extraordinarily unusual occurrence, and we are investigating the incident to find out what happened.”
“McCormack also responded to Twitter followers with their questions about the incident, revealing that it wasn’t a self-driving car and her husband was ‘barely moving in traffic’ when the incident occurred,” Yahoo! reported.
“When asked, ‘Do they know what happened?’ the actress replied, ‘No word from them.’”