October 3, 2013 3:22 pm EST Tesla Motors hit its first big road bump in months yesterday after Jalopnik broke the news that a Model S caught fire near Seattle after it crashed into some road debris, igniting the car's battery pack. Here's what we know so far, and why it may not be a big deal for Elon Musk. Read more But I don't think it's going to end up as a major issue for Tesla. As many of you readers have pointed out, it's not out of the ordinary for gasoline-powered cars catch fire after crashes. As Jarvis-Shean says, this is the first Model S fire after being on sale for a year, 13,000 cars delivered and a collective 83 million miles driven. If the Model S had issues with fires, I feel like we would know about it by now. (It's also kind of funny because it's highly unlikely one vehicle fire would dampen the stock prices of a company like General Motors or Toyota, but Tesla is still proving themselves.) We'll wait and see if other fires happen after crashes, and whether a recall will somehow become necessary. In the meantime, I think these statistics speak for themselves, and I don't think one fire will dampen enthusiasm or demand for the brand. Update: Earlier today I asked Dr. Stephen Granade, physicist and friend of Jalopnik, to help explain the difference between a lithium-ion battery fire and a gasoline engine fire. Here's what he told us. The thing about lithium ion batteries is that they can catch fire on their own in a way that you don't see with gasoline in a car's tank. It's actually really hard to make gasoline burn without introducing flames. You have to heat gasoline up to around 500 degrees F before it self-ignites and undergoes what chemists call "thermal runaway", where the gas is producing more heat than it's losing to the gas tank or the air around it. Lithium ion batteries, however, can experience thermal runaway at temperatures as low as 200 degrees F. Now, it can take days before the battery will catch fire, but it gives you an idea of how much easier it is to get a lithium ion battery to catch fire than it is with gas.Thermal runaway happens because the poles of the battery, called the anode and the cathode, are highly reactive. They undergo reactions that give off lots of heat, and as they heat up the reaction happens faster and faster. Lithium ion batteries are popular because they can carry a lot of energy. Their energy density — how much energy you can store per pound of battery — is really high. But that means that they have a lot of energy that can be converted into a spectacular fire. Even worse, they're filled with a highly-flammable material that's under pressure. When you draw electricity out of one of these batteries, lithium ions carry electrons from the anode to the cathode to give you an electrical current. The lithium ions move through something called an electrolyte. The electrolyte separates the anode and the cathode but lets the ions move from one to the other. It just so happens that the best electrolytes for lithium ion batteries are also really flammable.What probably happened to that poor Tesla S is that the debris in the road crunched one or more of its batteries in a way that made a direct electrical path between its electrodes. When that happens, it's like dropping a crowbar across a car battery. Electricity flows freely and the battery gets a lot hotter than it's designed to withstand. High-capacity batteries like the ones in the Tesla S have multiple cells in them so that they store more energy. Each cell is like its own mini battery, kind of like how you have to put multiple AA batteries in a flashlight. A fire in one cell can cause the surrounding cells to overheat and catch fire, and pretty soon you're off to the races.This is a known issue, and is why lithium ion battery manufacturers do everything they can to make their batteries withstand damage and they firewall off individual cells to keep thermal runaway from happening in the whole battery. Tesla also puts firewalls between individual battery packs for the same reason, but if you get a hot enough fire, then all of the cells in all of the batteries will burn.I've heard talk about how water didn't put out the fire because lithium ion batteries have lithium in them, and lithium catches fire when you expose it to water. It's true that lithium catches fire in water, as I accidentally proved in one of my chemistry labs. But there's very little free lithium in the batteries. Instead the lithium is either shoved inside the anode and cathode material or is bound up as a salt in the electolyte. Water won't make a lithium ion battery catch fire. What I'm guessing happened is that the firefighters put out the parts of the car that were burning, but didn't shoot enough water up under the car to cool down the batteries and stop the thermal runaway. That would let the batteries keep burning inside until the whole thing re-ignited again, possibly worse than before if more cells in the battery had also caught fire. I saw in the accident report that they were able to put out the fire by applying enough water directly to the battery pack's insides to bring down the temperature and put out the flames. Tesla's own directions to first responders states that, if the battery is on fire, it needs to be cooled down with plenty of water. Comment(s)