A fire that started in a parking lot in the Fechenheim district in Frankfurt, Germany destroyed 10 Tesla Model Y EVs and damaged another five earlier this week in what seems to be an act of social resistance from an anonymous group that sees the American car manufacturer as one of its “most prominent enemies,” according to local media.
The Frankfurt fire department says that its central control center got a call at around 3:20 AM on Tuesday that reported a fire had erupted in a parking area on Waechtersbacher Street. The blaze had spread to several cars before the firefighters arrived at the scene, who came with special respiratory protection and five fire engines to support their action, and the nearby railway line was temporarily closed for about 30 minutes.
At around 4:30 AM, the fire was extinguished and the first units left the scene, but the site remains under observation as there’s a risk that the battery cells might reignite. With this being said, the fire department report doesn’t mention if the batteries caught fire.
Later on Tuesday, an anonymous letter titled “Teslas flambé” appeared on the Indymedia platform claiming responsibility for the fire and saying that Tesla is one of the group’s “most prominent enemies.” The alleged perpetrators said in their letter that during the IAA Mobility auto show in Munich, “all kinds of corporations were able to show off their great, shiny cars at this summer trade fair and congratulate themselves on their economic successes in their air-conditioned conference rooms,” all while “the livelihoods of many are being destroyed” because of the fires that erupted in Portugal and Maui, and because of the floods in Slovenia and Austria.
On the same platform, which is considered by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as the central medium of the German left-wing extremist scene, according to Teslamag.de, the group published another letter in which it took responsibility for deflating the tires of 51 Porsche vehicles parked in Berlin as a sign of protest against the German carmaker.
The police estimate that the fire caused damages worth around $537,000 (€500,000) and says that an investigation is currently underway to determine the cause.