Tesla Shares

Seyed Ebrahim Banihashemi
Oct, 7, 2013
Principles of Supervision
Article 2
Shares Drop Sharply After Images of a Burning Tesla
This article talks about an incident that took place in Washington State outside Seatle in which a car got caught on fire. This car was a Tesla-made car. Tesla Motors is a California-based company that designs, manufactures and sells electric cars and electric vehicle powertrains components. 
On October 1, 2013 a Tesla S model caught on fire through a collision. The resultof this incident cuased the share price to go down by about 12% within two days and decreased the stock value of the industry by about US$3 billion.
Tesla motor company had an investegation on how their car caught on fire during its collition. Tesla's cars are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which have the possibility of catching fire at highrate, which makes the car have a fire risk. Engineers from the company said that the fire was caused by the direct impact of a large metallic object to one of the car’s 16 modules within the Model S battery pack. Because each module within the battery pack is, by design, isolated by fire barriers to limit any potential damage, the fire in the battery pack was contained to a small section in the front of the vehicle.
Tesla's battery differs from other electric and hybrid cars and its design actually lowers the risk of fire from starting that is why it was dubbed as the world’s safest car, but as the engineers at Tesla said their design made the car almost a fire risk due to their isolation, but if these batteries were held together something far worse that a fire could have been witnessed at Washington State.