Tesla Model S wreck in Germany gives fire crew chance to practice safety procedures

A few days ago a Tesla Model S crash in Germany, on the A93 between Abensberg and Siegenburg, gave the local (volunteer) fire crew a chance to practice emergency recovery of a crashed electric car. What’s nice for the rest of us is they posted a writeup along with detailed pictures of what they did. The car was badly enough damaged the firefighters wanted to disable the battery pack. Tesla Motors has prepared these cars with stickers giving instructions to do so.

But before we get to that – it’s thankfully true that the driver of this car was not badly injured.

The Abensberg fire crew wrote that with an EV you don’t just turn off the key, there’s a high voltage system that must be disabled. Otherwise the firefighters would risk electrocution. That’s their words, and I suppose it means they’re ignoring the fire and explosion risk of gasoline, eh?

From the pictures we gather that Tesla Motors left procedure instructions inside the car using informational stickers. And that there are two or three places where cables can be safely disconnected. At least one of which involves using wire cutters to disconnect wires.

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About David Herron

David Herron is a writer and software engineer living in Silicon Valley. He primarily writes about electric vehicles, clean energy systems, climate change, peak oil and related issues. When not writing he indulges in software projects and is sometimes employed as a software engineer. David has written for sites like PlugInCars and TorqueNews, and worked for companies like Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.