A fire that broke out in a car park in the Fechenheim district of Frankfurt, Germany, destroyed 10 Tesla Model Y electric cars and damaged another five earlier this week in what appears to be an act of social resistance by an anonymous group that sees the American carmaker as one of its “most prominent enemies”, according to local media.
Frankfurt’s fire brigade said its control centre received a call at around 3.20am on Tuesday reporting a fire in a car park on Waechtersbacher Strasse. By the time firefighters arrived on the scene, the fire had spread to several cars, and the nearby railway line was temporarily closed for around 30 minutes, with five fire engines in attendance.
The fire was extinguished at around 4.30am and the first units left the scene, but the site remains under observation due to the risk of the battery cells re-igniting. The fire brigade report doesn’t say whether the batteries caught fire.
Later on Tuesday, an anonymous letter entitled “Teslas flambé” appeared on the Indymedia platform, claiming responsibility for the fire and saying that Tesla was one of the group’s “most prominent enemies”. The alleged perpetrators said in their letter that during the IAA Mobility car show in Munich, “all kinds of companies were able to show off their big, shiny cars at this summer fair and congratulate themselves on their economic successes in their air-conditioned conference rooms”, while “the livelihoods of many are being destroyed” because of the fires in Portugal and Maui and the floods in Slovenia and Austria.
On the same platform, considered by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as the central medium of the German left-wing extremist scene, the group published another letter in which it took responsibility for deflating the tyres of 51 Porsche cars parked in Berlin as a sign of protest against the German car manufacturer.
Police estimate that the fire caused around $537,000 (€500,000) in damage and say an investigation is underway to determine the cause.
