'West Wing' actress calls out Tesla after husband's car bursts into flames
Actress Mary McCormark called out Tesla in a post on Twitter Saturday showing frightening video of her husband's car bursting into flames in Los Angeles traffic.
McCormack, who starred on TV shows "The West Wing" and "In Plain Sight," tweeted at the car manufacturer after her husband was forced to bail from his car on Santa Monica Boulevard.
"This is what happened to my husband and his car today," McCormack tweeted. "No accident, out of the blue, in traffic on Santa Monica Blvd."
Her husband, Michael Morris, has worked as a producer for the ABC show "Brothers and Sisters," and directed episodes of "Smash," "House of Cards" and "Kingdom." He was not injured in the fire.
"Thank you to the kind couple who flagged him down and told him to pull over," McCormack tweeted. "And thank god my three little girls weren’t in the car with him."
McCormack and Morris were married in 2003 and have three children ages 13, 11 and 6.
Tesla has had problems with its Autopilot feature, including deadly crashes in California and Florida. McCormack, however, later specified that Morris's car wasn't on Autopilot.
In a statement to ABC News, a Tesla spokesperson wrote, "We offer our support to local authorities and are glad our customer is safe. This is an extraordinarily unusual occurrence, and we are investigating the incident to find out what happened."
Tesla says its vehicles are 10 times less likely to suffer a fire than a gasoline-powered car based on its testing, and that there are only 55 incidents of fire per every billion miles driven in the United States. Tesla says its batteries are designed with extra protection, including firewalls between each of the battery's modules, making the spread of fire much slower than in gas cars and therefore more easy to escape unharmed.
Lt. Dan Nagelmann, from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, confirmed it was either a battery or mechanical issue that caused the fire and there was no collision at all.
