·        A crash and subsequent fire of a Tesla Model S this past weekend quickly caught attention online for its "four-hour" blaze, but that's not exactly what happened, the fire chief told Car and Driver today.

·        The initial fireball was contained in a matter of minutes, and it was just tiny flareups that were a longer-lasting problem, chief Palmer Buck explained to the Houston Chronicle and C/D.

·        Although the chief acknowledges EV fires require different tactics by firefighters, Tesla and government safety data asserts that traditional internal-combustion vehicles experience one fire for every 19 million miles traveled; for Teslas EVs, it's one fire for 205 million miles traveled.

It didn’t take long for reports to spread online that a Tesla Model S crash in a gated subdivision in The Woodlands, near Houston, Texas, this past weekend outwitted firefighters for four hours. The reality, according to the local fire chief, turned out to be much less exciting (though still tragic for those involved, including two people inside the car who died). There's a lesson here about how continuous advancements in the auto industry force first responders into an endless arms race for information.

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