A 45-year-old woman has burnt to death after her electric car crashed into a tree and burst into flames in Lower Saxony, Germany.
The driver, from Wolfsburg, became trapped inside the burning vehicle and died at the scene. The crash occurred at around 8.20am on Sunday.
Police said the woman was driving a Volkswagen ID.7 electric car when it veered off the road and crashed head-on into a tree while travelling northbound.
A police spokeswoman told German newspaper BILD that the circumstances leading to the crash remained under investigation.
“Why she crashed into a tree at around 8.20am is still the subject of our investigation,” the spokeswoman said.
Initial findings indicated that no other vehicles were involved in the accident. The resulting plume of smoke was reportedly visible from a distance.
Tobias Nadjib, head of the district fire department’s press office, described the incident as tragic.
“This is a tragic incident for us because a person has lost her life,” he said.
The incident adds to a series of fatal electric vehicle fires reported in different countries, including cases in which occupants became trapped inside burning cars.
Last year, a driver in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, died after his Xiaomi SU7 caught fire following a high-speed crash. Rescuers were reportedly unable to open the vehicle’s doors before the flames engulfed it.
In another case in Germany, a man and two children died after a crash involving a Tesla, with rescuers reportedly struggling to operate its retractable door handles.
In California, the parents of 19-year-old student Krysta Tsukahara alleged in a lawsuit that she was unable to locate the manual door release amid the smoke and chaos before dying in a Cybertruck fire.
