Walmart sues Tesla for negligence after multiple solar panel fires

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Walmart is suing Tesla for violation of contract and gross negligence after rooftop solar panel systems on seven of their merchant ’s stores supposedly caught fire, according to a filing.

Walmart reported the litigation, which was filed Tuesday in New York state court, arose out of years of gross neglect and failure to live up to industry norms by Tesla and the solar panels it engineered, installed and promised to operate and keep safely on the roofs of hundreds of Walmart stores.

Bloomberg was the first to report on the court filing. The lawsuit is aimed in Tesla Energy Operations, a division within the clean electricity and electric car automaker which was previously known as SolarCity .

Tesla did not return a request for comment. A Walmart spokesperson stated there was nothing to include past the lawsuit filed Tuesday. TechCrunch will update the content when Tesla responds.

The lawsuit comes only days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced a new rental offering for solar energy power in an attempt to reboot the flagging renewable energy business. Tesla’s share of this solar market has declined since its merger with SolarCity in 2016. At the second quarter Tesla deployed just 29 megawatts of new solar installations, although the amount two and one suppliers of customer solar, SunRun and Vivint Solar, set up 103 megawatts and 56 megawatts, respectively.

Walmart has requested Tesla pay for damages linked to 26, to eliminate solar panels where they have been installed as well as that the retailer alleges stem out of the panels. The lawsuit points to fires on the merchant ’s rooftops that supposedly stem out of Tesla solar panels.

The lawsuit states:

To say the obvious, correctly designed, installed, inspected, and maintained solar systems do not spontaneously combust, and also the incidence of fires involving Tesla’s solar systems is but one sign of neglect from Tesla. For this day, Tesla has not supplied Walmart using the set of final “root trigger ” investigations necessary to recognize the defects in its systems that caused every one of the fires explained above. The number of defects is overwhelming and plainly indicative of systemic, widespread failures by Tesla to fulfill with the standard of maintenance, as put forth in the contracts, concerning the systems set up at Walmart’s stores.

Unsatisfied using Tesla’so activities, Walmart requested in May 2018 the firm disconnect all of the solar panel systems, according to the lawsuit. Tesla complied. But, Walmart alleges another fire erupted even after the systems had been disconnected.

In Walmart’therefore opinion, many difficulties with the layout and setup were run by SolarCity’s business model, which depended on “installing as panels . ”

SolarCity’s company model was a bust. Unbeknownst to its customers until public reports exposed its Poor practices, SolarCity endured from “a quality assurance problem,” the lawsuit said.

Tesla announced plans to merge with SolarCity in 2016 in a controversial all-stock $2.6 billion deal that closed in November of that year.

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