A Model S sedan manufactured by the Tesla electric car company caught on fire this week, an occurrence that Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now saying was the result of a battery that had been impaled by a metal object. According to a report by ABC News, Musk responded to allegations that Tesla’s cars were unsafe with a Friday blogpost.

“Had a conventional gasoline car encountered the same object on the highway, the result could have been far worse,” Musk wrote. “A typical gasoline car only has a thin metal sheet protecting the underbody, leaving it vulnerable to destruction of the fuel supply lines or fuel tank, which causes a pool of gasoline to form and often burn the entire car to the ground.”

The car fire took place on Tuesday in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. Musk says that a curved metal object punctured a hole in the battery’s protective casing. Once the battery was hit, it began to burn, but not so quickly that the driver could not escape the vehicle. In fact, the driver had time to exit the highway and get the car to a relatively safe location before the flames spread past the battery and engulfed the rest of the vehicle.

But while the driver wasn’t hurt in the incident, the same cannot be said about Tesla Motors as a whole. The company’s stock took a sharp nosedive during the latter part of a week, after a cellphone video tape of the car fire went viral. Since the cause of the fire was not initially known, the video caused many to question whether or not Tesla’s electric cars were safe.

According to Musk, the Model S is perfectly safe – safer than a vehicle powered by “a large tank of highly flammable liquid,” as he put it – and the fire was hardly the product of spontaneous combustion. Musk speculated that the driver had run over the aforementioned “curved metal object” – likely a piece of a tractor trailer that had fallen off on the highway – and that the metal object had then punctured the battery, leading to the fire.

Whatever the cause, the fire certainly wasn’t a normal one. Firefighters struggled to quell the flames after arriving at the scene, and the volatile battery caused the car to reignite a number of times before the firefighters dismantled the vehicle and flooded the battery compartment itself with water.

The resilient nature of the flames was undoubtedly part of the reason that Tesla’s stock began to plummet – according to the USA Today, shares fell from $190 at the beginning of the week to a low of $168 after the video hit the web – but Musk was quick to deflect controversy away from the Model S and from electric cars in general. After all, some 194,000 vehicle fires occur in the United States each year, and less than one percent of those are electric.