There was an epic-sized tragedy this past week when a car in Butte County ignited thousands of adjoining acres. It’s not yet clear whether the fire erupted from sparks behind the wheels or from negligence by the driver. While shocking, most car fires seldom make the news, with two exceptions. They either unleash a fiery inferno like this one or they occur in an electric vehicle.
While no car fire can be good, why is there disproportionate coverage when it occurs in an electric vehicle (EV)? One reason is that not all firefighters are trained in methods to control the blaze, so the fires burn for a long time. That makes the fires seem uncontrollable. In future years, when EVs outnumber internal combustion vehicles, we might look back at these “long” fires as part of the campaign to slow down EV adoption.
The rates:
But first some numbers: A 2023 study found that EVS are considerably less likely to be involved in fires than gasoline powered or hybrid vehicles. Data collected from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Bureau for Transportation Statistics indicates that EVS were involved in 25 fires for every 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in fires for every 100,000 sold.
A second study, from Swedish prevention authorities tracked data from 2018 and 2022. They found a total of 29 EV fires and 52 from hybrids. In Australia, there were only four EV fires in the country over a thirteen year period.
The visuals:
But ‘visuals’ tells a different story. Beginning with a 2013 image of a Model S Tesla that was repeated over and over, there are blistering pictures of vehicles melting in their parking spaces while firefighters lamely douse the flames. The imagery shows the inferno leaping from the car to the owner’s home, melting down both. Another nail in the visual coffin comes from a viral story spread by TV’s The Grand Tour, seldom fans of EVs. In 2017 the media claimed that a rare Swiss sportcar driven by RIchard Hammond careened down a hill and burned for five days.
But, if you look at the electric vehicle with the most notorious and public history of fires, namely the Chevrolet Bolt, this imagery turns sour. Nearly 141,000 Bolt vehicles, between 2017 to 2022 were recalled. There were under 20 fires investigated, perhaps around 15 in all, but at least half of them did evoke horrific, long meltdowns that were difficult to extinguish, albeit without any loss of life. Bolt drivers were advised to restrict the vehicle capacity when they charged, and not park indoors.
The fires in Bolts were ultimately traced back to defects in the production/chemistry process used by the manufacturer, LG Chem. The Bolt was not the only vehicle recall- just the most notorious one. Toyota recalled one million hybrids in 2018, Hyundai recalled about 82,000 vehicles in 2021 and 2022, and there are more.
What seems to have made the Bolt fires so headline worthy was that they were “spontaneous”, i.e., they did not occur during or after a crash. Owners first heard a loud pop (perhaps from nonfunctional safety vents). Other reports say the eruption began with billowing smoke.
The verbiage to describe these EV fires heightens the imagery. The fires in the Bolt were named “thermal runaways.” That phrase evokes a super-sized image, akin to one of nuclear meltdowns or ‘atmospheric rivers’, the latter term now prevalent in weather reporting. It’s a bad turn of words but it is technically correct- as the defective battery cells had a vicious circle of overheating. Hence it could reignite.
The spotlight:
EV fires, while rare, continue to be in the spotlight. Less attention goes to updates on modernizing fire-fighting and improving training. A special branch of the UL Research Institute has been updating their fire-fighting strategies. A ‘visual’ that gets both good and bad reviews are purpose-made tarps made of a glass material and kevlar that are dropped onto the burning vehicle.
The press continues, like the earlier Top Gear story, to seed fear or doubt. In 2023, there was a headline-making story about a car-carrier at sea that had 498 electric cars on board (The Fremantle Highway). When the crippled boat made it to port, it was discovered that the blaze occurred elsewhere and the EVS arrived in good condition. The true-up story made fewer headlines, so it is the negative information that people recall.
Meanwhile, the automakers themselves haven’t done a particularly good job of telling the public that they have improved the thermal management system and adjusted the chemical composition of the EV batteries to make them more stable.
In closing, recall that it’s been nearly eight years since we first learned of the Galaxy 7 phones spontaneously catching fire. Somehow Samsung overcame their battery crisis and the public continued to buy these devices. Today, smartphones are on-the-spot when there’s a car fire, usually before the professional camera crew arrives. It will be useful to track how fires in new hybrid vehicles models get reported and whether they get called-out for their additional batteries.