Here in Norway we have a relatively high ratio of EVs on the road, and has had so for many years now.
As such there's some decent statistics showing that it's much more likely for an ICE car to start burning than an EV[1][2], up to 4-5x.
Our EVs are on average newer, for the last few years the majority of sales have been EVs. As such our ICEs are on average older. Interestingly the number of cars catching fire[3] hasn't increased substantially since 2016. The number of EVs catching fire has doubled since then, but the number of EVs on the road has gone up 5x[4].
Here in Norway new EVs no longer come with the "emergency charger" that hooks up to a regular 220V socket, as charging using regular sockets has been identified as a potential fire hazard.
The age distribution of our cars hasn't changed significantly[1] between 2016 and 2022.
However back in 2016, only about 4% of our cars were EVs[2]. So the 2016 car fire statistics is essentially just ICEs, which would include young ICE cars as well.
In 2022, around 20% of our cars were EVs. Given that the age of our cars has remained roughly the same, if EVs were as likely to catch fire as an average ICE in 2016, you'd expect[3] around 140-145 EV fires in 2022. Yet there were only 29.
My point is that even if the overall age distribution is constant, you'd need EVs to work their way through the same lifespan before it came out the same. What we need to know is not the overall distribution, but the age distribution per ICEs and EVs. (Otherwise you end up in a situation where the overall age curve is constant, but EVs are the majority of the young part of the graph, which makes them look good because they're all young and the ICEs look worse because they average even older.)
I tried finding the age distribution per power train, but the closest I could find was per brand, which isn't all that useful. Teslas is a decent proxy for EVs, being EV only and most popular for a long time, but not sure I can find a suitable, representative proxy brand for ICEs.
> [Firefighters have] had 100 years to train and to understand how to deal with internal combustion engine fires,” the NFPA’s Andrew Klock told Vox. “With electric vehicles, they don’t have as much training and knowledge.”
> But MSB’s Per-Ola Malmqvist has developed webinars that explain how to safely put out battery fires. In a 2022 webinar, he described the tools and techniques that were used to put out a raging EV battery fire in 10 minutes using only 750 liters of water. In another webinar about EV fire suppression best practices, Malmqvist interviewed a firefighter from Vestfold Fire Service in Norway, where the extinguishing method Malmqvist recommends was tried for the first time in battling an electric-vehicle blaze.
Not surprising. However, I would have liked to have heard a better explanation of the problem about EV fires self-reigniting, which can happen hours or days later. They touched on it, but passed it off as lack of firefighter training.
Sure, but that seems like mostly a question of getting them to a place where that can safely happen. Once it is isolated, let it burn out if it reignites.
Putting it out the first time so that it can be safely moved is important.
> Once it is isolated, let it burn out if it reignites.
Mere words do not quite convey the issue.
How does one "isolate" a car? Does one take it somewhere? Where? Are fire engines able to undertake this task? It's there a concern en route to the somewhere?
You tow it away while it's on fire? I'm wondering if that's even possible. You can spray the vehicle w/ foam and then cover it and then maybe you could move it w/o reignition? Seems kinda risky / might require enclosed tow trucks w/ on board fire suppression? Then there's the question of where you put them once you move them. It's my understanding that they basically need to be allowed to burn (off gassing toxic chemicals) or submerged in liquid for extended periods.
There have been some pretty horrendous chain reactions of EV fires in China. I'm not sure storing a bunch of already defective ones in various states of burn together is safe at scale.
Yeah that’s one of the aspects you need new training and equipment for. Nobody is downplaying that.
But it’s pretty easy to solve now. There’s already a kind of kiddie-pool like equipment that can easily be put up around the car to keep the bottom flooded with water for a few hours.
What does "per 100,000 sold" mean? Is that simply per 100,000 cars? This metric makes no sense unless you age-adjust vehicles; most EVs are <5 years old. Meanwhile, people drive 20, 30 even 50+ year old ICE vehicles all the time.
And dismissing firefighters lack of knowledge and training and equipment to put out these fires is strange. It will be overcome, but it's a legitimate issue.
Have you seen the gear US firefighters use vs their European counterparts?
Their stuff is ancient, so much so that they need to have "smoke drills" to put their very complicated kit on when they enter a smoke diving situation. This is all because the US helmet is the same shape it was in the 1800s, because tradition or something. They just refused to modernise.
The EU version? four clips attach to the helmet, tighten, done in under 5 seconds.
ICE vehicles have an average ge of about 11 years most (80%) of the cars are younger than 20years. older than that is the exception, not "all the time"
Yeah absolutely. I think a different accurate headline for the same evidence could be "It will require significant time and effort in training firefighters to bring EV batteries to an acceptable level of safety".
The timeline of social adjustment to a technology is just as important as the technology itself.
The same issue is with car mechanics. Some just refuse to change.
Meanwhile there are shops over here where people ship their EVs from around the country because they know their shit. They have the know-how and tools to fix EVs for a fraction of the cost the Official Solution (replace whole $thing with brand new part).
TBH if you're in your 60's and a car mechanic, there's no point in learning EVs unless you're personally interested. There's gonna be enough work for the next 20 years easily just with ICEs
Same thing with electricians and home electrification. In general, decarbonization technologies are significantly front-running the trades and training necessary to scale them. But that's totally normal (if unfortunate). There's a chicken and egg problem with these things, but viable technologies must come first, and adaptation to them come later.
But recognizing that this is normal doesn't mean it isn't going to require work and investment to make it all pencil out. People - like me - who want to see these technologies succeed need to be just as attuned to this and not downplay it or take it for granted that people will come along for the ride if they don't yet see the benefit to themselves.
My impression is that the concern with EV and battery fires is that they can occur in the home or while otherwise stationary, unexpectedly causing much more catastrophic damage. ICE fires, in contrast, seem to be mostly associated with collisions, or somewhat less so with driving; it seems uncommon for ICEs to suddenly catch fire in an enclosed building.
I'm not an expert on this though, and these are just my general impressions, which is maybe the point of the article. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to address the nature of EV fires in a scientific, public-health kind of way.
I think the thing most people are concerned about is a question like "how likely is my car to cause my house to burn down just sitting in the garage, while I'm sleeping?" Maybe the answer to that is the same with ICEs and EVs but that's the question that needs to be addressed.
ICE fires aren't often related to collisions. I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting. I've had multiple ICE cars recalled for catching fire when stopped. In the examples in the articles they mentioned vehicles in parking garages and on cargo ships, those weren't moving.
Your general impressions don't reflect reality. Out of all the cars I've owned my ICE ones have been way more likely to burn down my house while sleeping than my EV. Your own article even starts off with "most occur in motor vehicles not involved in collisions."
> I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting
The ICE car combusted while the engine wasn't running? Like, it was parked, they'd turned off the car as usual, and hours later it randomly combusted? Do you have any information on what the likely cause may have been? (e.g., hot weather? unexpected sparks?)
Yes. Usually it's related to some sort of electrical fire that occurs when the vehicle is off, that catches fluids (brake fluid, gas, etc) on fire, although a big enough regular electrical fire can do it too.
> the anti-lock brake control module can leak fluid and cause an electrical short, which can touch off a fire while the vehicles are parked or being driven.
> [...] Dealers will replace the anti-lock brake fuse at no cost to owners.
How can replacing a "fuse" prevent fluid leakage?!
Sizing the fuse to be smaller means the fuse will blow faster at the short before the wires in the puddle of brake fluid get hot enough to start the fire. Chances are the fuze was oversized to begin with.
I figured about as much, but I guess my point was: shouldn't they be fixing the leak?! Would people even know about the leak otherwise? Or is this going to silently surprise/kill people when their ABS fails?
The fuse swap is a temporary fix to make the cars safer until a full fix can be rolled out. I imagine truly "fixing" the leak means redesigning the ABS module, something that takes time. They need to investigate what makes the leak happen, redesign the actual part, validate that new part doesn't have some other issue, call the new part out for manufacturing (and make millions of them), get them in the hands of dealers, and then actually start replacing the part.
In the mean time, swap the fuze, and while the car is going to become immobilized or throw ABS warnings when the leak happens its not going to burn someone's house down.
It didn't sound like they were planning to do more than this, but I admittedly stopped reading the article fairly quickly after this part. I guess others pointed out the same thing so hopefully they'll have to follow up.
> Do you have any information on what the likely cause may have been? (e.g., hot weather? unexpected sparks?)
Possibly one of the above plus gasoline vapors which are a lot more dangerous and explosive than gasoline itself and can be easily ignited by a spark not necessarily due to a short circuit.
There's an entire 12V electrical system which stays active. There's also rubber and plastic parts, possible contaminants, a bevy of additives...plenty of interesting chemistry which normally does nothing but in the right sequence of unlikely events leads to an ignition.
> There's an entire 12V electrical system which stays active. [...]
I'm not that illiterate about cars or basic physics. I was trying to figure out what actually went wrong in their situation. Because I'd never heard of any specific cases of these actually happening. Previously these sounded incredibly less likely to me than what I'm now discovering here.
I don't remember the specifics about that situation. Something melted and slowly leaked and eventually caught fire. I don't think whatever happened in that case rose to become a recall. It was a relatively new Cadillac in the mid 1990s IIRC. I was a kid at the time it happened.
But yeah, vehicle fires happen to parked cars all the time. As mentioned I've had multiple cars have "don't park in the garage" kind of recalls, one car has even had multiple (Hyundai). In the article posted above it opens with:
> WHILE SOME FIRES in motor vehicles occur as a result of collisions, most occur in motor vehicles not involved in collisions. These non-crash-induced fires are relatively frequent (one for every 1,000 registered vehicles) but in general are less hazardous to occupants and bystanders than crash induced fires.
It later states:
> They occur on an average of one out of every 1,000 registered vehicles and can result in significant property damage
The way I see it, ICE vehicles have a different potential fire mechanism that isn't present in EVs.
Since ICE vehicles operate at much hotter temperatures, they inherently have a combustion potential due to leakages (brake fluid, gas, oil, etc). It's pretty common to have a bit of smoking from a fluid change, purely from accidental drips (even a little bit). If it's a continuous drip and hot enough areas such as exhaust, you can get a fire.
EVs just don't have anything that hot during normal operation. The operating temperature of both the electric motors and the batteries is much much lower than the temperature of engine operating temps (usually 200+F) or exhaust gas temperatures (something ridiculous like 1200F on catalytic converters, and 500F on exhaust piping).
ICE fires occur in stationary as well. It's just that we have learned to handle gas better over the years.
I otherwise agree, but it's complicated because while what you say in the first sentence is true, it was true for ICE at one point too.
So for example, this is why gas containers have pressure releases, etc.
I mean, for an ICE vehicle you go to a gas station and fill it up. It's hard these days to think about how really dangerous that is because of how safe we'd be able to make it. It's much more dangerous than charging an EV car in theory.
Even storing the gas is dangerous!
That said, what you are pointing out is that the other difference is more around the mechanism.
Gasoline can't ignite as a liquid. At high temperature it just vaporizes quickly into a gas and then ignites :)
As a gas, it has a lower explosive limit of about 1.5% and an upper of about 7.5%. Within that concentration level it is flammable. Outside of it, no.
Because you can get it to combust within this range, and we've become good at avoiding this happening in "normal" circumstances through safety mechanisms developed over the years.
This was not always true, and you saw more fires in lots of situations as a result.
EV fires on the other hand are usually self-sustaining chemical reactions[1] that got out of hand. Once triggered, they result in fire unless some safety mechanism stops them.
You can see this is really not dissimilar from ICE - we spend almost all energy/safety mechanisms on preventing the ability to cause a fire in the first place.
However, that said, these chemical reactions are more "omnipresent" than ICE for sure - once they are both "off", EV vehicles are more likely to explode than ICE ones.
A lot of this is the fact that they are not really "off" most of the time.
Regardless, however, we will do the same thing we did for handling of gas in general - we will figure out how to make that safer.
If we can make hand-filling your gas tank with an explosive fuel safe i've got faith we'll be able to make EVs sitting around doing nothing safe.
We actually already can, just not at the energy density we want yet :)
[1] I understand that as a nitpick, so is burning gas, but let's leave this alone at this level :)
What’s interesting to me is that most people talk about NMC batteries in EVs, but from what I can tell LFP batteries should be safer and are becoming more popular. Would be good to see if there are stats to back this up.
> Furthermore, fires in electric cars are declining. The MSB says the number of fires in electric cars has been around 20 a year over the last three years
The number of fires should increase if age was a linear factor. Could be non linear of course.
> Furthermore, fires in electric cars are declining. The MSB says the number of fires in electric cars has been around 20 a year over the last three years, although the number of electric cars over that tie has almost doubled. Presumably, this is due to EV makers improving fire suppressing designs in newer models.
article directly says that there's an exploding growth of new vehicles, thus "average car" hasn't aged yet
I'm not arguing against EVs being more safe, I'm arguing against awful statistics of comparing "new EVs against aging ICE" while only saying "EV vs ICE"
Every year the existing cars age by a year, and the number of cars has only grown, never declined. So you would think that the “20 a year” would increase with that if age was a linear factor, not stay stationary.
I’ve heard comments from a department in Norway that the lower risk exists even when comparing similar models of similar age. But I haven’t seen the raw statistics on that anywhere yet.
The difference is so large that it’d be incredible if age would close the gap.
New vehicles have some risk as well: I think defects in battery cell manufacturing can be a significant risk in the early years of EVs.
You'll never catch me with a lithium ion battery larger than ~150wH inside my home. I don't care how aggressively the statistics are massaged.
I've personally experienced laptop and cellphone batteries catching on fire and can see how something with 100x+ the capacity could cause some serious fucking trouble.
Anyone who has one of those 1kWh+ emergency power backup things sitting inside their house right now really needs to think twice about contingencies. Extend this thinking to an EV with 2 orders of magnitude more storage.
Can a gasoline car set itself on fire inside your garage entirely unattended? Sure. But I think it is much less likely to occur and the failure modes are more acceptable to me - I.e. I can inspect and anticipate if my gasoline car might be unsafe with more clues than around an EV car. You can smell gasoline. You can't smell a manufacturing defect in a battery pack.
You think. The point of gathering data and studying it is to attempt to replace our animal-brain intuitions with real evidence.
I honestly haven't looked into the evidence on this enough either way, since I haven't yet seriously researched purchasing an electric vehicle.
But I know that I have a big tank of gasoline sitting directly underneath a portion of my childrens' rooms, and a big pipe of methane running into my basement running to a couple little tiny flames that are always lit and sometimes turned into a big blue flame to heat the household's air, or a slightly smaller fire to heat its water.
I trust these clearly dangerous things to be safe enough, but I haven't ever researched the evidence on the safety of these either. The only difference is that I've always lived with these dangers without ever really thinking about them; they're just part of the water I swim in.
One day EV batteries will be no different. It's rational for novel dangers to receive more scrutiny than old ones, but new things become old before long.
It's worse than that! You (well, I'm guessing, I don't actually know you) have this wire just bringing foreign ideas, and crazy people's written thoughts, from all over the world, and you pipe them straight into your brain,
with no helmet on. And this happens right next to your kids! You're a mad man!
I've had multiple recalls for my ICE cars that would have resulted in a fire that I wouldn't have been able to notice ahead of time. My neighbor's house burned down from a few week old car that wouldn't have been obvious it was about to burn the house down. Car fires are rarely as obvious as gasoline profusely spilling all over the place, you probably wouldn't notice it if it were to happen to you.
Spontaneous ICE car fires are most likely to be caused by the 12V systems, so you’re not going to smell gasoline.
Here’s an example:
> Tension on the transmission wiring harness could lead to wire insulation pulling back from the electrical connector. As a result, water from external sources could penetrate the connector. The presence of water may create a short circuit over time. As a result, the short circuit could lead to thermal overload if the vehicle's ignition is off for longer periods of time.
Subsequently, the risk of fire cannot be ruled out.
Cars and energy storage systems have MUCH better BMS than your laptop. And MUCH better pack level protection from the environment.
An entire parking garage with several EVs in it burned down in Norway. Not a single EV battery pack caught fire. Think about that. A firey hellscape around them and not a single ignition. What if all of them were EVs. No gasoline to contribute to the fire.
It’s utterly insane that so many people think ICE cars are safer than EVs. It has no roots in basic facts. No roots in common sense. No root in easily available statistics. It’s such an obvious case of people fearing something just because it’s new and different.
> An entire parking garage with several EVs in it burned down in Norway. Not a single EV battery pack caught fire.
Details can be found in the fire departments evaluation[1] of the fire, specifically page 28, where they note they did not find evidence of any thermal runaway in any EV.
They also note that cars with liquid fuel often have plastic fuel tanks, which can get damaged due to the heat and start leaking, spreading flammable liquid over a larger area...
I think time will fix some of this, which of course doesn't counter what you're saying.
An example, how many decades of natural gas use were there, before we purposefully made it smelly? We've had more than a century of improvements to ICE cars, to learn how to make them safer. And even how to make safety systems and methods more cost effective. The issues with Pintos exploding upon being rear-ended, resulted of course in fixes, etc.
So I do wonder what will, eventually, come of battery tech. Say.. 40 years from now, or some such. I imagine it will be much, much safer. We certainly try to prevent such disasters, but it seems we're also commonly having an issue, people almost or sadly do die, and then we fix that problem.
New London School Explosion ... The explosion left behind a collapsed building, with as many as 295 deaths.
As a result of the disaster, the United States and Canada began regulating the use of odorants in gas.
This is the sad way it is, often. Everyone will say "Oh, it's fine!", sometimes with logic, sometimes with a desire to not accept the potential risk, thus feeling safer, and then a massive disaster occurs.
My guess would be some sort of global warming induced flooding event, with salt water, as a key for many cars at once going BOOM!
Gas cars spontaneously igniting are rare, but flammable liquids like solvents or gasoline for lawn equipment catching fire and causing massive destruction is fairly common. People often do things like store solvents in basements where fumes can get loose and get near furnaces and other equipment and ignite.
Stored energy is stored energy.
You do have a bit of a point about large lithium power bricks. I trust those things less than I trust an EV, especially if they are the weird ChinaCorp off brand type from Amazon.
There's plenty of stored energy in a slab of solid steel, but that doesn't make it remotely dangerous. What makes lithium-batteries dangerous is the thermal runaway, enabled by the liquid capacitor.
We got pretty good at making it acceptably safe to drive around at 80mph with tanks of volatile liquid fuel right behind or under us. We’ll get good at this too. Lithium batteries are already surprisingly safe for what they are.
Electric scooters and such do create a new danger that didn't exist before: they let (indeed, encourage) you to take the hazardous part (the battery) inside an apartment to "refuel". An equivalent would be bringing a gas-driven moped into your place which is against the rules in many places, and why would you do it anyway.
As such, it's important to take all possible reasonable steps to mitigate the risk. Those vehicles are still great overall, if only because, between air quality problems and exacerbated extreme weather events, fossil fuels cause deaths, injuries and property damage just through their normal usage. But the danger is there, and needs to be considered.
I think the article is grossly misrepresenting the dangers from lithium battery fires
in other places than cars.
Especially about escooters and bikes as well as air travel.
There is statistically one fire a week on passenger aircrafts in the US now. ⁽¹⁾⁽² ⁾
New York City is trying to deal with a large number of fires started by ebikes og escooters. ⁽³⁾⁽⁴⁾
To dismiss this problem by finding a fire that happened in Vietnam that was incorrectly attributed seems quite biased.
When it comes to the stats for cars, they are probably correct but somewhat misguided.
Most electric cars are pretty new, a large percentage are nearly brand news.
To compare them to the entire fleet of fossile fueled car fires is a bit unfair.
I think if you compare all new and brand new combustion engine fires the stats
would look different.
May well be much higher for combustion engines, I dont know, but the comparisons
used in the article are in my opinion biased.
It’s kind of absurd seeing some of the FUD around EVs from the perspective of li img in Norway now. We’re getting up to 20-30% of the cars ON THE ROAD being EVs now in some areas. I’d guess a quarter of my close neighbours have EVs.
According to some, our neighbourhood should be a EV-fire hellscape and we should have blackouts every week. The roads should have to be replaced every month from increased wear. Nobody can go on road trips anymore. Yet everything is fine. Better than fine. As the statistics are pretty clear on: there’s fewer car fires when you have more EVs. Also air pollution is down
When commenting on this topic online it feels like we’re living in the future, trying to argue with people from the past. If you’re wondering what a future with lots of EVs look like, you don’t have to speculate. All you have to do is come to Oslo or Bergen and take a look around. Yet people talk with absolutely certainty about how everything will go to hell when there’s too many EVs.
(Yes, Norway has some qualities that makes the transition easier. Like a strong grid to start with, low speed limits and a strong economy. But then the technology was much more primitive and expensive when Norway got started. Also, Norway has a winter that is brutal on the range of EVs, and an insanely high share of Norwegians will drive hours to their cabins high in the mountains every other weekend in winter.. not the most ideal market for EVs)
I fully agree with this "feels like we're living in the future, trying to argue with people from the past" idea.
My neighborhood isn't exactly new, it was mostly built in the 70s to very early 80s. There are several households on my street which I know have EVs. Given how many argue about the load on the grid you'd assume the power company would have had to massively upgrade the infrastructure here to support it. But in the end our actual peak power usage largely hasn't changed; we're just pulling a bit more power in the very late evenings and super early morning hours. Time when the grid around us has plenty of capacity.
Scooter batteries barely undergo any testing -> typical consumer product. I wish, that from oversees imported products would get safety and environmental labels. The consumers should somehow be educated. That one week after buying landfills filling cheap plastic thrash is no good for anything.
Meanwhile car battery is safety related part covered by dozens of regulations. Some YouTube channel was showing them under direct fire for minutes and they didn’t ignite. Maybe Rimac batteries, I don’t remember.
Yea, there's a ton of YOLO -level batteries in e-bikes and e-scooters.
Car manufacturers actually care about reliability, because they're usually bigger corporations with deep pockets.
Pretty much anyone with a contact in China can start "manufacturing" white-label e-scooters from the cheapest bidder. Then just shut down the corporation and disappear if any issues arise.
How can you have an article about battery combustion without talking about the chemistry?
A gasoline fire is a well understood event. Gas ignites and burns until there is no more fuel, or no more air. We know to extinguish this type of fire, we need to remove the air. Once the reaction has stopped, it would need another fresh ignition source to reignite.
A lithium fire is, on the other hand, is almost completely misunderstood by most people. It is a chemical chain reaction. It it an uncontrollable state in which the lithium becomes so hot that it perpetuates it's own combustion. You can remove the oxygen, but that's not the chemical that's keeping this reaction going. So the reaction will not stop. The lithium will keep heating itself, which will cause that heated lithium to heat more lithium, which heats more lithium, until there is no more lithium remaining.
It is disingenuous to compare apples to oranges like what is being done by comparing ICE car fires to EV car fires.
A lithium-ion battery fire is not a lithium fire; the lithium hexafluorophosphate electrolyte is non-flammable. You're mostly right about the rest, but it's really important to note that it's not a lithium fire.
Lithium combusts in the presence of water, so fighting a lithium(not-ion) battery fire requires special care.
As such there's some decent statistics showing that it's much more likely for an ICE car to start burning than an EV[1][2], up to 4-5x.
Our EVs are on average newer, for the last few years the majority of sales have been EVs. As such our ICEs are on average older. Interestingly the number of cars catching fire[3] hasn't increased substantially since 2016. The number of EVs catching fire has doubled since then, but the number of EVs on the road has gone up 5x[4].
Here in Norway new EVs no longer come with the "emergency charger" that hooks up to a regular 220V socket, as charging using regular sockets has been identified as a potential fire hazard.
[1]: https://www.motor.no/aktuelt/elbiler-brenner-langt-sjeldnere...
[2]: https://www.elbil24.no/nyheter/myten-som-nekter-a-do/7821704...
[3]: https://www.brannstatistikk.no/brus-ui/search?searchId=9B135...
[4]: https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10090893