It appears hybrids have more fires, EVs 'at the bottom' but a lot of skepticism and lack of market penetration/experience seen in this article. In
some areas EVs are 10% of vehicles purchased.
If David Blume correct that EVs will have to be mainly hybrids as noted in my earlier post and if hybrids have more fires. it may be transportation
planning might need improved as looking toward future. I read over a year ago that a fire in a combustion engine fire occurs about every 20 minutes
in the USA; another article says every 2.5 minutes. Will continual warming affect that statistic and EV fires?
www.popsci.com...
A new study has some surprising findings on car fires
An analysis from an insurance group ranks the likelihood of fires in EVs, hybrids, and combustion-engine vehicles. Here's what they found. By Rob
Verger | Published Feb 1, 2022 9:00 PM EST
A new study suggests that EVs catch on fire at lower rates than their gasoline-powered counterparts.
Car fires are a hot topic, especially when the vehicles on fire are electric. Last year, General Motors had to recall all of its Bolt electric
vehicles because more than a dozen of them caught on fire, an issue that cost LG, which makes the batteries in the vehicles, around $2 billion. When a
vehicle like a Tesla catches on fire, it makes headlines.
While it’s clear that electric vehicles pose unique challenges to the emergency teams fighting them—the blazes can be persistent and hard to snuff
out for good—one issue that’s less clear is whether they’re more likely to catch on fire than a car with a traditional combustion engine in
it.
A recent report by an online car insurance marketplace, AutoinsuranceEZ, shed some light on the issue, although it’s likely not to be the last word
on the topic. Researchers at the company analyzed data from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and to account for the fact that the
numbers of combustion-engine cars and EVs on the roads are vastly different, they factored in the car sales of different vehicle types.
The resulting analysis found that per 100,000 cars sold in each category, electric vehicles had the lowest number of fires. Hybrid vehicles had the
highest risk ratio for fire, and traditional cars were in the middle.
[Related: Why Dyson is going all-in on solid-state batteries]
Paul Christensen, a professor in the School of Engineering at Newcastle University in England, studies the issue of electric vehicle fires and acts as
an advisor on the topic to emergency responders. “At the moment, I believe that spontaneous fires are less likely to occur in electric vehicles than
they do in conventional, diesel or petrol vehicles,” he says. “But the problem we have is that the data collection has been very patchy—and we
don’t have sufficient data as of yet.”
“There’s so much hype around electric vehicles, when they do go up,” he adds, a problem that makes the ground truth on the issue harder to
discover. He says that when focusing on “the reported incidents” on the topic, EVs do seem to have lower rates of fires.
“My view is that electric vehicles are not more dangerous,” he says. “They just cause completely different challenges.”
Some of those challenges were spelled out in a report that the NTSB publicized early last year. A video from the agency notes that emergency
responders in the US tackle around 170,000 vehicle fires annually. It highlights three distinct safety issues that specifically pertain to EVs and
fire: thermal runaway, battery reignition, and stranded energy, which refers to energy that’s left behind in the batteries after a fire.
One 2017 case in Lake Forest, California exemplifies the fact that the fire in an EV can start up again after being extinguished. “The battery
reignited while responders were winching the car onto the tow truck—new short-circuits were created when the battery shifted, causing the fire to
restart,” summarised Thomas Barth, an engineer and highway investigator with the NTSB, in the video.
Christensen, who advises rescue crews on how to respond to electric vehicles, has counterintuitive advice that he stresses is his personal opinion and
not official policy: “Let the bloody thing burn,” he says. “As soon as one [battery] cell goes into thermal runaway, and it propagates, that
vehicle is a write-off, so why risk your life?”
“If the car is in isolation, [and] there’s no risk to life, let it burn,” he adds.
As for the report from AutoinsuranceEZ, Christensen says he was surprised to hear that hybrids topped the charts in that study when it comes to fires,
but not surprised to see EVs at the bottom. Laura Adams, a senior analyst with AutoinsuranceEZ, attributes the relatively high rate of fires they saw
in hybrid vehicles to the “combination of technologies under the hood” that those types of cars have. As with all studies, this represents just
one set of findings at one point in time—expect more research on the topic to surface in the future, especially as EVs continue to penetrate the
market.
a reply to:
1947boomer
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