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.

[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

> [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.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/29/electric-vehicle-fires-are-r...

Simply dousing the fire with water as mentioned in the article is not sufficient.

Does this article extinguish anything?

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.

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.

e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649

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.

When statistics are presented on fires per car sold, does it account for car age?

I'd assume that average ICE car catching on fire is older that average EV just by EV not existing when ICE was made

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.

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.

¹ https://explore.dot.gov/t/FAA/views/LithiumBatteries/Inciden...

² https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/03/03... ³ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/nyregion/e-bike-lithium-b... ⁴ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/ebike-batter...

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 think the scooter fires are a real issue. See: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lit...

Those batteries are handled, charged, and manufactured/repaired with much less care....

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.

it's almost like 5 years ago the old guard car companies might have been paying reporters to hype up all the EV fires.

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."

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 :)

> But I think it is much less likely to occur

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.

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.

I wonder if, back in the days, you would have allowed your house to be connected to the electrical grid or the gas grid.

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.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2022/RCLRPT-22V533-6872.PDF

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.

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.

Edit:

Googled, curious. Wow.

https://www.gasodorizer.com/gas-odorization-history/

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.