EVs are safer than internal combustion engined vehicles according to a report and research using vehicle fire figures from across Europe and Australia dispelling one long-running myth about the vehicles
A report byThe Guardian in the UK, concludes that claims about electric vehicle fires tend to fall into two broad categories: first that EV fires are very common, and second that when electric car fires happen, they are far more damaging.
But the report examines the realities of electric vehicles, with millions now on the roads of Europe and discovered that the in fact EVs are actually safer that regular ICE vehicles.
Colin Walker, the head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said that combustion-powered car fires are just so common that incidents are not reported anymore: “All the data shows that EVs are just much, much less likely to set on fire than their petrol equivalent. The many, many fires that you have for petrol or diesel cars just aren’t reported.”
Fires can start in several ways. Car batteries store energy by moving lithium ions inside a battery cell but if cells are penetrated or if impurities from manufacturing errors cause short-circuits, then unwanted chemical reactions can start “thermal runaway”, where cells heat up rapidly, releasing toxic and flammable gas. In petrol cars, fires can start via electrical faults causing sparks or if the engine overheats because of a fault in the cooling systems, potentially igniting flammable fuel.
At Disinfocheck – a website than monitors disinformation for Belgium and Luxembourg – last year came to a similar positive view about electric vehicles using information from the USA, though hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) fared worse than ICE vehicles. It said” “A major insurance company in the United States recently conducted a study. Electric cars, according to the study, are the least likely to catch fire. 25.1 out of every 100,000 electric vehicles sold caught fire. For the same number of combustion engine cars, 1,529.9 caught fire.
“However, hybrid cars are certainly the ones that catch fire the most often. 3,474.5 out of 100,000 hybrid cars sold caught fire. This is more than double the number of cars using internal combustion engines.”
The Guardian report last week said: “In Norway, which has the world’s highest proportion of electric car sales, there are between four and five times more fires in petrol and diesel cars, according to the directorate for social security and emergency preparedness. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency this year found that there were 3.8 fires per 100,000 electric or hybrid cars in 2022, compared with 68 fires per 100,000 cars when taking all fuel types into account. However, the latter figures include arson, making comparisons tricky.”
Australia’s Department of Defence funded EV FireSafe to look into the question. It found there was a 0.0012% chance of a passenger electric vehicle battery catching fire, compared with a 0.1% chance for internal combustion engine cars. (The Home Office said it was unable to provide data for the UK.)
Elon Musk’s Tesla is the world’s biggest maker of electric cars. It says the number of fires on US roads involving Teslas from 2012 to 2021 was 11 times lower per mile than the figure for all cars, the vast majority of which have petrol or diesel engines.
