It’s a situation no electric vehicle owner wants to think about: A car catches fire for inexplicable reasons and causes significant collateral damage before it’s finally extinguished. It’s also a headline no car company that makes EVs wants to deal with. Thankfully, those fires are statistically rare. But after one conflagration involving an electric Kia in a parking garage in Korea, the Hyundai Motor Group said it’s taking proactive steps to alleviate the public’s fire fears and alert owners to potential problems before they happen.
The world’s third-largest automaker and burgeoning EV titan has announced several policy changes, new practices and forthcoming software updates since a Kia EV6 caught fire earlier this month. Fortunately for all involved, that blaze was extinguished quickly. But it came on the heels of a far more devastating fire involving a Mercedes-Benz EQE in an Incheon garage that sent two dozen people to the hospital.
How common are those fires? I stopped a lady driving g a smoking Chevrolet Volt yesterday, it was coming out the wheel well and definitely smelled of electronic.
Electric vehicles are less likely to catch fire than combustion engine vehicles, by far. EV fires are harder to extinguish however.
EV fires are super rare. The overwhelming majority of vehicle fires are from flammability’s original BFF, cars with oil and gas sloshing around.
https://www.motortrend.com/features/you-are-wrong-about-ev-fires/
The problem with EV fires isn’t their frequency. The problem is that, in the handful of times they happen, they’re a pain in the ass to put out.
Not common enough where anytime one happens it’s still newsworthy. We’ll see if that continues as the percentage of BEVs on the road grows
Brakes, clutches, and electronics all smell pretty similar when burning. The breaking period on the Ford Fiesta/Focus with the ~2014 dct auto seriously smelled like an electronics fire. Not saying that Volt wasn’t having an electrical fire, just trying to spread awareness that there is significant overlap in the smells. I’m not sure where the high voltage electronics/motor are on the Volt.
