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.