Essay by Eric Worrall
There is growing public awareness of the apparent tendency of electric vehicles to spontaneously ignite and ignite with hot, difficult-to-extinguish flames.
The video above discusses how a normal fire extinguisher fails to put out a flame, and also covers the risk of heat loss, a new type of vehicle fire hazard in which even an extinguished EV battery fire can be spontaneously re-ignites, due to the chemical processes in the battery failing.
But one thing really caught my attention – in this case the car was on fire near some trees. Urban trees in the parking lot, so no harm done. But what if such a car fire happened in a less urban place, in a dry forest?
It is clear that fossil fuel-powered vehicles can also catch fire. My car once caught fire, the full tank burst and created a very dramatic fire – I just filled it up 20 minutes before it caught fire.
But the fire did not spread – some flames rose around the side of the vehicle, but most of the flames remained on the ground, under the trunk. And the fire was controllable – when the fire truck arrived 20 minutes after the fire started, the fire was extinguished within 5 minutes. If I had thought about carrying a fire extinguisher in the car, I might have been able to put out the fire myself.
The tram fires seem much more intense than the gas fires I’ve experienced. They seemed to be hot, much hotter than the gasoline flames that burned the back of my car. Worse still, electric vehicle fires seem to be difficult to put out, and a damaged electric vehicle battery is still dangerous even if you think the fire hazard is gone.
Are EV mobile fire hazards really the kind of vehicle we want to drive around in sensitive, bushfire-risk areas like Australia and California?
Time will tell, I guess, whether the apparent enhanced fire initiation potential of faulty electric vehicles has a significant impact on large-scale wildfire risk.
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