A video of an electric car burning in a car park spreads across social media within hours, almost always under the same caption: an EV is a bomb on wheels. The footage is genuinely alarming, with billowing smoke and flames shooting out like a blowtorch. Yet pull the camera back, look at the statistics rather than the single frame, and the conclusion is the exact opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2022 Sweden\u2019s Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) recorded 23 fires among the country\u2019s 611,000 electric vehicles, a rate of about 0.004 per cent. Over the same period its 4.4 million petrol and diesel cars produced roughly 3,400 fires, a rate of about 0.08 per cent. A combustion car, in other words, is around twenty times more likely to catch fire than an EV. The Australian project EV FireSafe, which tracks incidents worldwide, finds an even wider gap, with combustion vehicles tens of times more likely to ignite. The exact multiple varies between datasets and methods, but the direction does not: when it comes to how often a vehicle catches fire, the dangerous one has always been the petrol car, not the electric one. This is not hard to understand. A combustion engine runs on fire, thousands of tiny explosions every minute, with tens of litres of flammable liquid on board. For it to catch fire is simply for it to fail to keep the fire where the fire is meant to be. For an electric car to catch fire, a fire has to be conjured out of nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What really unsettles people is a different claim: that once an EV does burn, it is very hard to put out. There is something to this. A battery fire usually begins with thermal runaway in the lithium cells, where one cell overheats itself, the failure cascades to its neighbours, and the whole reaction feeds its own energy; starving it of air barely helps, and the only real remedy is to flood the cells with water until they cool. But the weight of this difficulty is routinely overstated. It arises only in the small minority of cases where a fire actually starts, an exception within an exception. And fire services are no longer improvising. They have turned it into standard procedure: thermal-imaging cameras to find the hotspots that cannot be seen, specialised nozzles to spray the battery pack from beneath the chassis, and instructions to tow operators to watch for reignition. In Britain the International Fire Training Centre, run by Serco, has opened the country\u2019s first dedicated electric-vehicle fire course, and in Europe the CTIF published an operational guide for these incidents in 2025. Firefighting has moved from guesswork to a written drill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More to the point, the hard edge of the problem is being designed out at source. Early electric cars mostly used NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) cells, high in energy density but with a cathode that releases oxygen when it overheats, in effect feeding fuel to the flames. The industry has since swung heavily towards LFP (lithium iron phosphate), now close to half of the world\u2019s EV battery capacity. Its cathode releases almost no oxygen, so runaway is both harder to trigger and far gentler when it does occur, producing mostly smoke rather than open flame. The next step, sodium-ion, has already moved from the laboratory into mass production: sodium is less chemically reactive than lithium, the runaway risk is lower still, the energy density has caught up with LFP, and the first cars carrying it are expected on the road in 2026. Each generation lowers the ceiling on how bad an electric-car fire can get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the terrifying image of the fire that will not go out looks increasingly like an old photograph of a previous generation of battery. Electric cars rarely catch fire to begin with, and as the chemistry evolves they are becoming both less likely to burn and easier to put out. The question worth asking is no longer whether an electric car is a bomb, but whether public perception, car-park regulations and insurance pricing will keep up with a risk that is shrinking rather than growing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A burning EV makes alarming footage, but a petrol car is about twenty times likelier to catch fire. The real challenge is putting it out, and battery chemistry is already designing that difficulty away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3114,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[84],"tags":[1534,1581,1586,1584,1582,1585,1583],"class_list":["post-3115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-tech","tag-electric-vehicles","tag-ev-fire-safety","tag-firefighting","tag-lfp-battery","tag-lithium-ion-battery","tag-sodium-ion-battery","tag-thermal-runaway"],"yoast_head":"\n