https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st...

There are probably some rare cases of this happening on gas vehicles over the years, but I expect any such case would also be concerning and deserving of a deep investigation.

You have a complex electrical system that gets constantly temperature cycled in a fairly extreme way, sitting right next to a bunch of flammable material. Not a big surprise that it goes wrong sometimes.

I doubt it's common enough to be a real worry in either type of car, though.

People need to keep statistics in mind when looking at these issues because there are lots of people who are heavily invested in EVs failing. That first tweet in the article is a prime example. They frame a single incident of a fire with a Hyundai EV as negative news for Tesla. You can click through to that account's feed and see they tweet almost nothing but negative comments about Tesla. People like that are actively working to make sure that you see every single isolated incident when something goes wrong with an EV in hopes that it stalls that industry.

And just a disclaimer to the above comment, this incident should definitely still be investigated to make sure there isn't a widespread issue. It is just a reminder that we shouldn't overreact every time a single EV has a problem because odds are we would never even hear about it if the same thing happened to an ICE vehicle.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-d...

Unfortunately, the majority of cases I remember were due to flaws in the electrical system:

https://www.autosafety.org/ford-ignition-switch-fires/

https://www.autosafety.org/category/vehicle_fires/ford_cruis...

https://www.autonews.com/regulation-safety/ford-recalls-f-15...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/08/07/gm-reca...

In other words, the (relatively small) battery in ICE vehicles provided the initial energy to start those fires, and not the fuel itself. I suppose one could say that a safety advantage of ICE vehicles when parked and off is that even a fuel leak requires a source of ignition to cause a fire (also, diesel is very difficult to actually ignite), whereas with an EV there is always a huge source of electrical energy available and a lot more components which are always supplied with power.

My guess is that once they become as common as ICE, EVs will continue to catch fire at roughly the same rate if not more.

I don't think you can predict from theory which will have higher fire rates. All the fires are due to small flaws in the details, so it's a question of design and manufacturing carefulness.

Does it count as "off" when the car periodically wakes up when parked to do everything from check for updates to warming/cooling the batteries or cabin?

(Not trolling, I can't find the actual answer.)

It's certainly not solely powered by the 12V as it'd be flat within the day.

EV fires will be fewer.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bmw-mystery-fires-abc-news-i...

It's certainly a thing that happens in these systems, sometimes it happens enough to warrant changes and/or recalls if it's systemic. Should there be insufficient protection in EV models that fails to address the safety issues unique to the new components that's something we need to address, just like we address when it happens in traditional cars.

Media over-reporting this is no different than those "look at that expensive supercar on fire" cases imho, the tech is new and gets clicks, slap Tesla in the summary and you get even more clicks. We certainly don't help the issue with discussions that look like programming language wars.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/ferrari-fuel-vapor-leak-f...

*Edit: changed to real link from amp version.

I'm moved to share about being very careful when opening the hood (engine compartment cover) of a vehicle that's overheated. I did that once, and there was a flash fire. From oil and grease on the engine. Fortunately I didn't get burned. And closing the hood put out the fire.

But damn, it was a shock.

(Anecdata) I had to prove that the work I did on a car (replacing the bumper) didn't cause a fire which burned down the garage and house it was in a week later.

That said, I do agree with your point that a brand new vehicle should not have these sorts of issues. Be interesting to see where the cause lay.

As long as an electrical circuit has power it can begin to heat up wires or connectors due to bad contacts or worn threads, for example, even if the car is cold and has been sitting for days. In the lucky case there's a slow short that just drains the battery or burns out the wiring, stopping the generation of more heat. In the worst case the heat will melt something and provide a new, direct short to ground, which runs enough power through the wires to ignite something.

I have a garage for doing repairs and maintenance on my cars. Each time I park one of my vehicles (new or old) there I'll disconnect the battery negative cable and keep it disconnected unless I have to start the engine or connect to diagnostics. I have insurance, of course, but the idea of my shop burning down alone is enough of a deterrent that motivates me to do the small effort of disconnecting the battery. I really don't want to rebuild my shop and reacquire all my equipment because of a bad connector hidden inside the wiring harness somewhere in my car chose to fail.

Another fun failure mode of gas cars is that when the gas tank does finally fail, if the car is on any sort of a slope, you now have a stream of flaming gasoline to worry about...

The reality is that current lithium batteries do have a very energetic failure mode - it’s not particularly common (because they’re engineered in such a way that a battery failure doesn’t trigger a fault in the casing) but when it does happen the immediate explosive force is much greater than for a gas tank. Also because physics lithium batteries do have a greater potential to simply “go wrong” when not in active use.

That said it is obvious electric cars are the future - I just hope we can do better than the current battery tech, the power density is way down on gasoline and that means the batteries are huge, and therefore weigh enough to impact overall car efficiency.

Large energy capacity batteries, and lithium specifically, definitely pose some new and "interesting" challenges. I'm optimistic though. Gas tanks are as safe as they are today because of several decades of safety-focused engineering and iteration.

If you gave me a choice between an ICE or an EV fire, I'm absolutely going to choose the gasoline, but that's just because it's a very mature technology, with well understood practices for dealing with them. I'd be surprised if I have the same answer in 10 years time though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyEaC9xcYhE

Vehicle fires unrelated to a crash are not unheard of for traditional gas powered cars.

https://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20090702/News/6041531...

https://www.firehouse.com/home/news/10515159/one-killed-in-c...

IIRC 300 people a year are killed by car fires in the States while self-filling gas cars due to static electric sparks from their clothing, and/ or shoes off the cars carpeting. Nasty that, huh?

We've passed 250k electric vehicles now in Norway[1] (and 3.2k Konas), I can't think of a single similar case as this in the media.

[1]: https://elbilstatistikk.no

In Portugal that's by law. I had never heard of the VW explosions though and always assumed petrol lobbying was to blame. Either way the law was very effective at killing natural gas cars through mandatory labeling of cars (social stigma) and prohibition of parking in underground garages (big drawback).

Strange how that works. A few Samsung phones explode and Samsung phones are declared dangerous. One Hyundai explodes and obviously all electric cars are somehow inherently dangerous.

As far as I recall (I haven't rigorously collected the statistics), about 10--20 phones exploded in the first month the issue was raised. One explosion at any time is an accident, multiple explosions in a month are not. The Kona explosion can be thus regarded as an accident until something more fishy happens.

Build quality and quality control is decent, my impression is that there are way less factory issues compared to Tesla.

Only downsides for this car in my book is:

- Lacking a bit of room for the back seats if you're transporting grown ups.

- Cargo space could be better.

- There's a bit of road noise (you notice that when you don't have any engine noise), I've had mine soundproofed to deal with this.

- The default summer tires are shitty (they're low consumption though, but noisy.) Replaced mine with Nokian tires.

- They could easily have added a frunk in the EV version, there's enough room under the hood. You can DIY this.

- Front distance sensors doesn't automatically turn on when driving at low speed. You have to manually activate them or hit reverse first. (US version doesn't come with front sensors I believe).

- Lane following assistant will disable itself if you don't touch the wheel for 2 minutes, ACC however will stay on. The correct safe way to do this would be to keep LFA on, but set ACC to 0. Stay in the lane, but slow to a stand still.

Sure I can appreciate that, but I like engine noise, and as a racer I'm More than just used to it--I interpret it into adhesion to name just one aspect of precision driving.

Yep no real cargo room, I stored a lot of items down by the spare. No heated side mirrors--I got the base, but still that's really shitty on their part.

Also I would NOT EVER have bought the car if I couldn't disable ALL of the driver assists: lane keeping, Forward collision and traction control--it takes a few seconds but I can't say it will ever irritate me. I did drive with traction control on until the 600 mile break in mark so as not to overrev while trying to catch the car IF that were to happen, which it never did. Now though all three are off all time--And always will be ;)

I don't park in my garage, but I do back it close to the garage due the neighborhood kids playing street hockey; however as it is gas powered, I really don't feel it is an issue.

Well yeah they do, and people get hit by lightening, and yet I still walk in the rain. Not to mention the article is about an EV Kona... so ya know.

I could also imagine that having a breaker in the house for a high amperage circuit which is regularly toggled-off is just a good safety precaution against the neighbors stealing your power!

It's surprising they do it so openly, but useful, as you can use it as an easy but reliable "this tweet is unreliable" indicator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Tesla Cars and Other EVs Banned From Texas Drag Strip Due to Battery Fires"

Must be insulting to see your vehicle towed away by them.