Interesting, one of the selling points of Electric Vehicles over 100 years ago was how safe they were when compared to other vehicles.

Strange all I hear about with modern EVs are issues due to fire. In theory EVs should be far safer than any fossil fuel cars.

> Strange all I hear about with modern EVs are issues due to fire. In theory EVs should be far safer than any fossil fuel cars.

Strange indeed. Possibly because we're so used to ICEs catching fire it's not registering anymore[1][2][3].

[1]: https://www.faktisk.no/artikkel/er-elbilen-en-brannbombe/118...

[2]: https://www.nrk.no/vestfoldogtelemark/279-bilbranner-hittil-...

[3]: https://www.tv2.no/broom/harde-fakta-sa-ofte-brenner-elbiler...

Hard to make direct comparisons though, right? A battery fire poses different risks.

Sure it's different, but as noted by my last source, there's very few EV fires that start in or spread to the battery.

So not only do EVs catch fire significantly less than ICEs, but battery fires is just a small fraction of that.

Combustion-engine cars catch fire all the time, but that rarely makes headlines.

Search for recent results of "car catches fire" on google news or wherever, and you'll probably get a dozen incidents just for the past day, and even those will be mostly only newsworthy because the car in question caused a road closure or someone was injured.

If a car burns down and nobody is impacted in any way, it doesn't even make the news.

Humans are notably bad at evaluating low probability, high impact risk. An ICE car burning in the street has lower potential for life threatening damage than a PHEV burning when in a garage of a house overnight (ignoring the difficulty fire crews have dealing with battery fires).

Besides, Volvo has safety at the heart of its brand image, so it makes sense that they would issue an overly cautious warning.

is that a problem with EV vs ICE or shoddy/lowest bidder type of manufacturing of EV components?

What's the difference? As silly as that question sounds, the point is that ICE has the same issue of shoddy components. Ford (but not limited to) enjoys replacing critical metal parts with plastic and dunking rubber in oil. Now they have a reputation for blowing engines and being scrapped because shaving a few cents off the BOM was deemed preferable to not requiring engines to be completely removed to replace said parts that would have cost a dollar to manufacture quality versions of. There are aftermarket manufacturers that make higher quality replacements for a lot of modern OEM parts.

Bean counters ruin everything and they seem to have infected almost every business.

By design, fuel for ICE is extremely combustible. EV batteries an only combustible because of shoddy manufacturing. That problem can be fixed, but fuel will always be combustible. That’s its job

Some call it “death by MBA”.

And in fact, they are - regular ICE cars are far far far more likely to cause fires than EVs. EV fire is much harder to extinguish, but it's debatable if it's more dangerous to the occupants as the batteries have a solid firewall between them and the cabin.

Even in this case - Volvo identified one case where a problem occured, and decided to recall 7000 cars(out of 100s of thousands sold), and even among those they said they will check first if they even need to have a battery module replaced.

In the meantime my last petrol Mercedes was recalled 3 times in my 4 years of ownership.....each time for a fire risk. And that was part of larger recall spanning 100s of thousands of cars globally.

EV fire in an underground parking garage or home garage is a scary thought.

Is it more scary than an ICE car fire? A fuel tank of most ICE cars carries more energy than even the largest EV batteries - and many underground garages and homes have been burnt down to a crisp from a regular car fire, once it gets going it really doesn't matter what type of car it is.

In fact one of the largest car insurance claims in history is from a Ford truck that caught fire on a ferry in transit, burning down all of its (very expensive) cargo.

https://www.jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-milli...

an EV fire burns hotter and this does more structural damage.

Interesting - do you have any materials about it that I could read up on?

Most of them have big issues with cooling and thermal protection of batteries. Follow EVClinic on X to see ridiculous things from manufacturers.

100 years ago batteries didn't have thermal runaway issues.

It's true that currently commercially available EV tech today has a lot of engineering involved to prevent fires.

However, on the bright side safer chemistries and tech ranging from iron phosphate cathodes and sodium ion to solid state are just around corner. Which is pretty cool from an engineering and design perspective.

I wonder what the energy density of 100 year old batteries was.

Here's a battery density graph, there are a variety of these out there but give a good approximate comparison of different types.

https://media.monolithicpower.com/wysiwyg/Educational/BMS_Ch...

Lead acid I believe is what was accessable for automotive purposes 100 years ago.

Li-ion cells have about 50-60 years of research in them with maybe 30 where they've been able to be used in automotive applications.

There's been no known fire incidents for Nissan Leaf. They've sold ~1m of those, so it's not like they made too few of them.

Actually, there was one in Japan recently, but that later turned out its occupant was moving around some container of kerosene inside while smoking cigarette which lit fire on fuel(wtf?) so doesn't count.