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Respectfully, be careful throwing numbers out on this subject and I am happy to have a polite conversation about it because there is so much misinformation out there about the “rate” of fires. Even that is difficult to pin down because you cannot necessarily assign “blame” to the battery or ICE for all “vehicle fires”. My best answer is that I don’t know, but I suspect it is much more similar than what people paste all over social media.

The US uses NFIRS for fire reporting. It is an antiquated system and most firefighters (by nature and culture) are NOT going to read the manual to find the two additional codes necessary to specify that the “vehicle fire” box they check on the front page was an EV or a hybrid. I know this firsthand - they fill out page 1 and the drop-downs and it is rare to see more reported data. I have looked at many of them. I personally know of several “EV fires” that were not reported or referenced in studies such as the EV Fire Safe one (an excellent organization in Australia by the way) but even Emma went out on a limb with her analysis and admittedly used “news stories”. An EV fire in rural Colorado for example is unlikely to make the news.... just saying.

The EZautoinsurance brochure claiming to have used NTSB data to extrapolate the numbers is crap. They are a discount auto insurance brokerage - not an insurer and their data analysis is very flawed given that they used the number of fatal fires for example - meaningless to “the vehicle started the fire”. If I taught statistics to college kids I would use their brochure as a study assignment so the kids could learn about bad or misinterpreted data leading to a flawed result. Even NTSB released something saying they did not say what the discount brokers said in the oft-cited brochure.

The ONLY people who know the real numbers are the insurance industry and they are not sharing the data - they are raising rates more for EV’s vs ICE vehicles. I don’t claim that is related to “fire causation” directly but it is certainly part of the equation as I explained above and THAT came from an insurance executive.

Vehicle fires are typically in my experience “older vehicles with poor maintenance”. Daughter goes off to college and has bad valves in older car purchased by dad and she does not check the oil = overheated engine and eventual hot surface ignition for example.

The vast majority of EV’s have been purchased in the last 5 years. Prior to this time period they comprised a very small number of the total vehicles in use in the US. Go to your local craigslist and search for used cars less than 5k in cost and those are by far the most likely to catch fire usually from dry rotted hoses with ignitable liquids (lots of fluids besides gas in a vehicle) or severe leaks from bad gaskets, etc.

About 10-15% of car fires (per authorities like NTSB or National Fire Protection Association) are arson and most of these are stolen cars used for joyriding or other crimes and the perp torches the vehicle to get rid of forensic evidence or just because they are azzholes. I saw a lot of these as a cop in the inner-city during my prior life. I also saw a lot of cars torched for “domestic squabbles” in the inner-city. Not caused by the car.

EV’s are much harder to steal since you would need to be a hacker and that is beyond the ability of your average car thief. The EV crowd (generally wealthier) are less likely to be burning each other’s rides because they slept with their squeeze so we can probably agree that there are less “criminal incidents” involving EV’s.

So, if we removed the older vehicles with poor maintenance AND we remove the stolen vehicles/meth fueled social dysfunction we now get better data, but it would still need to be cleaned up!

How could this be done? You would have to compare the same year model vehicles to make any kind of claim. 2017 EV to 2017 ICE to 2017 HEV or 2022 EV to 2022 ICE to 2022 PHEV to 2022 HEV.

That would improve it, but even then, the numbers will be skewed. Take the vandalism arson incident at the Tesla dealership in the US. Photos of that are erroneously linked by many people online to illustrate the fire risks of EV’s or Teslas. That is ridiculous because the batteries DID NOT catch fire despite gas being poured on top of the exterior of the vehicles and lit on fire. Not the vehicles fault and kudos to the engineers - the battery design resisted the fires on the vehicles but IF the reporting agency correctly logged the incident in NFIRS it would reflect over a dozen Tesla’s that “caught fire”. I would bet it went into NFIRS as over a dozen “vehicle fires” and those are counted as ICE. Unfair either way and logically meaningless to your assertion and my skepticism.

What about wildfires? Take the recent fires in Spokane, WA, for example that just occurred in August (Oregon and Gray Fire) or the Camp fire in California. Burned hundreds of homes and thousands of vehicles of all kinds. Those are still logged somewhere as vehicle fires so it neither supports nor disproves your statement about the rate of fires because the vehicles were victim, not cause, and I sincerely doubt they were reported as EV or ICE or hybrid.

I could go on, but you get the point. I believe the Norwegian government study showed that older EV’s were more likely to catch fire than newer ones (shockingly just like ICE vehicles), but I admittedly did not parse that report and understood from a colleague that the data reported by a government pushing the technology in the name of “climate change” also had problems. Norway is also a very wealthy country in comparison to other data sets so I bet they have fewer vehicle fires than Juarez or New Orleans given newer vehicles and better maintenance with “poorer Norwegians” more likely to be driving an old beater ICE vehicle than an EV.

Like I said - the only sound data is possessed by the insurance industry and they are not talking. It would be a direct comparison by type and year model eliminating any vehicle fire that was “arson” or vehicles that burned because of something else spreading fire to them. I don’t believe NTSB or the US DOT or your state DOT has this data.

My assertion above stands - ALL vehicle fires are very low incident events but EV’s are much higher consequence than ICE fires in my experience and I have seen both. Most ICE fires are not that exciting and are easily extinguished and many can be repaired.

ANY fire in an EV is game over for the vehicle and far more deadly to people inside the vehicle or inside a structure where the incident occurs. They are a MUCH different animal from start to finish. Like I said, the fact that they exist at all is a real testament to engineering given the temperamental nature of the lithium-ion battery regardless of which chemistry.

PS - it is all but certain that the older the current generation of EV’s become the more failures will occur. It is a simple engineering concept - more age and more wear and tear = more failure.

Battery fires are scary because the slightest flaw in one cell out of thousands in a pack can burn them all and the propagation is very difficult to stop. They burn hotter and are much more toxic too.