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Comment by tekstar | Hacker News Reader

In my ~20 years of driving I've seen many ICE vehicles catch fire. The first time I remember driving home late one night, had to pull off the road and wait for firefighters to douse an SUV that had caught fire behind the dash and eventually engulfed the whole car. The owner had pulled their golf clubs out of the trunk and was watching it burn.

Anecdotal news articles are not that useful, is there any reports on rates compared between ICE and electric cars?

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Not all fires are created equal. The problem with battery fires is that they are hard to put out. The surest way how to put out an EV is to drop it into a big water tank and let it soak for days.

Firefighters regularly put out EV fires it just takes water from a hose. The biggest issue is a lot of the chemicals used to aid firefighting doesn’t work as well on battery fires. https://youtu.be/8n5Wf7TlGrU

Also, there are 200,000 car fires in North America per year, it’s extremely common. ICE cars are actually 10x as likely to catch fire as EV’s. ICE cars also frequently catch fire while parked.

Even taking your figure as accurate, how many fires per vehicle-mile driven? (And is NA just the US? US+CA+MX?)

It’s about 56 per billion miles which is a significant improvement over 40 years ago, but also a recent upswing.

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

>ICE cars also frequently catch fire while parked.

I don't think you and I have the same definitions of "frequently" or "extremely common".

>Also, there are 200,000 car fires in North America per year

There are almost 500,000,000 cars in North America.

...so the probability of a fire in an ICE car is about 0.04% per year? Assuming fires are randomly distributed (which is a bad assumption, granted) then over a lifetime of car ownership, the average individual has about a one in fifty chance of experiencing a vehicle fire. That is very much higher than I would have expected.

It is in relationship to fighter fighters not cars. Residual fires are only about twice as likely.

* residential

And while ICE cars are generally in use when this happens, EVs seem to love this doing stuff while not in use and in your home. You can never quite turn off an EV.

I'd love to see what the actuarial tables look like in a few years for home insurance. "Do you have an EV?" might become a factor, and not in the good while.

Happens with ICE cars all the time as well, there’s more than enough energy in a lead-acid battery to start a fire. I think our impression of the regularity is just a function of media attention.

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

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

A lead-acid battery has enough power to start a fire however it is itself not particularly flammable. The danger with EV batteries isn’t that they have enough energy to cause an electrical fire, it’s that they are themselves quite flammable.

Parked ICE cars burn down too, here's an example where a completely stationary car caught fire and caused $100M in damages.

https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...

To be fair Ford issued a recall for the fire risk and the owner didn't take it in to get fixed.

> as a result of the blaze, much of it was trashed, all over a 2002 Ford Escape under recall.

Of course, and I'm sure if there is a wider issue with the ID3 then Volkswagen will issue a recall too. I'd imagine a lot of issues where the car can catch fire result in a recall.

>>and the owner didn't take it in to get fixed.

Yes, which actually resulted in a fascinating legal battle, because Ford says it's not their responsibility as they have issued a recall, and the owner says she changed address and there is nothing that would legally require her to inform the manufacturer of her car of that fact. So she really didn't know about the recall, which means the responsibility here is.......unknown, and at the heart of the $100M legal battle. One of the other fascinating things is that the Department of Justice has literally stepped in and said they don't agree for the owner of the car to be a side in such expensive case, and they are taking her place instead.

I am way more concerned by all the batteries in my house than the one parked in the garage. There are probably so many powerbanks, laptop batteries and other things lying around and in drawers where they are forgotten that it's a lot more likely that a house catches fire because of those batteries than an EV

Random gadgets with Li-ion from AliExpress is most dangerous one in my house. I don't keep it charged them unless I'm at the room.

I know of several people who have had their houses burn down because of an ICE car deciding to catch fire in the garage. Hyundai has recently recalled almost a million vehicles because they tend to catch fire while parked.

last i checked electric vehicles also use the same braking mechanisms and could catch fire for the same reasons : https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-... , please post an actual link to a known case of an ICE vehicle spontaneously combusting while being turned off due to some component of the gas/gas system being the main cause of the combustion.

Oil leaking on to an exhaust manifold count?

https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/

As someone else mentioned, I wasn't trying to argue either car catches fire more or less. The parent was suggesting ICE cars catching fire while parked practically never happens, when millions of ICE cars in the last few years have been recalled for such things. Lots of people have had their houses burn down from ICE cars being parked inside. A parked car catching fire isn't something new to battery vehicles.

yes, thanks for pointing that out!

That's not really the argument, though. The argument is that all types of cars catch fire. It is not that ICE cars catch fire more.

If there is nothing nearby just let it burn down whats left is p save for the scrapyard.

Put it in water is nonsense. A cell that has not been damaged is watertight and wont react with the water but later on can burst into flames due to corrosion that opens the cell somehow or due to mechanical damage.

If you would put an fully functional EV into a lake for 3 weeks then let it dry for a few days it would burn just as good as it would have before it was soaked.

Concerning the recent recalls related to the chevy bolt battery fires - they appear to be at least 7 times as likely to catch fire and up to 35 times as likely when compared to ICE cars.

https://allev.info/2021/07/early-chevy-bolts-much-more-likel...

It's unfair to condemn EVs in general by comparing the fire rate of ICE vehicles in general to that of a specific EV that's under recall for a fire risk.

Right, similar to a citation[0] from another comment in this thread, I would guess that the fire risk of cars that are under recall for fire risk is quite high indeed!

0: https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...

I didn't condemn them, I was just providing data for comparison, which the previous commenter asked for.

they appear to be at least 7 times as likely to catch fire and up to 35 times as likely when compared to ICE cars.

Bolts are ~6 times less likely to catch fire than an ICE.

A subset of Chevy Bolts, IF they have a Korean battery, IF the fire happened while parked, IF only compared to cares 2 years old or newer, then they a higher rate of fire than cars with ICE. That's relevant, but it is misleading to give the numbers without the context.

I provided the link as context.

Also for what it's worth chevy just announced a recall for all bolts 2017-2022 (which is every model year they've released) and even the EUV models from 2022 - so the problem appears to be more widespread than initially thought.

https://my.chevrolet.com/how-to-support/safety/boltevrecall

Yep, this is the same effect as plane crashes vs. car crashes. Every plane crash and EV fire makes international news, so people are irrationally afraid of flying and EVs. Meanwhile, ICE fires and car crashes happen way more, but usually don't even make local news.

Many? I have been driving almost as long as you and probably many more miles, having driven professionally for roughly a year. I can count the number of times I have seen a car on fire on two hands. Out of likely hundreds of thousands vehicles seen I would not call a less than a dozen many. Anyway just my experience.

I don't drive very much, and I've seen several ICE car fires just this year. Almost all in the mountains, which are hard on cars.

Electric cars have a fire rate much lower than ICE, apart from specific problems like the LG batteries that caused 1 order of magnitude more fires for EVs compared to ice.

This is way too defensive.

Why can't it just be news that a woman barely got her baby out of 'the car that will save driving (as we crash into mass extinction)'?

I rent cars a couple of times a year in Germany. I think I spotted a burning car on the side of the road on my last two such trips. It's very common but rarely fatal. Basically, cars are allowed to drive very fast here and some cars don't actually handle that abuse to well and catch fire.

> ICE vehicles catch fire.

It seems like this happened spontaneously. Do ICE vehicles ever spontaneously combust? Disconnecting it from a charge isn't really abnormal use.

Hyundai recently recalled a ton of ICE cars because they could catch fire. They had the possibility of catching fire when parked.

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-...

GM recalled over 1.4 million vehicles due to fire risks from oil leaks which could happen while the engine was hot and parked.

https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/

> About 85% of the fires took place when the car was shut off and there was no one around the car, GM spokesman Alan Adler said.

Pre-emptively recalling vehicles for potential problems is a lot different than those problems actually occurring.

I'm glad the people who need to know these things (ie actuaries) will be making the decisions, not the "yeah, but!" crowd.

Are people ignoring that Tesla's battery pack in Australia has already burst into flames and they had trouble putting it out?

> Pre-emptively recalling vehicles for potential problems is a lot different than those problems actually occurring.

In both of the listed recalls hundreds of cars had self-immolated. In the GM one I personally knew a few people who had their homes catch fire from the car catching fire while parked in their garage.

Yes, I’ve had it happen personally. It damaged a garage it was parked near — thankfully it was parked outside. It was a blackened ruin after, tires had gotten so hot they popped, etc.

What was the cause? That seems unlikely without external cause.

Commonly electrical systems and/or the battery itself in ICEs cause unattended fires.

Yes. Electrical fires are not unusual in ICE vehicles. It's extremely rare that the ICE part catches fire by itself.

this exactly, every recent fire / recall has been because of a short in some electrical system igniting something like the brake fluid, which also exists in EV

Please stop spamming the point that EVs also have brakes. The point was that all cars have the potential to spontaneously catch fire. Nobody has tried to make the point that ICEs are vulnerable where EVs are not, and your attempt to reframe the discussion as such is disingenuous.

no my point is the EVs have far more electrical components, so if anyone is being disingenuous and not pointing out the entire picture it's the people also posting links to articles of ICE cars also catching on fire making people think it was the gas that combusted when it was actually an electrical fault. We have to look at the actual cause. Also I'm not saying EVs aren't the future, but there's still more work to be done in making electrical systems in cars safer, whether it's ICE or EV.

Stationary car combusts, causing over $100M in damages:

https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...

“Brake fluid leaking from the master cylinder reservoir cap had been reported to enter the vehicles’ automatic braking system (ABS) wiring harness electrical connectors, causing short-circuits, melting, and fires,” the NTSB reported. By 2012, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration knew of at least 260 vehicles that experienced a non-crash related fire.

Last i checked EVs also use brake fluid and they could end up exploding the same way. Please post a link to an ICE vehicle spontaneously combusting while off due to spontaneous combustion of the gasoline contained in its tank.

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking for, or what your point is. Why that specific threshold? Lithium in EVs also doesn't catch fire by itself, it's usually a fault somewhere else in the system first. Most bizzarely, I think you're assuming that I'm taking a side here? Like....there are no sides to take, it's just an article meant as a reply for someone who asked if ICEs ever spontaneously combust.

EVs do have brake fluid, but the brakes are used significantly less in EVs than in ICE vehicles. (Most slowing is done via magnetic resistance from regenerative braking.) Presumable this means brakes in EVs are subject to a lower rate of degradation caused by use.

I had a vehicle catch fire whilst unattended about 20 years ago. The cause was either faulty wiring or a smoldering butt end left in the ashtray. The fire service and the insurer were both happy with this explanation.

Pretending that this single event, a brand new latest electrical model from Volkswagen spontaneously burning, its just a normal statistic fluke and not a Highly Unusual event, where there is nothing else going on...Reminds me of this:

https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

As it seems many did not like the comment... I will provide you with a quote from Taleb. Maybe that will help some understand what I was try to get into.

“If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull – you don’t even know how many sides the dice have!”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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