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Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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