this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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ICE fires get the attention they deserve, the difference between an ICE fire and a BEV fire is in the scale and intensity and the fact that a lithium battery fire is impossible to stop with normal firefighter equipment.
BEV fires are orders of magnitude more dangerous and lethal.
Have you ever heard of anyone dying because their ICE car caught fire? This is an issue especially with Tesla, where the manual handles are hidden, preventing people from getting out quickly enough.
In case of a BEV fire, you only have seconds to exit the car, otherwise you are toast.
PS:
Just in case someone thinks I'm making anti BEV propaganda, I own a VW ID.4 which I am very happy with.
Yes.
That is not ICE cars but ALL cars. Obviously we already know people die in BEV fires.
If you die in an ICE car fire, the reason is probably that you crashed and are unconscious.
I should have been more specific, I meant die in an ICE car fire, as in CAUGHT by the fire unable to get out quickly enough despite being conscious.
Cars crumple when they crash and sometimes the crumpling pins people inside. That’s the whole reason we have the jaws of life. You don’t have to be unconscious to die in a car fire of any type, just unlucky.
Plenty of people have died in ICE fires.
This was half the problem with the Ford Pinto - the big name in burning people alive after minor collisions.
All Detroit cars at that time had the same gas tank design, it's just Ford was singled out by lawyers because they had more money.
It wasn't unique in small American cars in those couple decades (notable for rushed designs with an indifference to safety across the board) but the numbers were a bit worse. They stood out for Ford's extensive crash tests, and well-documented knowledge of the lethal design flaw, their early decision to pay out for deaths rather than make a quite inexpensive design change, and recall, and for the decade of expensive legal battles and PR campaigns where they lobbied against federal rear-end collision safety requirements which would have saved lives and identified the problem. They were happy to throw money at every aspect of the problem except for the part that kept burning their customers alive.
Also it wasn't just the gas tank design but flaws with the frame and (essentially cosmetic bumper) which jammed every door even in minor rear end collisions.
This is nonsense. Not getting out because of stupid electric door handles is a problem that's very specific to tesla, not something that is inherently systemic to the electric drive train. It's a manufacturer issue, not a propulsion issue. Dying in an ICE fire might result from a bunch of reasons, from unconsciousness to being stuck in a crumpled car to doors not opening simply because they're deformed.
Battery fires may emit more hazardous fumes but at the same time electric cars are much more unlikely to catch fire. I have never seen statistics that could even remotely suggest battery electric cars are more dangerous - it's usually quite the opposite.
No Tesla is the worst, but many other brands have copied Tesla in the design of fully electronic door handles.
So much so EU has decided to regulate it, and in China such door handles as the Tesla has are now illegal.
This is true
Care to share some examples?
AFAIK KIA and Xpeng, but you'll just have to look it up, I don't remember the brands.
I Just know that although Tesla is the worst for hiding the manual, they are not entirely alone in this.
In fact the car I bought is a VW ID.4, and one of the reasons is that the handle although electric can work as manual if the power is out.
This was specifically demonstrated in several car reviews of the car.
I tried to look them up but wasn't really successful... For kia, it seems to be the ev6 that might have them but I found owners that said there's still a physical connection to open the doors without 12v power. I also found some that said they had issues with a deadlock mechanism that was specifically built to disengage door handles as a security measure, which seems weird enough, but not really what we're talking about. Xpeng is hard because if you search for that one and electric door handles you end up getting a lot of articles that those types of door handles have been completely banned in China but not really anything specific to xpeng.
The point remains though - even if it's not exclusively a tesla problem, it's not connected to the propulsion system either. Electric cars don't lock you in burning cars because they're electric. On the opposite, the doors being hooked to the 12v system would make them just as available in combustion cars.
The point was that there are relatively more deaths due to battery fires than gas fires, despite battery fires are rare, and part of the reason is that we have heard about them have been these stupid door handles. And because you need to get out quicker.
Previous to electric cars, I had never heard about anyone being caught in a car and die because it caught on fire.
I strongly doubt that this is true. I have never seen any such numbers and EV fires are so rare that I consider any such statement without the numbers to back it up to be baseless fearmongering. That's not to say that I can't be convinced otherwise, but please, give me some sources to back that up.
Because EVs were new and had a novelty aspect to them (and a lobby against them) and because fires in ICEs are so common they're usually not reported.
You were right to doubt that it’s true, because it very much isn’t.
- https://seriousaccidents.com/blog/electric-car-accident-statistics-facts-are-accidents-more-likely-in-evs/
Maybe there aren't, but relative to we heard about this already early on with Tesla, when there were way way less than 1% of cars on the road that were electric, and ALL electric cars were new, I think there actually was a higher frequency of this problem with EV vars. BUT and that's a huge but, batteries have improved a lot since Tesla model S was introduced. So it may not be true anymore.
This has almost seemed like a cover up to me, we've heard about a multitude of problems with especially Tesla, but it has been very difficult to find for instance accident statistics.
A couple of years back however some were released that showed that Tesla indeed is the most accident prone brand on the road in USA.
Here in Denmark we have seen completely unheard of failure rates at mandatory safety checks for Tesla model 3 last year with 35% failure rate! That in itself is insane, but this year the 2021 model Y had a failure rate of 45% 😱 The average i 8% and that includes cars of all ages, where the 2021 model Y had this failure rate at their first check that is when the car is 4 years old.
It's insanely annoying IMO that these kinds of data aren't always publicly available.
PS I bough a VW ID.4 and for that model the failure rate at the first mandatory safety check is less than 2%!!
Not buying a Tesla is a no brainer IMO, even the cheapest Chinese cars have way better record at these safety checks. And it's a similar picture for Germany, Netherlands and Sweden, so it's not just Denmark.
Incidentally a Tesla model Y cost about twice as much as mine in insurance! Which is also somewhat telling, although the companies again don't reveal the stats behind that difference in price.
No. I stand by my point there... As far as I know, there has never been any data that pointed in the direction of EVs being anything but a much lower fire hazard than ICEs. If you had other numbers I'd gladly accept those but it seems you don't do maybe you should just consider that your impression is wrong.
Failure rate for mandatory tests refers to a lot of things, most of which aren't immediate hazards and all of which don't refer to the high voltage battery fire probabilities. It's a terrible sign that tesla fails these, but this has nothing to do with batteries spontaneously igniting.
Dude... It's just data that hasn't been prepared in a way you'd like it. That doesn't mean there's a conspiracy going on.
Oh for fucks sake, an ice car burning a couple of cables because of overheating in the engine compartment is not comparative to an EV battery catching fire.
You are comparing apples and oranges.
Luckily, https://lemmy.ca/comment/21667925 above already looked it up and lo and behold, you're much safer in an electric vehicle.
Did you read it?
Turns out, when a big tank of gasoline is set on fire, it’s deadly.
That has absolutely zero to do with the car which is not a car but a truck being ICE.
Read carefully.
That paragraph is about both trucks and cars. The average car has what, a 12 gallon tank of gasoline? That’s an incredible amount of flammable liquid.
What are you on about that electric cars have to be more dangerous for you? Are you heavily invested in an oil company or something?
I mean, being covered in gasoline that is on fire is generally not an easy thing to survive.
Yes and that happens all the time. /s
600 times a year. It happens so frequently, it's not news, like mass shootings.
Vehicle fires report | NFPA Research https://share.google/BoVl5eecmZQF51wcs
That people were covered in gasoline? I don't think the stat says that.
It literally does. Hundreds of times every year in the US alone. Car crashes can be pretty fucking horrible, man. Fuel spilling out of the tank is fairly common in bad accidents.
A car fire doesn't have to mean more than a couple of wires catching fire due to an overheated engine.
It's not like the infamous beancounter case where GM failed to recall cars where the gas tank had a high risk of catching fire.
Because it was cheaper to pay damages than to repair the car. Car fires are common, but deadly car fires are not.
Just because people die in a car that caught fire, doesn't mean they died BECAUSE the car caught fire.
That's the kind of fire we are talking about when an EV catches fire.
You’ve made it pretty clear that actual statistics aren’t enough for you to change your mind, so I don’t think there’s any point in continuing this conversation.
Those statistics are not specific on the things we are debating.
I'm not claiming people aren't dying in car fires in ICE cars, what I'm claiming is that it is more common to die BECAUSE of a car fire in an EV. (when weighing that EV cars are still a minority).
And we don't have that stat.
And trucks are NOT cars. Trucks are different because they have potential flammable cargo.
- You, yesterday.
You didn’t even bother to read my reply correcting your misinterpretation of that paragraph about all highway vehicles, so again, there’s no point in continuing. You are not arguing in good faith.
BECAUSE, not just die in a car that caught fire, but actually BECAUSE of the fire. That's what we have seen documented many times with regard to BEV. Always explained as being because the battery fires are explosive, so you only have seconds to get out.
An ICE car does not catch fire in that way, and even if they are much more common, the vast majority are relatively harmless.
Seems to me the people responding to me negatively are the ones that are not in good faith, pointing to statistics that don't show what they claim.
That 1 in 80 fires are BEV doesn't say much if BEV is only 1% of cars, and it doesn't say much if the lethality in a BEV is 10 times as high. The stats need to show a usable picture, not just snippets.
Do y'all keep fire extinguishers in y'all's cars in DE?
I'm from Denmark but no, it's pretty rare, but in this case it meant it was a relatively minor fix to get the car going again.
I haven't seen the evidence to suggest that BEV fires are orders of magnitude more dangerous, as you claim. I have seen the evidence to suggest that they are orders of magnitude less likely.
Yes they burn hotter and are harder to extinguish, but I understand that generally they spread slower and with more warning, allowing greater time for escape (unless you are stuck in a Tesla and haven't read the manual cover to cover).
ICE cars are more likely to explode, BEV cars take longer (in general) to become fully engulfed.
If there is a credible evidence source / study looking at fatalities per fire (which corrects for the stupid door handles) then I'd be very interested to read it.