Fire statistics confirm EVs are safer

Even though burning electric cars often get a lot of attention in the media, the fire of an electric car is significantly less likely than that of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. This not-so-new finding was confirmed by a recent analysis of car fires in the US.

The findings went beyond simply comparing EVs and ICEs, however, as the study also found that hybrid vehicles have the most vehicle fires per 100K vehicle sales, followed by gas vehicles, with 3,500 vs 1,500 per 100k vehicles registered, respectively. In total numbers, however, gas vehicles stand far beyond the competition, although it bears mentioning that there are a lot more gas-powered cars on the road than hybrid ones with almost 200,000 fires going to ICE vehicles, 16,000 being attributed to hybrids and a grand total of 52 battery-electric vehicle fires.

autoinsuranceez.com, electrek.co

2 Comments

about „Fire statistics confirm EVs are safer“

JOHN T. SHEA

04.03.2022 um 22:59

The AutoInsuranceEEZ study first says ICE cars are SIXTY times more likely to burn than Evs. Later it quotes Tesla claiming ICE cars are 11 times more likely to burn. Finally it says ICE cars are twice as likely to burn as EVs. So which is it? And do one out of every 30 hybrids really burn? And why haven't we heard any of this before?

doseas

12.11.2023 um 20:21

Just saw your comment & I can address it (a little late). Both of the first two statements are true -- it just depends on how you measure it.AutoInsuranceEZ's numbers come from the NTSB, which reports fire incidents per number of cars sold. The figures are 1530 fires per 100K gas (ICE) cars vs 25 per 100K EVs, which works out to 60X as many.EV critics claim that most ICE fires occur in older cars (though the data doesn't support this claim), therefore Tesla attempts to counter this by measuring number of fires per million miles traveled. For Teslas, there was one fire for every 210 million miles traveled. Contrast this to 1 fire per 19 million miles for ICE cars (per National Fire Protection Association). That works out to ICE cars being 11X as likely to have a fire.In any case, EVs are much less fire-prone than ICE cars.