Electric cars still face a number of challenges. Weight is one thing, but the chance of sudden cremation is also a sore point. Various initiatives have now been set up to fire off electric vehicles more safely, but are they justified? A recent study showed that gasoline cars and diesel cars burn out more often than electric cars.
Watchman Data on car fires were collected in Norway (the electric car country par excellence), Australia and Sweden. The numbers are clear: electric cars catch fire much less often than gasoline-powered cars. The newspaper also cites data from Tesla, which indicates that its cars in the United States between 2012 and 2021 were 11 times less likely to have a car fire per 1.6 kilometers driven than the fleet as a whole. This fleet still largely consists of cars equipped with a gasoline engine.
Figures from studies
In Norway, fire accidents for gasoline or diesel vehicles are four to five times higher than for electric vehicles. A Swedish government organization found that there will be 3.8 car fires per 100,000 electric or hybrid cars in 2022. For cars with combustion engines, this figure is 68 per 100,000 cars. More than seventeen times.
We see the same trend in Australia. Electric car drivers have a 0.0012 per cent chance of seeing their car break down, while diesel and petrol car owners have a 0.1 per cent chance of a fire occurring. It should be noted that lit fires are also included in these figures. Well, though, we think the point is made.
So why do electric vehicles seem to burn so much more than gasoline cars? Colin Walker, of Energy and Climate Intelligence, thinks he has the answer. “All the data indicates that electric vehicles are much less likely to catch fire than their gasoline counterparts. There’s not much written about gasoline and diesel car fires. In other words: once again, nothing is as it seems on the Internet. On the other hand, Extinguishing a fire with an electric vehicle is much more difficult than extinguishing a gas-powered car, so evil tongues are not just myths.
