With speculation on a rise in electric batteries catching fire, many are concerned about the risk for electric battery vehicles. EV FireSafe answers the question of how many EVs have actually caught fire in Australia. EV FireSafe aims to identify risks to emergency responders when attending an electric vehicle lithium traction battery fire. Vision courtesy: evfiresafe.com
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00:00 Hi there, Emma from EV Firesafe. In this really quick video I want to answer the
00:05 big question that's been doing the rounds this week on social media. How
00:09 many electric vehicle battery fires have there been here in Australia? Now when I
00:13 talk about this I'm talking about BEV and FEV battery electric vehicle and
00:16 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. So they require external charging and they have
00:21 a far larger battery than the hybrid vehicles. So electric vehicles catch fire
00:27 all the time and this is actually my very first electric vehicle which I
00:30 unfortunately parked in the wrong spot while jumping on a truck to go fight a
00:34 big bushfire but the battery wasn't involved in that fire. And it's a really
00:38 important point we have EV fires and we have EV battery fires and actually when
00:44 an electric vehicles on fire only about 40% of the time does the battery
00:49 actually become involved. So this is a really important bit of information for
00:53 firefighters like myself because if it's just combustibles burning just the
00:57 vehicle but not the battery we put water on it the same way we we would with a
01:01 petrol or diesel vehicle. But if the battery becomes involved then it's a
01:06 little bit more of a it's a bit of a bigger job because we have a process
01:11 called thermal runaway that makes the incident longer it will require more
01:15 people typically require more water. There's more information about thermal
01:19 runaway on our website I won't go into that here. But back to the big question
01:23 how many electric vehicle battery fires have we had here in Australia while
01:26 they've been on the road? So we've actually only had six. So we've had six
01:30 lithium-ion battery fires in electric cars that require charging and there are
01:35 about a hundred and twenty thousand of these on the road currently here in
01:38 Australia. So why did these vehicles catch fire? In all cases it's due to
01:43 damage to the battery pack from arson there have been three that have been in
01:49 private home garages and the garage has burnt down. We've had one due to
01:52 collision and one due to road debris that actually the car ran over and it
01:57 went up into the battery pack which is the one that happened near Goulburn
02:00 earlier this week. So in none of these cases were the vehicles on charge which
02:05 is a good thing for us to know. The other good thing for us to know is if you're
02:10 an emergency responder or an electric vehicle driver and your electric vehicle
02:14 is involved in a collision or it's hit by road debris underneath the vehicle
02:18 where the battery pack sits, it's submerged in water particularly flood
02:23 water that's salty for an extended period. If it's recalled by the
02:27 manufacturer due to battery fault or if it has suffered some kind of fire then
02:32 you do need to contact your dealer and get it checked out. If this has been
02:37 really useful information for you come and train with us. Go to EVfiresafe.business
02:41 if you're an emergency responder or if you work around electric vehicles.
02:45 We have some great training programs and online sessions that are going to help
02:49 keep you safer.