Oh dear, these electric cars which feature electric/electrinic door handles/locks entraping the occupants inside to be burnt alive because they could not open the doors and likewise rescuers cannot open them from outside either. Now many EV'ers have made claims about people being burnt alive following being trapped inside their cars after a crash.

This video now throws fresh light on those claims and when you see the wreckage of those peoples cars you will see that the claims are totally bogus, so it is not a case of ICE drivers throwing out misinformation, but EV owners attempting to deflect the truth and are actually giving out misinformation themselves. Also there is more information about the burning Nissan Leaf, which highlights even bigger issues with EV's burning, that is wahy they cannot use water on them until the batteries have burnt themselves out, because the toxic is an even bigger problem once it enters into drainage and water system.

Edited 6 October, 20256 Oct by Graham Butcher

Here is another video about the real hazards of electric cars, even if the battery does enter into thermal runaway, please don't just refuse to watch and listen to the video, it could actually help save your life one day.

4 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

This video now throws fresh light on those claims and when you see the wreckage of those peoples cars you will see that the claims are totally bogus, so it is not a case of ICE drivers throwing out misinformation, but EV owners attempting to deflect the truth and are actually giving out misinformation themselves.

Can you enlighten us what you think each each side are actually saying?

Yet more recent fires in underground carparks, both residential and office and all started by EV's and shows the dangers and also actually highlights how a buildings design can help contain fires.

1 hour ago, Graham Butcher said:

Yet more recent fires in underground carparks, both residential and office and all started by EV's and shows the dangers and also actually highlights how a buildings design can help contain fires.

I was amazed that at Luton airport where my Scenic sits quietly. Was expecting 50 or 100% loading on parking an EV in their car park, nothing.

Every day I expect a call that my car has burnt down the car park along with a thousand other cars.

Same for my house with its dozen lithium battery storage devices littered around the house, any one which could burst into flames at any moment. Even when I let all that free solar energy from my solar arrays keep being plugged in they seem to just shut the incoming power off and sit there 100 % so despite good overcharge and more input than output and 100% charged those Chinese BMSs keep doing a great job, not what the right wing press tells us is happening all the time !

Edited 12 October, 202512 Oct by lol-lol

55 minutes ago, lol-lol said:

I was amazed that at Luton airport where my Scenic sits quietly. Was expecting 50 or 100% loading on parking an EV in their car park, nothing.

Every day I expect a call that my car has burnt down the car park along with a thousand other cars.

Same for my house with its dozen lithium battery storage devices littered around the house, any one which could burst into flames at any moment. Even when I let all that free solar energy from my solar arrays keep being plugged in they seem to just shut the incoming power off and sit there 100 % so despite good overcharge and more input than output and 100% charged those Chinese BMSs keep doing a great job, not what the right wing press tells ne is happening all the time !

Most EV fires I've seen have been tesla's

Both my Enyaq or MG5 aint suddenly burst in to flames on my drive way or while I've been driving them

Nobody is saying or claiming that these things regularly burst into an uncontrollable blaze, but they do indeed catch fire occasionally, that is undeniable unless you ignore the facts. Yes, ICE cars can and do catch fire and most car fires do not involve in the batteries, or their equivalent on an ICE car, the fuel tank, which is precisely what the battery is, a fuel tank.

Both diesel and petrol require some external ignition source to catch fire, battery is made up of thousands of individual cells, connected to together in a combination of series and parallel circuits to achieve both the voltage and the current rating, all along with loads of battery management modules, all of which have loads of electronic parts in them and are always directly to the cells monitoring them and regulating them. It only requires a single cell to develop a problem and start off gassing, getting hotter etc and then you have a problem. The equipment we all have indoors, generally does not consist of more than 1 or 2 cells and are also of limited capacity, so they cannot really be compared to a EV battery pack in a car, they are far less likely to catch fire.

Now I fully expect that many of the so called EV fires do not involve the batteries but sort of normal vehicle electrical malfunction or something the owner/driver has done, like a discarded cigarette that wasn't fully snuffed out, or a phone charger lead that has gone faulty and has been left plugged in. This actually happened to me in my diesel Superb, my son had been charging his iPhone and when he got out disconnected it from the phone, but left it plugged into the car. Luckily I happened to look back at the car, as you do at times, and saw the car filling up with smoke and went to investigate and saw the phone lead glowing red hot, so I snatched it out from the cars USB socket and the only damage done was it had scorched the leather on the passenger seat between the seat and the centre consol.

A close shave indeed, but it does show just how easy it is to start a fire inside a car, and he and SWMBO still to this day are guilty of the same thing at home, leaving the charging lead, laying around, still plugged into the wall charger, which itself is still active, that's all it takes. I have to go round and unplug the wall chargers just in case.

Edited 12 October, 202512 Oct by Graham Butcher

2 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

Nobody is saying or claiming that these things regularly burst into an uncontrollable blaze, but they do indeed catch fire occasionally, that is undeniable unless you ignore the facts. Yes, ICE cars can and do catch fire and most car fires do not involve in the batteries, or their equivalent on an ICE car, the fuel tank, which is precisely what the battery is, a fuel tank.

Both diesel and petrol require some external ignition source to catch fire, battery is made up of thousands of individual cells, connected to together in a combination of series and parallel circuits to achieve both the voltage and the current rating, all along with loads of battery management modules, all of which have loads of electronic parts in them and are always directly to the cells monitoring them and regulating them. It only requires a single cell to develop a problem and start off gassing, getting hotter etc and then you have a problem. The equipment we all have indoors, generally does not consist of more than 1 or 2 cells and are also of limited capacity, so they cannot really be compared to a EV battery pack in a car, they are far less likely to catch fire.

Now I fully expect that many of the so called EV fires do not involve the batteries but sort of normal vehicle electrical malfunction or something the owner/driver has done, like a discarded cigarette that wasn't fully snuffed out, or a phone charger lead that has gone faulty and has been left plugged in. This actually happened to me in my diesel Superb, my son had been charging his iPhone and when he got out disconnected it from the phone, but left it plugged into the car. Luckily I happened to look back at the car, as you do at times, and saw the car filling up with smoke and went to investigate and saw the phone lead glowing red hot, so I snatched it out from the cars USB socket and the only damage done was it had scorched the leather on the passenger seat between the seat and the centre consol.

A close shave indeed, but it does show just how easy it is to start a fire inside a car, and he and SWMBO still to this day are guilty of the same thing at home, leaving the charging lead, laying around, still plugged into the wall charger, which itself is still active, that's all it takes. I have to go round and unplug the wall chargers just in case.

Renault have moved on from this. Batteries are in isolated packs with only a few hundred in each pack and there is a foam flooding via a fireman port to flood each chamber. There is a operational document for fire departments to perform this pack flooding.

I think am auto onboard system should be the next step.

Edited 12 October, 202512 Oct by lol-lol

To be fair, I don't think there any batteries that have the thousands all in the same pack, but those smaller packs are all in the same overall metal container and even with the fireman port, it does assume that they can actually arrive at the scene before the battery gets to the thermal runaway position, which is just minutes or even seconds as can be seen in many of the online security cameras that capture many of them.

The modules are still packed extremely close to each other as can be seen in this photo, so it doesn't take much to set the other modules off.

EV's have been made with cell to module, module to pack method.

There's innovations to switch to cell direct to pack. Example is BYD blade battery directly into a pack.

There's also a design (name escapes me) that is doing cell to module and then use structure of the vehicle as pack boundary and support.

14 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

Both diesel and petrol require some external ignition source to catch fire

True for the fuel by itself.

But when the fuel is pumped through a vehicle with elements and sometimes made to burn even hotter for filter cleaning cycles. I'm not sure that is true when consider the powertrain as a emergent system.

14 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

The equipment we all have indoors, generally does not consist of more than 1 or 2 cells and are also of limited capacity, so they cannot really be compared to a EV battery pack in a car, they are far less likely to catch fire.

Why is that?

A cell is a cell. All battery cells catch fire if not treated properly.

There's some truth in that not all EV's monitor state of every single cell. Leaf only have 3 temperature sensor, for example.

The fire risk of the battery is reliant on competency of the BMS and its sensing capability. It's true for indoor equipment and it stays true when scaled up to the biggest battery (grid scale).

On 13/10/2025 at 08:48, wyx087 said:

Why is that?

A cell is a cell. All battery cells catch fire if not treated properly.

There's some truth in that not all EV's monitor state of every single cell. Leaf only have 3 temperature sensor, for example.

The fire risk of the battery is reliant on competency of the BMS and its sensing capability. It's true for indoor equipment and it stays true when scaled up to the biggest battery (grid scale).

Yes, a cell can catch fire in something like LED torch for example, I have one that uses a single 18650 cell @ 3.7V all housed in a rugged aluminum case with zero chance of that affecting other cells nearby. Compare the rik and impact of 1 cell in a torch with that of say Tesla cars that also use 18650 cells, in the following vehicles and quantities:

Tesla Roadster uses 6,851 cells to make up its power battery

Tesla Model S uses 7,104 cells to make its power battery.

Tesla Model X uses 7,256 cells to make its power battery.

So there is world of difference of between 1 isolated cell entering thermal runaway and multiple, thousands of cells entering thermal runaway. Imagine 1 match head being struck and then 7,256 heads being struck together, I don't know about you, but I'd be prepared to snuff out a single match with my bare hand, but 7,256, er no way...

Edited 16 October, 202516 Oct by Graham Butcher

Hmm, I had not known about some of these EV's risky cars and possible fires with some of these cars, some from so called prestige cars, many of these seem to have been suppressed and limited press coverage until being forced into recalls and very expensive fixes.

2 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

Yes, a cell can catch fire in something like LED torch for example, I have one that uses a single 18650 cell @ 3.7V all housed in a rugged aluminum case with zero chance of that affecting other cells nearby. Compare the rik and impact of 1 cell in a torch with that of say Tesla cars that also use 18650 cells, in the following vehicles and quantities:

Tesla Roadster uses 6,851 cells to make up its power battery

Tesla Model S uses 7,104 cells to make its power battery.

Tesla Model X uses 7,256 cells to make its power battery.

So there is world of difference of between 1 isolated cell entering thermal runaway and multiple, thousands of cells entering thermal runaway. Imagine 1 match head being struck and then 7,256 heads being struck together, I don't know about you, but I'd be prepared to snuff out a single match with my bare hand, but 7,256, er no way...

So your assumption is that cells will catch fire, only question is what happens afterwards.

Whereas everything single statistical analysis, including a video you've shared, shows well managed battery cells self igniting are vanishingly rare.

Yet another electric car (prototype) left sitting in a showroom for a year, not being charged either so the battery was highly likely with a really low SOC. This car was in the HQ of Faraday Future Loas Angeles when it suddenly blew up overnight.

As expected, the Faraday Future's statement played down the event and tried to whitewash the battery playing any part of the problem, instead suggesting that buildings electrics had caused to explosion, which has rendered the building unsafe as a outside wall has been fractured.

Strange how the video just shows the car itself being blacked and damaged by the fire, the rest of the building and indeed the showroom itself seem to be undamaged, but the fire brigades own hazmat teams reported all the telltale signs of a high-voltage battery Li-ion battery with all of the associated deadly gas levels.

The company is a Chinese company who have their HQ based there and are producing electric cars and selling them in both China and USA.

Faraday Future - Wikipedia

Yet another incident of a PHEV exploding and making people homeless.

5 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

Yet another incident of a PHEV exploding and making people homeless.

Hang on, I thought you said li-on battery fires are fierce flames. They don't really explode.

Someone else on SpeakEV actually thinks for themselves, I'll just c+p here:

"

Interesting somehow an explosive atmosphere was created inside the garage. There are 3 possible atmospheres. Hydrogen / oxygen from 12v battery charging. Petrol vapour + atmospheric oxygen and assuming the house uses gas a natural gas leak from a domestic supply and atmospheric oxygen.

Hydrogen / oxygen from 12v, difficult to get enough volume for a big bang

petrol / air needs a lot of energy to kick it off.

My money would be on the gas leak explosion, there are about 30 per year in the UK alone, if that's the case the car is an innocent bystander.

"

https://www.speakev.com/threads/peugeot-phev-explodes-with-a-shockwave.193765/?post_id=3836985#post-3836985

Funny how that particular youtube channel chooses to point the blame at li-on batteries despite absolutely no evidence. Hum...... makes one wonder their biases....

What about this one then with an electric bus bursting into fire after a crash with a car, the batteries were exploding like fireworks going off and one passenger on the bus died in the fire.

Edited 23 October, 202523 Oct by Graham Butcher

2 minutes ago, Graham Butcher said:

What about this one

What exactly are you seeking?

There is no video of the fire. Burning is seen from the thumbnail but no giant explosion in such a distructive way as the previous video.

How sure are you that the previous video was Li-on related?

On 23/10/2025 at 09:50, wyx087 said:

What exactly are you seeking?

There is no video of the fire. Burning is seen from the thumbnail but no giant explosion in such a distructive way as the previous video.

How sure are you that the previous video was Li-on related?

You like to see the gory details, try this one for size then, so scary, no warning at all.

11 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

You like to see the gory details, try this one for size then, so scary, no warning at all.

Why haven't you bought the merch yet? It perfectly describes you.

But yes, some does look scary. Including cars that would burn down airport car parks.

This car was already sitting in a water filled container for safety after it was rear ended in an accident, and security cameras caught the car going into thermal runaway, fire dept were called who filled the tank up, so the car was completely submerged and still the runway continued and the water literally boiled for 13 hours and can be seen in this video. There is also footage of another car on fire with a blanket over it, which I'm given to understand was incorrectly used as the blanket traps the highly toxic gases and the fire just burns slower, lift the blanket because thermal camera show the temperature is dropping, increased oxygen is introduced and those gases go mental as they burst into flame.

The proper use of the fire blankets when the car on fire is an EV, is to deploy the blankets on adjacent cars etc to try and prevent the fire spreading to them.

It seems the official report into the cause of the fire onboard the Fremantle Highway has been kept secret until Dagblad van het Noorden invoked an international treaty that requires it to be made public.

Just as expected, it was indeed a battery electric BMW car that started the fire and because there is no way of currently putting such a fire out, even though the ship was flooded with masses of CO2, which with an ICE car, would have extinguished the fire, fire as we know demands oxygen to burn, and with CO2 being heavier than air would have prevented oxygen reaching the fire. Li-ion batteries generate masses of oxygen, so any defeated the CO2 fire suppression system.

Now I wonder just why was the report kept secret?? Add to this, just how many other reports of similar events have been kept secret??

'Secret' investigation with major consequences: fire in electric BMW cause of Fremantle Highway disaster - Dagblad van het Noorden

Edited 20 November, 202520 Nov by Graham Butcher

This bit I find critical going forward, from auto translator:

"

‘Transport EVs must be safer, existing ships not suitable’

After their findings with the fire on the Fremantle Highway, the Panamanian investigators recommend measures that should make transport of EVs on all ships – including ferries and passenger ships – safer. Because it has become clear to the researchers that ships that only have a fire extinguishing system for transporting cars with an internal combustion engine, now also transport electric vehicles ‘without any upgrade of their loading floors and firefighting’.

‘Panama’ calls the risk of fire in electric car ‘minimum, but the consequences ‘catastrophic’. For example, tailgates on existing ships have not been built for transporting electric cars. This can damage the batteries that are in the soil of EVs, which can cause a fire.

"

I wonder how Norway ferry are dealing with this change of risk, they even many electric ferries.

18 hours ago, wyx087 said:

This bit I find critical going forward, from auto translator:

"

‘Transport EVs must be safer, existing ships not suitable’

After their findings with the fire on the Fremantle Highway, the Panamanian investigators recommend measures that should make transport of EVs on all ships – including ferries and passenger ships – safer. Because it has become clear to the researchers that ships that only have a fire extinguishing system for transporting cars with an internal combustion engine, now also transport electric vehicles ‘without any upgrade of their loading floors and firefighting’.

‘Panama’ calls the risk of fire in electric car ‘minimum, but the consequences ‘catastrophic’. For example, tailgates on existing ships have not been built for transporting electric cars. This can damage the batteries that are in the soil of EVs, which can cause a fire.

"

I wonder how Norway ferry are dealing with this change of risk, they even many electric ferries.

Totally agree, but here the problem is, just what is the right approach to fire fighting with these cars that these ships could be equipped with, given that they still continue to burn even when totally submersed or in CO2 saturated atmosphere given CO2 sinks to the lowest to point and builds up from there to become the equivalent of dumping the cars in water that totally submerges them thus both cutting off a free supply of oxygen which is an absolute must to support fire, so removing the oxygen normally stops a fire dead in its tracks, but not so with the current and most prevalent range of batteries.

If there was a 100% foolproof method of doing so, then that has not been shared with the rest of the world and given that there has been much research worldwide on this subject for over a decade now, must be a real major concern for the safety for the ships and everyone else across the world.

Nobody is currently denying that such fires are not yet common place happenings, but they are now beginning to become more common and will continue as the numbers of electric vehicles grow.

What is the current problem is that when one of these rare events happen, the consequences are so bad that many people do tend to suffer greatly from the results of them.

Edited 21 November, 202521 Nov by Graham Butcher

It is a case of risk management. Lower chance but extreme damage. I'm sure shipping companies are well aware of this. Probably charge accordingly.

Holistically, it is also a question of which is less worse? Continue to ship and sell millions of ICE cars burning fossil fuel for 10+ more years, or the tiniest of chance EV shipping burning up until mitigations are put into place?

There is no panacea. No magic cure. EV fires seem devastating but they are the best solution we currently have to stop mass burning stuff for trivial daily errands.