Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

Does this article extinguish anything?

What does "per 100,000 sold" mean? Is that simply per 100,000 cars? This metric makes no sense unless you age-adjust vehicles; most EVs are And dismissing firefighters lack of knowledge and training and equipment to put out these fires is strange. It will be overcome, but it's a legitimate issue.

When statistics are presented on fires per car sold, does it account for car age?

I'd assume that average ICE car catching on fire is older that average EV just by EV not existing when ICE was made

My impression is that the concern with EV and battery fires is that they can occur in the home or while otherwise stationary, unexpectedly causing much more catastrophic damage. ICE fires, in contrast, seem to be mostly associated with collisions, or somewhat less so with driving; it seems uncommon for ICEs to suddenly catch fire in an enclosed building.

e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649

I'm not an expert on this though, and these are just my general impressions, which is maybe the point of the article. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to address the nature of EV fires in a scientific, public-health kind of way.

I think the thing most people are concerned about is a question like "how likely is my car to cause my house to burn down just sitting in the garage, while I'm sleeping?" Maybe the answer to that is the same with ICEs and EVs but that's the question that needs to be addressed.

You'll never catch me with a lithium ion battery larger than ~150wH inside my home. I don't care how aggressively the statistics are massaged.

I've personally experienced laptop and cellphone batteries catching on fire and can see how something with 100x+ the capacity could cause some serious fucking trouble.

Anyone who has one of those 1kWh+ emergency power backup things sitting inside their house right now really needs to think twice about contingencies. Extend this thinking to an EV with 2 orders of magnitude more storage.

Can a gasoline car set itself on fire inside your garage entirely unattended? Sure. But I think it is much less likely to occur and the failure modes are more acceptable to me - I.e. I can inspect and anticipate if my gasoline car might be unsafe with more clues than around an EV car. You can smell gasoline. You can't smell a manufacturing defect in a battery pack.

Sure, but that seems like mostly a question of getting them to a place where that can safely happen. Once it is isolated, let it burn out if it reignites.

Putting it out the first time so that it can be safely moved is important.