Thanks for the data Sam
Do you have any handle on the hybrid fire rate in your role in fire protection?
I'm not on that end of chain but you data intrigued me and I actually have public access to the incident reporting from Sweden 2018-2023.
Baseline, 2023 there were almost 300 thousand pure EV's in Sweden, and roughly double number of hybrids, on a total of 5 million cars.
I went through the incident data and then I weighed the incident rate over the years (taking in account the growing number of EV/hybrids in the period) for the number of cars for one year to get some better resolution.
Rough data as above:
EV 5,5 per 100,000 sold
ICE 82 per 100,000 sold
Hybrid 4,4 per 100,000 sold
So a lot lower rates then US generally, suprising by itself, maybe could connected to general much lower accident rates, better driving and infrastructure standards, very litte smoking?
I'm also guessing the very low hybrid numbers might be off, as probably a lot of gasoline fires in hybrids weren't reported as a fire in a hybrid car, rather just ignored and pooled in the big pool of car fires.
Also interesting, if looking at confirmed fires in the high voltage batteries for pure EVs, it looks like this:
Confirmed fire in HV batterry: 1,4 per 100,000 sold
Ah yes, but the rest of EV fires could still be HV fires, just unconfirmed, right? Well actually we also have confirmation where it was NOT a fire in the HV battery on pure electric cars, on hybrids the reporting quality is not as good.
NO fire in HV battery: 3,2 per 100,000 sold (I readily assumed if the fire was confimed to the engine bay and/or the whole car didn't burn down without firefighting, the main battery didn't burn - obviously).
So if we discard these fires as we're specifically interested in the risk of the high voltage batteries burning, and deduct the same from ICE for sportmansship, the above statistics become:
EV HV battery 2,3 per 100,000 sold
ICE 79 per 100,000 sold
Interestingly, I can only find 1 case where it's confirmed that the high voltage battery caused the fire, meaning if you have a fire extinguisher, there is still a good chance you could stop a fire in all the cases the fire started elsewhere.... need to get that extinquisher!
Or an ICE car is 34 times more likely to burn than the battery of an electric car. And then we haven't even taken into account differences in mileage, electric cars tend to do a bit more mileage in Sweden....
But the general ballpark number of 20-50 less likely for an EV fire as
@Duke reported seems to fit the Sweden case at least.
PS: some difficulty also in these statistics. Sometimes several cars burn, one is a hybrid, no know cause. Still this is reported as a hybrid fire. Even a few where the cause was confirmed as a gasoline car that started the fire, are still reported as EV fire when an EV is parked besides, in the above numbers ( 2 cases). Not always clear cut...
