EP59: EV Fires: a Storm in a Teacup

Motoring Historian Jon Summers examines claims that electric vehicles frequently catch fire, drawing on a Society of Automotive Engineers talk in Palo Alto by Dr. Abid Kemal of Exponent, a firm known for major failure investigations. He says vehicle fires have halved since 1980 and usually involve 10–20-year-old cars, while EVs appear 5–10 times less likely to burn than ICE vehicles, though their fires can occur later—on tow trucks or weeks in yards—because stranded battery energy remains after a crash. He explains thermal runaway: a weak cell heats from charge cycles, damages neighbors, melts plastics, boils electrolyte, generates oxygen, and can ignite in milliseconds, with severity influenced by state of charge. Examples include the 2021 Chevy Bolt battery recall and GM’s 80% charge limit, shipping policies under 50% charge, and the need for firefighter and tow-industry training.

Notes

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

Based around a presentation by Dr Abid Kemal
Exponent, Investigators of Disasters
Geoff Buys Cars, youtuber/conspiracy theories
Toyota Unitended Acceleration
San Bruno Gas Explosion
737s flying at the ground
Hubnut’s Prius Battery Repair
New car ferry fire
Hillman Hunters in Iran

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel

Good day, good morning, good afternoon. It is John Summers, the motoring historian Today, electric vehicle fires, or more specifically, is there anything in what these conspiracy theorist types say about, “Oh, EVs, they all catch fire. Oh.” ‘Cause, you know, instinctively, right, yeah, a computer gets hot, but on the face of it, normal cars have, [00:01:00] like, gasoline, and the gasoline runs in little rubber hoses right by the hot exhaust, right?

That’s what cars were like years ago. It just feels like instinctively a Chevy Chevelle is more likely to burst into flames rather than a Tesla. That- that’s just how I feel about it. But notwithstanding the fact that obviously, uh, the Tesla can get in the sea, and I love a V8 Chevelle, even if it is gonna catch on fire and burn it and myself to a crisp.

But that’s not why you’re tuned in, is it? You’re tuned in really for me to actually tell you whether or not this, this EV fire thing is, is actually, you know, real or, or just some BS. So, so let’s drill into that, and let’s drill into that via a presentation that I had. It’s another one of these Society of Automotive Engineer things that took place at Stanford.

This is a couple of ways. It’s not at Stanford, it’s in Palo Alto at, uh, the Nordic Innovation House or something. I think that’s the name of the venue. But anyway, the fellow who I saw present was called Dr. Adeed [00:02:00] Kamal, and, uh, he’s a professor of thermal science at a firm called Exponent. Now, it’s worth going to their website and looking at what they do because basically, you know, when that Boeing 747 or 737, when they kept on trying to, you know, fly the plane at the ground and crash, Exponent were the people who Boeing came to to be like, “Shit, the plane won’t work properly.

Help us.” You know, they are these kind of process men, material engineers, but ultra-clever Stanford ones.

Jeff Buys Cars, the YouTuber, he does all these things about EV La La Land and, and how terrible that they are. And so partly I went to this session so that I could reach out to him and say, “You know, these are the facts on EV fires.” It took the presenter there… I c- I can’t read his name properly. I wrote it down, like Adeed or Aveed or something like that.

I’m [00:03:00] sorry, sir. You were very well informed and a, and a terrific presenter, and I’m sorry I didn’t write your name down properly, but not to worry. Kamal was the, the second name. I’ll look him up on the website and connect him and all of that, so. Uh, the, the point is that he spent a long time not really answering what would’ve been, you know, Jeff Buys Cars conspiracy theorist YouTuber.

So, you know, so Jeff had piqued my interest, right? Jeff had made me think, “Oh, you know, maybe there is something in this, this EV fires thing. I’ll see what the Stanford perspective was.” And I reached out to Jeff to be like, “You know, I’m going to this thing. Are you interested in what I learn?” And I didn’t hear back from him.

Obviously, you know, he’s a YouTuber with a million subscribers, right? You know what I mean? He’s probably got better things to be doing than responding to me. I’m not bothered by that, right? But then just a couple of weeks later, he did another EV fires thing being like, “Oh, doom and gloom. These EV cars will be the death of us.”

And I’m like, “No, dude, I gave you the [00:04:00] chance to have the proper information, and you just rejected it.” So bit of a butthole. He, he, he… You know, anyway, whatever. So, so Jeff, thanks for piquing me, but, uh, dude, you’re a bit of an idiot because the raw stats, it, it took, um, this Kemel fellow a while to get there, but the raw stats, you can hear me leafing through my notes, can’t you, to the end of the presentation here.

But, but look, the number of vehicle fires since 1980 has decreased by half. Consistently, the study that he had showed, you know, from like insurance data, showed that vehicle fires almost always occur in vehicles that are 10 to 20 years old. So it’s that stravel where the fuel lines have got old and have started to crack.

It does get on the exhaust. Those cars do catch fire. They always did. It seems like EVs are five times or 10 times less likely to actually catch fire. But there are [00:05:00] circumstances where they do, and the way in which they do is different from the way that gas cars do. And what do I mean by that? I mean, you know, they’ll wreck.

You’ll get it on the back of the tow truck. The thing’ll catch fire afterwards. You’ll get it in the tow yard. It won’t have moved for six weeks. It’ll still catch fire. Believe it or not, there are even stories of that happening in, in an LA tow yard. So that is fuel to the fire, forgive the pun, of folk like Jeff who are like, “Well, I’m afraid.

I’ll take my, you know, Hillman Hunter with its cracked gas line spraying gas right onto the hot manifold. Um, you know, I’ll take my risk of that fire that I can understand. I’ll take that over, you know, the EV fire that’s all peculiar and sometimes it catches fire and sometimes it doesn’t, and there’s not any real flame, and when you put water on it, you know, it doesn’t put the flame out,” and all of that.

And that’s just a case, you know, the fire department needing to have the right fire to put it out. Or the other thing he said is [00:06:00] a lot of them are like rollover accidents, or if the car’s not rolled over the- but the battery’s caught fire, you can’t actually spray the fire retardant where the fire is ’cause the fire’s on the battery that’s in the floor of the car.

So what are we saying here? We’re saying that as society pivots to using more and more electric vehicles, the fire risk, whilst it’s still there, is going to be significantly reduced.

EV fires are different because with ICE cars, once you turn off the motor, there is no fire risk. The problem with EVs is there’s still energy trapped in the battery. That energy has to go somewhere. You know, it can’t just sit in the gas tank inert. It has to, to go somewhere, and that’s where there’s the fire risk, and that’s why the fires can happen, you know, when the accident’s over, when the car’s on the back of the [00:07:00] recovery truck or in the tow yard and, and even weeks later if the circumstances are right.

And what I’m gonna talk about in the rest of this presentation is the stuff that he talked about as being, you know, what goes wrong inside the battery for fires to happen. So stranded energy causes the fires. Getting it all out, that’s the Holy Grail because if you can suck it all out, there’s no chance of fire.

Coming back to the, uh, the top of my presentation, 15% of total fires are EVs, and by that he includes pure BEVs and hybrids as well.

I don’t know why I had that stat up there because I’m gonna jump around now and just tell you a little bit about Exponent. It’s a firm of Stanford grads that started about 30 years ago. Hundreds of PhDs, that was what I, I wrote down here. So… And projects they were involved in were the [00:08:00] Toyota unintended acceleration.

They also talked about, this is something if you’re in the Bay Area you’ll remember it, but there was a gas explosion in San Bruno a couple of years ago, and they looked at what it was that, uh, caused that, and the Boeing Max flying at the ground, that was them that did the analysis and the fix on, on that.

So that’s big cheese shit, isn’t it? Like, let’s, uh, call a sl- spade a spade. Now, the next thing he did was he did a sort of, you know, how did we get here? Always amuses me when scientists do the history piece, right? Because as scientists, they always wanna be able to say, you know, “First there was the Cugnot steam chariot, then there was, you know, Carl Benz and his wife who patent…”

You know, they, they wanna have this, you know, after one comes two, and after two comes three kind of story, and of course, history doesn’t work like that, and we historians, we just love to change our mind about whether three really came before two, or whether three’s really more than two, or whether three’s actually more like one.

We as, as [00:09:00] historians really love having those kind of debates and, and scientists tend not to, to wanna do that. And as an automobile historian, you exist in this place where so many of the people writing auto history are engineers who need this A, B, C, D, E kind of path. And, and as a trained historian, you’re actually unwilling to go down that kind of path.

And, and this is why auto history does not exist in history departments as such. We, we exist under technology history, and the more interesting bits of automotive history, I think, almost fit in philosophy of history. But look, I don’t wanna fall down… I have fallen down that rabbit hole, haven’t I? But the point is, right, that he positioned up, you know, the history of, you know, how did we get to where we were.

1859, the first lead-acid battery, Gaston Plante, apparently. 1888, I think that says, first production EV. This was a chap called Thomas [00:10:00] Parker in, in England. By… In 1900, 28% of vehicles were electric. Did we know that? Of course we car guys did. The Baker Electric and all of that and, uh, and you know, I certainly can never forget that, that French count whose name escapes me, but whose car held the land speed record for a bit, and he called it La Jamais Contente, The Never Happy, and he named it after his wife.

So that 28% statistic of, you know, all vehicles, that’s before the Model T, and it’s before Rockefeller and oil consolidation. So, you know, really between those, those two things. I don’t know, it’d be interesting to do the research into it properly, but my sense is between those two things, those are the things that really did for early electric cars and the need to…

1916, the Woods Dual Power Hybrid. Oh, I’ve missed the 1902 Studebaker Electric that had a 40-mile range and had regenerative brakes. He made the point that, you know, all [00:11:00] these batteries, all, all these EVs, it’s all about lithium ion flow, and it’s about making that flow rate work effectively, and it’s about making sure that even though you have many, many battery cells, you don’t have a failure rate.

So the example that he gave was that Tesla came to Exponent years ago saying the failure rate of their cells was about one in a million, and that was not a good enough rate for them to be able to start building cars in a meaningful way. So they came to Exponent to say, “How do we reduce the failure rate of these cells?”

One thing that I did think was quite interesting was he did refer to EVs as glorified golf carts whilst talking himself about driving a BMW 740.

So the cause of fires in EVs comes from a single cell warming up [00:12:00] And the way that these things are, are, are laid out is that there’s hundreds of these cells. Well, the way to perhaps think about it is something like a Prius, is under the back seat, there’s something that looks like a giant cooler. Almost it looks a bit like the power pack, almost looks a bit like if you’ve seen tool chests in, in the bed of a pickup truck, those tool chests that go right up against the cab, those kind of tool chests.

It looks like something like that. And inside it, when you, you open it up and, and take it apart, there’s all these sliced modules of cells. So you can sort of pull them out almost like toast out of a toaster. Then the individual cells are within each slice. So the reason that I know that is that, that HubNut did a video just recently where he tried to repair, successfully did repair the battery on a Toyota Prius.

I’ll include the [00:13:00] link for him doing that. But the way that he did that was went to a specialist in, you know, rubber gloves and all of that, and it is a bit frightening ’cause the voltages are so huge that it’d just fucking fry you and kill you if you made a mistake. So there is, you know, that element of it.

And, you know, when he was there with… Uh, he went to an EV dealer, uh, who he’s friends with, and he did the work, but he had, like, the guy that deals in these secondhand EVs, he had him work with him basically for exactly for that reason of, of safety, and the tools, like the screwdrivers have got big rubber handles on them, and they were wearing, like, Marigold, like, washing up gloves to be doing the work.

And what HubNut was saying is the business of taking the pack out or accessing the pack wasn’t too difficult, but the business of, uh, when you put the pack back together, making sure that it’s all, like, cross-referenced in the right way, he had the, you know, he had the specialist do that, and that to me looked like being a, a, a pretty [00:14:00] hideous job.

I guess the other part of it is that it’s, it’s not just enough to, like, pop another slice of toast in, so to speak. You have to balance the load across the cells. And part of the reason why I’m sharing this is I think you can tell how slim my understanding is of the topic, but I do feel like we’re in a place now where there’s beginning to be a raft of specialists who are able to replace and, and you as, uh, you know, and me as a car enthusiast is able to recognize, well, have we replaced just one slice of toast there, or have we replaced the entire power pack?

‘Cause if we’ve done the whole power pack, that’s gonna be better than just one slice of the toast and then having to balance the cells across the whole power pack with the new bank of cells inserted. But in essence, what happens and, and the language that this, um, physicist fellow, thermodynamicist specialist used…

‘Cause that’s basically what the bloke was. The bloke was just like a specialist in- [00:15:00] fire and explosions

He talked about EV fires as being runaway thermal events. At first, you’re a bit like, “Ooh, adult beverage.” It’s not really that because what we’re saying is that one cell, there’s a fault in the manufacturing somewhere, it’s just a bit weak for some reason. And after the cycles of charge and recharge, and charge and recharge, and, you know, the ions flowing backwards and forwards, and backwards and forwards, and backwards and forward, it gets hot and it starts to fail.

And as it starts to fail, not just that one gets hot, it heats up its neighbors as well. And that’s what happens, is that if it heats up its neighbors as well and the neighbors become damaged, eventually… And he did show, you know, he showed video of this happening that, you know, if you can, you know, if you, if you can spot it coming, like, and get coolant to it within, [00:16:00] like, half a second, you might stop it catching fire.

But fundamentally, when you, you can spot a little bit when it starts to get overheated, but the thermal runway path is quite short. So think of it, one bit catches fire. So if in a, in a situation where the, a car’s had a wreck and it’s caught fire The fire brigade come and they put out the fire, but the energy’s still sitting in the battery, and all the cells around the one that caught fire, they’re all still damaged.

Even more now if there’s been a fire, probably the whole battery’s damaged and there’s hundreds of cells which are damaged. So it’s very easy to imagine how fires could start again. And if you layer into the fact that, you know, when the Chevelle is on fire, you know, you spray fire at the top of it and the fire goes out.

You know, you don’t open the hood and the fire goes out. Whereas if it’s in a battery that’s underneath, unless the car’s turned over, how are you even [00:17:00] gonna spray the retardant onto it? Has the fire people even been trained to look out for this kind of thing? So it’s just everyone being trained and ready to fight this new kind of fire that is the risk the, the EVs represent.

And I do think it’s interesting that whether it’s the 10 to 20-year-old, you know, Chevelle or Hillman Hunter that catches fire, or whether it’s the 10 to 20-year-old Tesla that catches fire, it’s still technology which is fundamentally… It’s a lot of energy. It’s a lot of energy which is stored, and that storage, as the mechanism of storing it becomes used up, it is likely to catch fire.

However, the Tesla at 10 years old is still a whole lot less likely to catch fire than the Hillman Hunter was, or, you know, whatever other silly example it was I was just giving. So [00:18:00] it’s not that there’s nothing in what the conspiracy theorists are saying. These EVs do catch fire in really weird and spooky ways, but for Christ’s sake, it’s just not very many of them.

So Jeff, Jeff, you’re misinforming people with this, and when I offered to correct you, you just ignored me, so I’m a little disappointed by that. There’s a little bit of deliberate misinformation going on in the

anti-EV world. Who knew? What a surprise. Yeah, so now they stack cells, but what they used to do is roll them up. So it used to be they used to do them more flat and then they would roll it, it all up, but that’s an older design now and, and le- and less efficient. So the specifics of the thermal runaway event are this.

That first the heating starts because of the cycling backwards and forwards and because that cell is maybe just less efficient than its neighbors. And if the heating is allowed to continue [00:19:00] unchecked, the plastic around the cell softens and melts. That causes the electrolytes, which is the secret sauce of the battery that determines the electron flow and, you know, is why your Leaf battery claps out after a short amount of time, whereas Tesla batteries seem to last far longer.

The electrolyte fluid boils. The boiling of the electrolyte fluid creates O2, and that’s the first ingredients then for a full normal fire. Yeah, he showed us a video of like a rolled-up cell, so an older style cell. He showed it in s- slow motion and basically the whole thing like the process from like okay to full on fire was 200 milliseconds.

I mean, it, it, it kind of boggled the mind, uh, a little bit. So just like with a gas car, if there’s a tank full of gas, the fire [00:20:00] risk is much worse than if there’s not a tank full of gas. So if you’re on 80% state of charge, the fire risk there, you know, for an EV which is wrecked and been damaged, if the battery pack has been physically damaged, you know, ’cause if you hit it with a hammer or you smash it…

Like in fact, here’s a really interesting comparison that he gave. The plane companies have in place a whole bunch of, you know, tray tables upright kind of policies that are specifically around making sure that you… It’s the phone drop, right? You know, they’re always like, “You know, we’ll help you find the phone,” all of that.

It’s because hell or high water, they don’t want the phone to be trapped in the reclining chair. Because if the phone or an iPad or a computer’s trapped in one of the reclining seats, you recline it, you break the device, you damage the bat– you know, you bend the device, you damage the battery. That is why laptops and cell phones can burst [00:21:00] into flames for exactly the same reason.

The cell’s damaged, and it leads to this breakdown, and then, you know, the full-on release of energy in the form of, of fire. So with a full battery, the fire is gonna be briefer and more intense. You remember there was that incident where a car ferry had caught fire not so long ago. I’ll include a link to it.

I think there were multiple incidents, but what that has led to is the, the shipping companies are demanding that the cars ship with a less than 50% state of charge to avoid the fire risk. Because if they have a fuller battery, the fire… There’s just, you know, there’s more gas to burn, right? It’s, it’s that simple.

It’s in a different form, but nonetheless, the stored energy, there’s an issue with that, with how the energy is stored. If a cell fails, if there’s a fault in the manufacturing, you have this runaway thermal event. And, you [00:22:00] know, it always existed, right? The Hillman Hunters on their way being shipped to Iran.

Did you know there’s lots and lots of Hillman Hunters in Iran? There’s a whole sidebar about Hillman Hunters being made after marketing. But let’s imagine the first Hillman Hunters, they were actually sh- shipped as knock-down kits and built in Iran. But no, let’s imagine the cars being shipped on the ferry in the same way.

For every 100,000 Hillman Hunters, one might have a cracked fuel line, mightn’t it? And that car might leak gas, and when you fire it up to drive it off the ferry, it might catch fire, just exactly in the way that the, uh, that the EVs

have. So he wanted to talk about some particular issues. One of them was that in 2021, all Chevy Bolts had a, a recall, and they replaced all the batteries. So it’s like 140,000 batteries replaced. Apparently, it cost GM $2 billion to do it. But the thing that they did with the replacements was they limited charging to [00:23:00] 80%, because when they were carrying more than 80% charge, that was when there was a fire risk.

The other example he had, and you may remember this, was that Hyundai had fire issues in 2022, and were telling people to park their cars outside because of the fire risk. But these were ICE cars. It just goes to show that even, you know, there’s modern versions of Hillman Hunters being built with cracked fuel lines because there’s just so many components on modern cars.

So it only takes one little slip twixt cup and lip, and, and you can find yourself in this kind of situation.

There is a conclusion to be drawn from that, isn’t there? That are EV fires a real thing? Yes. Is it important that we train our firefighters and all of the infrastructure around accident prevention, you know, tow truck drivers, all of that? Is it important that everyone understands that these things catch fire in a different way from the way that gas cars [00:24:00] do?

Oh, yes, for sure. But the fundamentals of it, most cars don’t catch fire, some do if there’s a fault in manufacturing. We’re working really hard to try and limit the number of faults in manufacturing. We’re much better now than we were years ago. These EVs are orders of magnitude better than modern … Than, you know, even, you know, the, the gas-powered cars of the 2010s, let alone the gas-powered cars of the ’70s and the ’80s for fire risk.

It’s a bit of a storm in a teacup, that, isn’t it? Sure, we need to be afraid. Sure, the fires are different from other kinds of fires, but, but really this is a bit of a non-story, isn’t it? So there you go. That’s my two cents on EV fires. Thank you, Drive Thru.

This episode has been [00:25:00] brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our Motoring Podcast Network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, The Motoring Historian, Brake Fix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motorsports and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.patreon.com/gtmotorsports.

Please note that the content, opinions, and materials presented and expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has been published with their consent. If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.