Plug-in electric vehicle fire

This article may need to be rewritten to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards. You can help. The talk page may contain suggestions. (July 2019)

Numerous plug-in electric vehicle (EV) fire incidents have taken place since the introduction of mass-production plug-in electric vehicles.^[1] In some cases, an EV's battery (at least arguably) caused a fire. In other cases, an EV's battery did not cause a fire, but it added "fuel" to a fire. Technically: it is the "thermal propagation" properties of the battery pack which may, or may not, prevent it from getting involved in an automotive fire – even if one or more of the cells in the battery pack has overheated dangerously, the upholstery has already caught on fire, or the car's wiring harness is severely damaged.

According to one research group:

The causes of fires in EVs can be mainly divided into the following categories: spontaneous combustion during driving, fire during charging, fire during vehicle parking, fire after collision (traffic accident and chassis collision), water immersion of battery packs, external fire ignition, human factors, aging and short-circuit of components, and charging equipment failure. For the first 3 categories, they can be classified as the state of the vehicle, rather than the apparent factors of the EV fires, because in these states, the status and integrity of the battery have not been changed, and the accident that occurred at these states can be considered to be caused by the battery pack's malfunction.

Based on the EV fire accidents collected from the internet in 2021... battery malfunction accounts for 50%, chassis collision accounts for 13%, water immersion, traffic accident, and external fire accounts for 7% separately. Charger or wire failure accounts for 5%, electrical failure accounts for 4%, customer retrofit accounts for 2%, and others account for 5%.^[2]