this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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Firemen know that, they are trained to use foam and dust for electrical fires even if no lithium batteries are present.
Also it's hard (or close to impossible maybe?) to extinguish a burning car with water if the petrol or diesel tank catches fire. There isn't much difference in that regard to EVs (maybe in terms of how long after the apparent flames a battery might rekindle the flames).
It took the firemen 45 minutes to put out my car after the full fuel tank ruptured.
An EV catching fire isn't an 'electrical fire', it's a metal fire. That's why it takes so long to put out and you just kind of try to suffocate it and let it die out.
(I didn't know/heard about it on safety meetings that the firefighters differentiate between them, but that makes sense. "Electrical fire" in the firefighter sense, which includes gasoline burning on some wires that carry current.)
Big battery safety is a very new thing tho, a bit like ice vehicles stopped being rolling fireballs after a few decades, I'm sure batteries will integrate fire safety features (ducts, chemicals, switches, or just different types of materials used to store charge).