Earlier this week, five cars were destroyed at Sydney airport after the lithium-ion battery of a luxury electric car (EV) ignited, sparking flames that spread to four surrounding vehicles. However, in news reports, Adam Dewberry, Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) superintendent said electric cars batteries are still considered low fire risks and their batteries are held to “rigorous standards”.
However, some insurance industry stakeholders say the perception persists among the media and the public that EVs are a high fire risk.
“It seems like everyone is really worried about electric vehicle fires,” Hendrike Kühl (pictured above), policy director of the International Union of Marine Insurance (IUMI).
Hamburg-based Kühl was talking to Insurance Business in the wake of the recent Fremantle Highway fire off the Netherland’s coast. In that incident, a car carrier with nearly 4,000 vehicles on board caught fire, resulting in one dead crew member and possibly hundreds of thousands in damage costs. Media speculation initially pointed to an EV as the cause of the fire. More recent news reports say the cause of the fire is still unknown.
“The key point that we would say is that electric vehicle fires are not more dangerous than internal combustion engine vehicle fires,” said Kühl. “They are different because they need to be addressed differently.”
In response, this month IUMI published a best practice guide for transporting electric vehicles on ships with research about EV fires.
“There are growing concerns within the shipping community, including marine underwriters, about fires breaking out on car carriers and roros [ships designed to carry wheeled cargo] with the assertion that many of these fires are attributable to electric vehicles,” said Lars Lange, IUMI Secretary General in a media release announcing the guide.
Lang said, so far, the scientific research demonstrates that “fires in battery EVs are not more dangerous than fires in conventional vehicles, nor are they more frequent.”
He said current estimates show that “in general there are fewer fires from EVs compared with fires from conventional vehicles when driven over the same distance.”
Kühl agreed and said EVs – on ships or on land - are not more likely to catch fire than conventional cars.
In fact, she said that because of the way EVs are built their fire risks can be lower than combustion engine cars.
“The fire load that they [EVs] have, their energy source, is 20% and 80% is the rest of the car, the surroundings, the plastics,” she said. “When you’ve got internal combustion engine cars, there’s likely to be a pool fire because of the fuel that gets out of the tank.”
However, controlling these fires should be approached differently.
“If there is an EV on fire you need to monitor it longer because it might reignite at a later stage,” said Kühl. “There needs to be boundary cooling because it needs to burn down in a controlled manner.”
Kühl said when a fire breaks out on a car-carrying ship, it’s important for crew to “keep calm” and focus on putting out the fire.
“If there is a fire on board a car carrier, it is a problem and the focus needs to be on how to extinguish it and not so much on the source of the energy of the vehicles,” she said.
The IUMI’s media release detailed the best ways to fight fires on car-carriers, including drencher systems that it said “are effective for fire-fighting onboard roro and ropax vessels both for EV and ICEV fires.”
Kühl also discussed the growing risk of fires aboard container ships with IB. After years of lobbying, the IUMI and its supporters have managed to get this fire safety issue on to the agenda of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).
From March next year an IMO subcommittee will look at ways to reduce these risks – including fire risks connected to EVs.
In an IB interview earlier this year, Andrew Hall, CEO of the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA), said any fire risks around EVs usually concern their charging stations or areas where the batteries are actually stored. He said insurers have seen an uptick in claims related to these incidents.
Are you an insurance industry stakeholder involved with EVs? Please tell us how you see their fire risks below?
