The rate of electric car fires is much lower> teslamag.de

Photo: Stamford Fire Department (fire drill on Tesla Model 3)

“Fire in a charged electric car in front of the town hall; it caught fire completely when rescue workers arrived, with the risk of spreading to nearby cars”: this is how the Swedish Civil Protection Authority describes in a new report one of the cases in which electric cars caught fire in recent years. It sounds scary, but according to the agency’s statistics, such accidents happen much less often with electric cars than with conventional vehicles.

Electric Vehicle Fire Rate 0.004%

In all, there were 106 electric vehicle fires of various kinds in Sweden last year, the agency said last week. Only 23 of these are for cars, while the number of e-scooters was the highest at 38. Both plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars were taken into account. From 2018 to 2022, there were a total of 81 electric vehicle fires in Sweden.

The number of such cases has remained very similar over the years, the authority wrote, although the number of registered electric vehicles has doubled to 610,716. With 23 fires last year, that meant a rate of just 0.004 percent. That might be apt to put the fear of the dangers of the new type of driving into perspective: according to the authority, there were 3,319 cases out of nearly 4.3 million car burnouts in Sweden in 2022. This results in a much higher rate of 0.076 per cent.

In addition to the pure numbers, the Civil Protection Authority also published the causes of electric vehicle fires recorded in its study. It is noted that many of these were related to previous accidents or were caused by other vehicles. In 50 of the 81 cases, the exact cause remained unknown. According to the information, 20 electric cars caught fire while they were driving.

Tesla with long range statistics

Tesla, as the world’s most important electric car maker, has been trying to combat fire fears with statistics for years. According to the latest figures from its Safety Report, only one Tesla burns for every 200 million miles traveled from 2012 to 2021, while the average in the US was one vehicle fire every 20 million miles. However, as with the evaluation in Sweden, no distinction was made according to the ages of the cars, which could skew the statistics in favor of younger electric cars.