It's a situation no electric vehicle owner wants to think about: A car catches fire for inexplicable reasons and causes significant collateral damage before it's finally extinguished. It's also a headline no car company that makes EVs wants to deal with. Thankfully, those fires are statistically rare. But after one conflagration involving an electric Kia in a parking garage in Korea, the Hyundai Motor Group said it's taking proactive steps to alleviate the public's fire fears and alert owners to potential problems before they happen.
The world's third-largest automaker and burgeoning EV titan has announced several policy changes, new practices and forthcoming software updates since a Kia EV6 caught fire earlier this month. Fortunately for all involved, that blaze was extinguished quickly. But it came on the heels of a far more devastating fire involving a Mercedes-Benz EQE in an Incheon garage that sent two dozen people to the hospital.
How common are those fires? I stopped a lady driving g a smoking Chevrolet Volt yesterday, it was coming out the wheel well and definitely smelled of electronic.
Electric vehicles are less likely to catch fire than combustion engine vehicles, by far. EV fires are harder to extinguish however.