Are Electric Vehicles as ‘Dangerous’ as some people say?
Actually, Electric vehicles are VERY safe, although the media makes much of the story when things go wrong. In fact, you’ll find that there are many posts on the internet about EV failures which actually are proven to be untrue. These writers must be interested ONLY in ‘fishing’ with ‘click-bait’ and trading on FUD – ‘Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt’. Do not trust all you read – question it.
Our job is to help straighten this out…. Oh! and by the way ….… we are not sponsored by anyone. We give you facts as best we can be sure of them.
EV’s get a lot of Bad Press… it is said THAT Electric Cars are ‘Dangerous’….
….and so are Electric Bikes and Scooters
[Spoiler Fact: An ICE vehicle (Gasoline car) is 60x more likely to catch fire than an EV.] (2023 Study Data – US National Transportation Safety Board & the Bureau of Transportation Statistics)
But if they are THAT ‘safe’, what’s all the fuss about? …and why do ‘they’ catch fire so easily?….. or do they?
But before we answer THAT question, we have one more thing to check – what’s ‘THEY’? No-one says what actually caught on fire.
Question – Was a reported EV fire a Traction Battery fire (the big power battery itself), or just an EV car that caught fire and did not burn the battery at all? The difference is huge, of course. Let’s check the evidence, in this case from the Netherlands.
Of 118 Electric Vehicle fires in the Netherlands, less than half – just 45 vehicles – involved the hi-voltage Lithium-ion Traction Battery, meaning that 72 were just ‘car fires’. Statistics from NIPV (Netherlands Institute for Public Safety) https://nipv.nl/ in 2022.
….. and there’s more …. The International Energy Agency, IEA, based in Paris, estimated that there were 16 million or so Electric Vehicles on the roads worldwide as of January 2022. There have been about 460 Electric Vehicle traction battery fires, globally, from 2010 to the present. That’s roughly, just ONE EV fire for every 35,000 EV’s on the roads.
Facts like these show that the scary stories about EV’s are very far from the truth.
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We will find as this Blog develops that our attention will move quickly away from Electric Passenger vehicles and their safety, to smaller more personal items.
There are two VERY important reasons why this is so –
1.Large expensive electric cars are built very well. There’s money to fund Research and Quality Control to make reliable, safe products. Smaller items, from e-Scooters to Vapes can be – and are – made and sold without worrying too much about reliability or safety.
2.Very significantly, we don’t carry the cars into our house to charge them! or put them inside near the front door! They live outside the house, on the street or in their own garage. Sometimes – maybe every night? – we even charge our smaller gadgets beside our heads while we sleep!
The REAL STORY is that it’s our personal stuff that can hurt us, and that it seriously needs our SERIOUS attention.
You’ll find more of this in the next post Are Lithium-ion Batteries SAFE or NOT?
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