00:00 Hi there, Emma from EV Firesafe. In this really quick video I want to answer the
00:05 big question that's been doing the rounds this week on social media. How
00:09 many electric vehicle battery fires have there been here in Australia? Now when I
00:13 talk about this I'm talking about BEV and FEV battery electric vehicle and
00:16 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. So they require external charging and they have
00:21 a far larger battery than the hybrid vehicles. So electric vehicles catch fire
00:27 all the time and this is actually my very first electric vehicle which I
00:30 unfortunately parked in the wrong spot while jumping on a truck to go fight a
00:34 big bushfire but the battery wasn't involved in that fire. And it's a really
00:38 important point we have EV fires and we have EV battery fires and actually when
00:44 an electric vehicles on fire only about 40% of the time does the battery
00:49 actually become involved. So this is a really important bit of information for
00:53 firefighters like myself because if it's just combustibles burning just the
00:57 vehicle but not the battery we put water on it the same way we we would with a
01:01 petrol or diesel vehicle. But if the battery becomes involved then it's a
01:06 little bit more of a it's a bit of a bigger job because we have a process
01:11 called thermal runaway that makes the incident longer it will require more
01:15 people typically require more water. There's more information about thermal
01:19 runaway on our website I won't go into that here. But back to the big question
01:23 how many electric vehicle battery fires have we had here in Australia while
01:26 they've been on the road? So we've actually only had six. So we've had six
01:30 lithium-ion battery fires in electric cars that require charging and there are
01:35 about a hundred and twenty thousand of these on the road currently here in
01:38 Australia. So why did these vehicles catch fire? In all cases it's due to
01:43 damage to the battery pack from arson there have been three that have been in
01:49 private home garages and the garage has burnt down. We've had one due to
01:52 collision and one due to road debris that actually the car ran over and it
01:57 went up into the battery pack which is the one that happened near Goulburn
02:00 earlier this week. So in none of these cases were the vehicles on charge which
02:05 is a good thing for us to know. The other good thing for us to know is if you're
02:10 an emergency responder or an electric vehicle driver and your electric vehicle
02:14 is involved in a collision or it's hit by road debris underneath the vehicle
02:18 where the battery pack sits, it's submerged in water particularly flood
02:23 water that's salty for an extended period. If it's recalled by the
02:27 manufacturer due to battery fault or if it has suffered some kind of fire then
02:32 you do need to contact your dealer and get it checked out. If this has been
02:37 really useful information for you come and train with us. Go to EVfiresafe.business
02:41 if you're an emergency responder or if you work around electric vehicles.
02:45 We have some great training programs and online sessions that are going to help
02:49 keep you safer.
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