Which type of car is more likely to catch fire - electric, petrol, or diesel?

I’ve noticed that when electric cars catch fire, journalists are quick to report it and make sure to mention that it’s electric, yet when other vehicles catch fire, it is often either not mentioned in the media at all or appears in the news without specifying the type of car. Why do you think that is? 👀

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ElwoodBlues · M

Petrol (AKA gasoline) is more likely to catch fire.

It's a tricky question, because there are far more petrol cars on the road than electric, so the raw numbers will show petrol has the most fires. The more important question is fires per mile driven or fires per year ownership. I haven't found definitive numbers for this, but I suspect the answer is petrol. With hybrid cars, you'd need to specify whether the fire began in the battery/electric part of the vehicle or in the gasoline part of the vehicle.

This link says

Cars catch fire. Electric vehicles are no exception. In the United States, according to a 2023 study citing recent data from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, gasoline-powered, internal-combustion engine (ICE) cars were involved in about 1,530 fires per every 100,000 sold. On the other hand, pure electric vehicles (meaning those powered only by batteries) were involved in just 25 fires per 100,000 sold. Yet, says, Paul A. Kohl, a professor at GeorgiaTech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, in Atlanta, “The media don’t treat EVs and ICEs with equal footing, because gasoline is not sensational anymore.”

https://spectrum.ieee.org/lithium-ion-battery-fires

More from the IEEE link:

In Sweden, where battery EVs and hybrids already represent 40 percent of new cars sold, the numbers reveal an even more pronounced trend. According to MSB, Sweden’s Civil Protection and Emergency Management Agency, the total number of EV fires in the country reached an annual peak of 106 last year.

But MSB reports that in 2022, there were only 24 EV car fires in Sweden, representing 0.004 percent of battery-powered cars there. For cars running on gasoline or diesel fuel, the fire rate was 0.08 percent, or 20 times the frequency.

BTW, the link here attempts to untangle some misinformation that was published earlier https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a40163966/cars-catching-fire-new-york-times-real-statistics/
Apparently a company called AutoInsuranceEZ published some bad data that overestimated something by a factor of 60, and that erroneous estimate is still circulating.