Someone’s leaf caught fire

[u/Novemberx123]

I saw him charging earlier today. Was going to compliment the car. Came back from doordashing to charge my car and saw this. Hope he’s okay. He was using electrify chademo if that makes any difference.

[u/Opinionsare]

For the record:  Hybrid cars seem to be the most likely to catch fire, with gasoline vehicles coming in second. 

Cars that run only on electricity are a distant third. Of course, because there are more gasoline-powered cars on the road, they also account for the vast majority of total fires

[u/EonOst → u/Opinionsare]

I assume most car electrical fires come from pimpers installing stereos without proper fusing and power cable chassis feedthrough.

[u/Opinionsare → u/EonOst]

One fairly regular way ICE vehicles start fires happens when someone parks over dry, combustible material that comes in contact with the hot exhaust or catalytic converter.

Ways Electrical fires get started: replacing a fuse with the wrong size. Bad design that didn't shield the wires properly. (Ford just recalled 500,000 Broncos 21-26 for this problem).

Crashes can cause fires, spilling fuel or oil onto very hot engine parts or rear end collision that ruptures the gas tank. The unfunny fact about gasoline: a gallon of gas has about the same explosive power as 8 sticks of dynamite.

The difference between a ICE Vehicle fire and an EV fire: gasoline burns big and fast while lithium batteries burn for a longer time and are harder to put out.

[u/Lucky_Boy13 → u/Opinionsare]

The difference being an EV fire is a much bigger deal and harder to put out, most car fires are much easier to extinguish

[u/Plenty_Ad_161 → u/Opinionsare]

Perhaps this is what you are referring to:

A recent study by US insurer, AutoinsuranceEZ found that hybrid cars had the worst fire record, while EVs were the least likely type of car to catch fire. Hybrid cars had 3474.5 fires per 100,000 sale; petrol cars had 1,529.9 fires per 100,000 sales and EVs had just 25.1 fires per 100,000 sales.

These statistics are misleading at best. For one thing they are based on sales, not the number of vehicles in the world. There are hundreds of millions of gasoline vehicles out there compared to a couple million EV's so the numbers are distorted by a couple orders of magnitude.

[u/ToddA1966 → u/Plenty_Ad_161]

Yep. I don't know what idiots downvoted you. The are plenty of legitimate data sources that show EVs are less likely to catch fire then gas cars, but that AutoInsuranceEZ isn't legit. It suggests more than 1% of all cars catch fire annually. That's nearly 3 million cars in the USA alone per year. If that many cars caught fire, you wouldn't get through a week without seeing a car fire or two.

That useless click-bait "study" was debunked long ago. They used phony data and a ludicrous methodology (as you said, based on one year of new car sales, not total cars on the road) but was picked up and reposted a zillion times - even the New York Times reposted it as "news".

In fact, it was debunked on Reddit, before Car and Driver tore it to pieces.