A Man Who does not mince his words.

The fact you haven't heard about it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

If you are saying that you are not aware that the mass media love to jump on any mention of EVs catching fire then you must have been living in a cave for the last 5 years. The reality is that all sorts of fires occur every day across the globe and very rarely get reported because they are simply so common and thus not newsworthy. In the case of EVs, the reality is (statistically speaking at least): 1/ ICEVs are 60 times more likely to catch fire (for whatever reason) than EVs, and 2/ Hybrids are 139 times more likely to catch fire than EVs (Tusker fleet data reveals the truth about EV fires). Such fires kill over 400 people in the US every year; 100 in the UK… How many of you those have you *ever* heard of?

As for lead acid batteries causing explosions I know of at least one myself. A friend had a Leyland Mini van whose 12 V battery sits on the floor behind the driver's seat underneath a projection of the rear load tray. One day having just started out first thing in the morning, he hit a pothole which caused the 12V battery to jump out of its tray (it was not properly secured!) and the 2 terminals shorted across the load tray edge reinforcing angle igniting the hydrogen gas that had accumulated in the few minutes after starting the engine causing a mild explosion which blew out his front windscreen. He showed me the pitting and shorting marks later the same day.
Quick search shows the US vehicle fleet to be 298.7 million light road vehicles, whereas for the UK same search gives 42 million total road vehicles (so I assume the most readily available estimates are reported differently), but even using that underestimate for the US, the ratio is over 7 to 1, (and they do almost twice as many miles) whereas the above ratio of fatalities is 4 to 1

One wonders why the UK fires are so disproportionally lethal. More passengers per car? Smaller cars? Crowded wee island?

Shouldn't be better healthcare/ambulance/fire service in the US, or at least thats not the image.

Perhaps Americans trapped in burning vehicles are shot/shoot themselves, so the fire isn't the official cause of death? Or might obesity offer some protection?

As it happens, there is unsurprisingly a higher proportion of electric cars in the UK, 5% as opposed to 1.5%. Probably a relatively minor influence on the overall deaths, though data on relative Einferno lethality doesn;t seem to be readily available
 
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