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Just about everyone has seen electric car fires start in garages and do serious damage to an entire house. But a fire in Norfolk, Virginia on the morning of April 30 involved an EV parked in the driveway which still damaged the home.
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Thankfully nobody was hurt in the blaze, with all four people living in the house making it out safely. However, it looks like the house is damaged to the point it can’t be lived in until major repairs are done.
The Red Cross is helping the people who have been displaced. Hopefully the homeowner’s insurance will pay for the all necessary repairs. But in the meantime, those people will need to find somewhere temporary to stay.
Firefighters were able to eventually extinguish the fire, but you can see in video footage the car was gutted. It’s safe to say the EV, whatever brand it was, is a total loss.
An investigation into the cause is ongoing. We have no idea if the EV was charging at the time of the fire. That’s often when these types of sudden ignition events occur, although that’s not always the case.
Electric car fires burn at extremely high temperatures, so when they ignite if there is a building or other vehicles nearby, an EV can do serious damage or even completely destroy them. While it’s true that traditional cars do catch fire suddenly, thanks to anything from faulty wiring to leaking fluids, the result usually isn’t anywhere nearly as destructive.
We can say it probably isn’t a bad idea to have an automatic fire suppression system built into your garage, whether you have an EV or not. But electric car fires have to be extinguished differently, so the system would have to be designed to address those needs.
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