this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
600 points (95.2% liked)
Technology
84103 readers
4078 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Did Toyota write this? EVs already are much safer than ICEs, the headline reads like it's trying to gaslight people into thinking otherwise.
Except ones with no handles. You're supposed to burn alive in these.
Which has nothing to do with the drive train.
Except the fact that batteries burn extremely rapidly. In case of fire you have seconds to open the door and help the driver/passaners escape out of the vehicle
I've heard that gasoline also tends to burn rapidly. The Mythbusters usually had to add gas to make their explosions look cooler
Not as rapidly as lithium batteries. From firefighting perspective this is much uglier case. Bonus issue: unlike gasoline, you can't extinguish it reliably - it has to burn out on its own
Battery fires can be extinguished.
The only way I know how to reliably extinguish a lithium car battery fire, is to throw the whole car into a water tank
That's two ways: if you can throw a whole car in a water tank, you can throw a whole water tank on a car.
Nope. The moment you stop flooding it with water, it starts burning back again. Lithium reacts with water producing heat and hydrogen. Spraying the surface with hose just doesn't work. You have to drop car into a water tank for prolonged period of time. Long enough for water to reach all damaged cells and react with all exposed lithium
Make it a sand tank. Or a cement tank. Ooh or an army tank!
So? Overall risk is still much lower.
Dude...gas cars blow up every day. It's so common it's not news.
Vehicle fires report | NFPA Research
National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) https://www.nfpa.org/ › research › fire-statistical-reports Oct 31, 2024 — The 195,927 highway vehicle fires per year in 2018–2022 caused an average of 579 civilian deaths; 1,336 civilian injuries.
That’s a feature as far as I’m concerned
Except their weight which leads to insane amounts of energy transfer and also none of the intrastructure, like guardrails, is built to handle that much weight so low down.
The way to safer is to reduce the amount of cars.
Hersey! Blasphemy! Unamerican!
First time I ever heard about guardrails having issues with EVs. Do you have a source for that?
Also the comment was about the fire risk, which the article was about.
https://youtu.be/x3sSFBb0ILQ
Yes, I do.
It affects more than the guardrail situation as well. Any collision with a car laden with extremely heavy batteries as low to the ground as possible has inertia and force that was not calculated into road safety systems originally.
This can be corrected, but the first step is recognizing and accounting for it. Which seems to upset people for reasons I cant comprehend.
But as the other guy said, the safest systems are the ones with the fewest cars on the road in general.
EVs weigh similar to similar ICE vehicles.
Yeah, no.
This is a golf compared to an id.3. Two very comparable vehicles. The id.3 weighs 41% more. Don't get me wrong I'd love to be able to get an id.3 but all we get in the states are these horrible SUVs. That said EVs do still suffer a major weight penalty that comes with its own issues.
Not even a little bit, and I’d say “but good effort” but really no, not even that.
WTF Lemmy....EVs are massively heavy.
For the occupant or those who are involved in a collision with one?
EVs are heavy
They don't catch fire that often though.
Which is what that headline is about.
Do ice car catch fire more often?
While true, you should also mention that there's way more ICEs and (more importantly) the way they burn is much, much safer.
You can't really extinguish lithium fire, it burns way hotter, and it's more toxic.
Comparatively an ICE car burning is not a big deal; they almost never make other stuff around them burn, and also when they catch on fire it's pretty much exclusively only when people are still near/in them so there's A chance to notice it and do something about it.
Yes.
Came here to say exactly this.
But it was already said so....
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-again-has-the-highest-accident-rate-of-any-auto-brand/
You do realize that article neither negates or supports the above statement.
"But Teslas are electric and Teslas are bad!" -the person we're replying to.
It's like the commenter doesn't realize there's more electric cars than just Teslas.
Safer cars get into less crashes. You seriously want to argue semantics?
https://www.tesladeaths.com/
There are electric cars that are not Teslas..
So the article's source has been updated. Tesla was number 1 in the last year's report (2024's numbers) but it's number 3 now (2025's numbers).
Source used by the article you shared
TLDR: It's a close battle between BMW (44.9 per 1000), Ram (44.7 per 1000), and Telsa (42.8 per 1000)
EDIT: "That includes accidents, DUIs, speeding and citations" If you instead just isolate accident rates it's slightly different: Ram (23.9 per 1000), Subaru (23.2), and Tesla (23.1).
I should clarify that I'm not a fan of Tesla AT ALL. I'd love to see Tesla fail (in particular Elon failing especially). There's more electric car's than just Tesla's.
It probably has more to do with the people that buy BMWs, Rams, and Teslas driving like fucking idiots than with the cars themselves.
I was about to say that when I am near a tesla, bmw, or ram truck I anticipate them driving like jackasses. teslas can go both ways though, either unnecessarily slow or crazy bmw style impatient driving
Tesla crashes are a function of a poorly designed interface, overweight cars, and too much power for public roads.
This battery is even safer than Li-ion cells, why is that “gaslighting”?
Because the headline is not making that comparison?
That's new to me. Why exactly?
The main thing is there's no big engine in the front, so your entire hood can now be a crumple zone, and it's easier to design to be safe in impacts. The center of gravity is also much lower so there's a lower chance of a rollover.
On the other hand... Tesla's have a habit of locking their occupants inside when the car is on fire because SOMEONE decided mechanical latches were too expensive.
And as others have mentioned... the added weight also makes it less safe for everyone else outside the car.
The article is about batteries that might catch fire less often.
ICEs catch fire much more often than EVs already. The comment was specifically about that.
The fires from EVs (ones that use lithium batteries that is) are incredibly hard to extinguish.
Sodium ion batteries don't ignite which makes them even safer.
Link to a video of a puncture test of Sodium cells.
And another one that's also cool.
That's nice and all but not what the headline compared and therefore not the point. That comparison was specifically between ICEs and EVs.