Ask most people in the trade whether an EV or hybrid is more likely to catch fire than a conventional car, and the answer will probably be yes. It’s a reasonable assumption. It’s also not what the best available evidence supports, at least not in the way most people mean it.
What Fire and Emergency New Zealand actually says
Fire and Emergency New Zealand’s own public position, set out as EVs first arrived in volume, is that electric vehicles are generally safer than petrol or diesel cars. That comes with a genuine complication: once a lithium-ion battery pack is damaged badly enough to ignite, the resulting fire burns at around 1,000°C, and FENZ has warned of a reignition risk that can persist for up to five days after a fire is apparently out — specific enough that FENZ has built a dedicated tactical response procedure around it.
What FENZ doesn’t have is a robust local number to put against “generally safer.” Fire and Emergency’s own research, prepared through BRANZ, found the agency’s incident statistics don’t reliably capture whether a burnt vehicle was battery-electric, hybrid, or combustion, making it hard to calculate a genuine New Zealand fire rate for any of them. That gap hasn’t stopped people trying to fill it: at least one analysis of FENZ data has extrapolated from a sample of roughly eight electric vehicle fires over two years to argue EVs are overrepresented in “spontaneous” vehicle fires. Eight incidents is too small a sample to draw a reliable rate from, and it’s built on data FENZ itself says isn’t fit for that purpose — but it illustrates how thin the ground is that stronger claims, in either direction, tend to stand on.
The international data is more robust, and points one way
Better numbers exist outside New Zealand. EV FireSafe, an Australian research body funded by the Department of Defence, maintains what it describes as the most detailed verified global database of EV battery fires, built from fire agency reports and direct investigation rather than estimates. It had recorded 14 EV battery fires in Australia since 2021, against more than 500,000 EVs on Australian roads, and 772 verified globally against roughly 78 million plug-in vehicles worldwide — a rate of around one in 100,000.
A 2023 peer-reviewed Australian study put the average EV fire frequency at about six per million vehicles a year, in line with that global figure. Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency, working from an entirely separate dataset, recorded about 16 electric and hybrid vehicle fires in 2022 against 611,000 such vehicles on the road, compared with 3,384 fires among 4.4 million petrol and diesel vehicles — a combustion-vehicle rate around 20 times higher. Three independent sources, three different methodologies, the same general conclusion.
Why the perception persists anyway
Part of the answer is genuine novelty bias: a burning EV is still unusual enough to make the news, while conventional vehicle fires are common enough to go largely unreported. Part of it is that the ones which do happen often get misattributed in the moment. RNZ’s Mediawatch flagged a recent example: a bus fire on Auckland’s Tamaki Drive was widely assumed online to involve electric bus batteries, before FENZ confirmed the fire had actually started in the petrol car that struck the bus, and the operator confirmed the bus’s own batteries were undamaged. The correction got a fraction of the attention the original assumption did.
The behaviour of an EV fire, when one does occur, doesn’t help the perception either. A conventional fuel fire burns fast and predictably; a lithium-ion battery fire releases stored energy over a longer period, can develop pockets of heat that reignite well after the fire looks out, and needs sustained cooling rather than a quick knockdown. That makes the rare EV fire more dramatic and more memorable than the routine combustion fire next to it, even though it’s the less likely of the two.
Hybrids remain a genuine unknown
On hybrids specifically, the research hasn’t settled on a fire rate that holds up to scrutiny. There’s a plausible engineering case that a hybrid, carrying a full fuel system alongside a high-voltage battery, has more potential failure points than either architecture alone — but plausible isn’t proven, and no credible source puts a specific, defensible number on it yet.
A compromised battery needs different handling
The evidence says EVs aren’t more dangerous overall. What it doesn’t change is the fact that a high-voltage battery, once compromised by a collision or any other cause, doesn’t behave like a damaged fuel tank. Correct isolation procedure, awareness of reignition risk during recovery and storage, and enough separation from other stock all matter regardless of how rare the underlying event is; in short, a rare worst case is still worth keeping rare.
