Per 100K cars sold, yes, it's 60.9x more gas vehicle fires than EV fires.
Fires involving electric cars often make the news, but let's take a look at how frequent they actually occur—and whether you should fret over their possibility.
www.autoweek.com
I believe many things are missed when comparing/contrasting the "fire risk" of EVs to fossil-fuel vehicles.
Here is my list of things that make this difficult, if not impossible, to quantify at this point (thereby making the "data" suspect and conclusions unreliable):
- Are we talking about pure EVs, or Hybrids? The article does not delineate. For the sake of my points below, I'm just going to lump them in together, but that is likely going to induce errors into the data stream.
- The "source" of vehicle fires is not identified in this article. ANY vehicle can catch fire, depending on the ignition source and the fuel (fuel meaning - what's able to burn ... carpet, seats, wiring, gasoline, insulation, plastics, etc). Of these gas and EV fires that were included in the study, how many of those fire were directly related to the energy drive system, versus stupid stuff like friction, cigarettes, etc?
- "EVs" are reasonably new to the market in mass, therefore they have not "aged" like many other gas/diesel vehicles. This makes a big difference. A fire in a 2 year old Tesla due to drive batteries overheating (resistance fire) is a lot different than a 15 year old Taurus with a brake seized (friction fire) and set the car ablaze. The article doesn't help us understand the nature of these differences, and they are very important to distinguish.
In fact, I'd say a LOT of "gas" vehicle fires are actually electrically-sourced probems in the first place. RARE is the time that a gas vehicle catches on fire because of the fuel itself. Typically it's some type of electrical cause. Even modern gas/diesel vehicles catch fire, but often it's a manufacturing defect in wiring or a component, and not the fuel system.
Here's an example where the data at the top level would lead to a massive error in data reporting.
This is a TRUE STORY that HAPPENED TO ME!
1986 ... I had a diesel Ford Tempo (please don't laugh; it was what my dad was able to provide at the time). We got it new; it was a lease vehicle. I was on a trip to visit friends at another college. We decided to run out for a bite to eat. The car was full; five people on board (2+3). After several minutes of driving, one girl in the back seat said she smelled smoke. I looked in the rear view mirror and didn't see anything, but did get a wiff of an acrid odor. Seconds later, she screamed her (posterior) was on fire! We were stopped at an intersection and all jumped out. Within seconds, the car was roaring in a fire, which had it's origin in the back seat area. The fire department showed up, but it was a total loss; the car was nothing but a smoldering heap. Here's the funny thing though ... it was still running fine. The interior was gone, the paint above the beltline was bubbled and char-black, and the tires were all flat. But the diesle engine was still idling! (ol' skool mechanical fuel pump so it just kept running despite the fire!) What caused the fire? It was an electrical short in the battery wiring! The battery in those cars was in the trunk (massive battery for the IDI diesel). The cables run under the rear seat frame, and when the mass of three people sat on the seat in back, it caused the seat frame to abrade through the wiring insulation and start a resistance fire in the seat foam, and then the backseat, and then the entire car! (It was not a design defect, it was a manufacturing defect. The cable was supposed to lay in a recessed track, but it was hap-hazardly laid on the floor pan. We could see it after the fire was out.)
Now ...
how would that true example have been classified in the "study" that Autoweek did? If they ONLY looked at two criteria (did it catch fire and was it fossil fueled?) then the "data" would lead you to believe it was a fire due to being a fossil-fuel car. But that is completely wrong; it was an electrical fire and had nothing to do with the fuel source.
Simply put:
Electrical fires can happen to both EVs and fossil-fuel vehicles, but only fossil-fuel source fires can happen to fossil-fuel vehicles. Soooooo .... this argument about the safety of vehicles related to fire risks is, well, silly, because that article has spent no time really defining the actual root causes, and not standardized for the mono-directional overlap of characteristics. I estimate that the bulk of all vehicle fires is related to two things: electrical sources and friction sources. Rare is the "fuel" fire a thing. The fuel may burn in the fire, but it's rarely the root caus of the fire.
This is what happens when you get a car nerd at AutoWeek to "study" a complex set of data. People like that need to "stay in their lane" and stick to car reviews, and let the data be handled by statistical experts.