Batteries don’t make electric vehicles more likely to catch fire than gasoline-powered cars

An Instagram video uses fearmongering and unrelated footage to inaccurately describe what happens to electric vehicles when they get into crashes. 

"When electric cars get in accidents, they explode, they catch fire very, very badly because of the lithium batteries," says a man in the video, which was posted Oct. 20 on Instagram. 

The man says "you can do experiments yourself, just get a lithium battery and unwrap it and throw it into a bowl and see what happens." A narrator then does just that, but with a double-A lithium battery, not an electric vehicle battery.   

The Instagram post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Electric vehicles are overall less likely than gas-powered cars to combust or explode after a collision, according to data and experts. 

There are more gas-powered cars on the road than EVs, so a good way to analyze their relative safety is fires per distance driven. Tesla, which makes more than half of the electric vehicles sold in the U.S., reports five car fires per billion miles driven, compared with 55 fires per billion miles driven in gas-powered cars.

"An electric car can get into an accident without any explosion or fire, like gasoline cars," said Ahmad Pesaran, chief energy storage engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in an email interview with PolitiFact.  

"An accident has to be very severe to compromise the battery pack in a way to rupture the cells and create an internal short which may lead to a fire," Pesaran said. "Because of the construction of the battery pack and the strong enclosure around it, this is very rare."   

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As for the video showing the deconstruction of a double-A lithium battery, Pesaran notes that EVs don’t use lithium batteries, but the much safer lithium-ion batteries. He said the potential for danger isn’t as severe as the video implies.

It’s also important to consider the relative risk of electric vehicles compared with gas-powered vehicles, Pesaran said.

"There are more than 200,000 fires in gasoline vehicles each year in the U.S., but for some reason, they are not put under the magnifying glass with inaccurate information like those for electric vehicles," he said. 

That said, some specific models of electric cars have had fire risks. In 2021, General Motors Co. recalled the Chevrolet Bolt because of a risk of its battery pack catching fire.

An Instagram post says, "When electric cars get in accidents, they explode, they catch fire very very badly because of the lithium batteries."

Electric vehicles are not more likely than gas-powered cars to catch fire in crashes.

Tesla, which makes more than half of the electric vehicles sold in the U.S., reports five car fires per billion miles driven, compared with 55 fires per billion miles driven in gas-powered cars.

We rate this claim False. 

RELATED: Electric vehicle fires can be extinguished with water