On July 2, a car hauler full of new Teslas caught fire at 8:20 AM (local time) on the A21 road in Portugal, which goes from Mafra to Ericeira. The first outlet to report the incident was the Facebook page Os Monhacas, which kindly authorized me to share the videos it published. Weirdly, this is probably the first place you will read about this in English, which leads to one of two possible conclusions: either this is just too common to report, or people fear to do so to avoid being called a battery electric vehicle (BEV) hater.
Whatever the reason was for this silence, this new fire reignites an old discussion: how safe are BEVs when it comes to fires? As much as BEV advocates keep repeating they are safer than cars that work with internal combustion engines (ICEs), we keep seeing blazes involving electric vehicles. Just ask yourself what happened with three Rivian vans that caught fire on July 1 at Amazon's Houston Fulfillment Center in Texas.
One person trying to defend the vans said the problem was on the chargers, not on the vehicles. How could they know that? What if the BEVs presented issues and also made the chargers burn? Only the investigators will be able to determine the cause. Besides, if chargers are to blame for these problems, what will BEVs do to avoid that? Fill up their tanks with gas?
Photo: Os Monhacas
Unfortunately, these attempts to present electric cars as safer than ICE vehicles when it comes to fires are nothing new. One of the most relevant blazes I remember covering was the one that almost sank the Fremantle Highway, a cargo ship that was carrying 3,783 automobiles, 498 of which were BEVs, when it caught fire. On August 28, 2023, I had to write an article to show how every outlet that absolved electric cars for that fire were not journalists but rather advocates. All it took me to debunk their allegations was an email exchange with their alleged source.
If you go to Wikipedia for more info on this ship, it still relies on the false defense for BEVs about that blaze, which is a shame. Wikipedia editors, you should get this corrected as soon as possible, especially when there are videos such as the one below. It shows an electric car unloaded from the ship and placed into a water-filled steel bin. That's now a common measure to prevent battery packs that caught fire from reigniting. The vapor that comes out of the bin proves how necessary it was.
Another famous case involving a RoRo ship was that of Felicity Ace. It sank near the Azores islands after catching fire in February 2022, which destroyed 4,000 cars apart from the vessel itself. Luckily, no one died, which is not something we can say about the Fremantle Highway. Search for its name, and you will find dozens of articles saying a BEV did not cause the fire. Investigations proved them wrong, which did not make them retract or correct these articles. Porsche and Volkswagen are now being sued by the ship operator and its insurance company, among several other plaintiffs, because the fire would have erupted from a Porsche BEV.
Photo: via RTL Niews/edited by autoevolution
In the Tesla fire in Portugal, BEV advocates rushed to state the fire started in the trailer, not in the cars, which is extremely unlikely. If that were the case, the fire would have affected the vehicles on the lower part of the trailer first. If you check the image right below or the "Os Monhacas" video, you'll see the car hauler has eight Teslas, all made in China. The last two in the upper part of the trailer are the ones pouring out more smoke. If we were to bet, we'd say the fire started in one of them, possibly in the one more to the center.
Knowing these are Chinese vehicles, we'd feel tempted to say the fire affected a car with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. However, that would ignore a characteristic of Portuguese Tesla customers: most of them pick the more expensive versions of these BEVs. That means these vehicles must have ternary cells, which several people already said are more prone to fires, including some insiders like Our Next Energy (ONE).
Mujeeb Ijaz, the company's founder, said his company's goal is to avoid mixing cobalt and nickel because they "represent a major thermal runaway risk" – such as the one that sunk the Felicity Ace, which may have caused the Fremantle Highway blaze and which is the probable cause of this new fire in Portugal. I have tried to contact the Civil Protection Department in charge of the investigation, and they have yet to answer. When and if they do, I'll update this article. More important than the event itself is the discussion it reignited. It should determine the future of transportation.
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