The North Collier Fire Rescue District along with Florida’s Chief Financial Officer & State Fire Marshal Jimmy Patronis stated that electric vehicles are spontaneously catching fire in Florida because their batteries suffered water damage after the floods caused by Hurricane Ian.
In the social media posts, they show and explain how difficult it was to put out the fire from the batteries of a Tesla Model X.
The most worrying thing they said was that this issue isn’t isolated to this particular vehicle. And that authorities are dealing with EVs catching fire all over Southwest Florida.
It’s a well-established fact that lithium and water aren’t friends.
If you look at videos about the chemical reaction between a simple AA battery submerged in a bowl of water, you’d be amazed. Now bring that up to scale with the massive batteries inside any EV, add tons of salt water that do extensive damage to them, and you end up with a recipe for disaster.