Volvo Tells Plug-In Hybrid Owners to Stop Charging

https://www.carscoops.com/2025/03/volvo-recalling-thousands-of-plug-in-hybrids-over-fire-risk/

by teleforce • 1 year ago

13 21 1 year ago

jmclnx• 1 year ago

Interesting, one of the selling points of Electric Vehicles over 100 years ago was how safe they were when compared to other vehicles.

Strange all I hear about with modern EVs are issues due to fire. In theory EVs should be far safer than any fossil fuel cars.

dylan6042• 1 year ago

is that a problem with EV vs ICE or shoddy/lowest bidder type of manufacturing of EV components?

Chaosvex• 1 year ago

What's the difference? As silly as that question sounds, the point is that ICE has the same issue of shoddy components. Ford (but not limited to) enjoys replacing critical metal parts with plastic and dunking rubber in oil. Now they have a reputation for blowing engines and being scrapped because shaving a few cents off the BOM was deemed preferable to not requiring engines to be completely removed to replace said parts that would have cost a dollar to manufacture quality versions of. There are aftermarket manufacturers that make higher quality replacements for a lot of modern OEM parts.

Bean counters ruin everything and they seem to have infected almost every business.

gambiting3• 1 year ago

And in fact, they are - regular ICE cars are far far far more likely to cause fires than EVs. EV fire is much harder to extinguish, but it's debatable if it's more dangerous to the occupants as the batteries have a solid firewall between them and the cabin.

Even in this case - Volvo identified one case where a problem occured, and decided to recall 7000 cars(out of 100s of thousands sold), and even among those they said they will check first if they even need to have a battery module replaced.

In the meantime my last petrol Mercedes was recalled 3 times in my 4 years of ownership.....each time for a fire risk. And that was part of larger recall spanning 100s of thousands of cars globally.

goalieca2• 1 year ago

EV fire in an underground parking garage or home garage is a scary thought.

magicalhippo2• 1 year ago

Strange all I hear about with modern EVs are issues due to fire. In theory EVs should be far safer than any fossil fuel cars.

Strange indeed. Possibly because we're so used to ICEs catching fire it's not registering anymore[1][2][3].

[1] https://www.faktisk.no/artikkel/er-elbilen-en-brannbombe/118...

[2] https://www.nrk.no/vestfoldogtelemark/279-bilbranner-hittil-...

[3] https://www.tv2.no/broom/harde-fakta-sa-ofte-brenner-elbiler...

tyingq• 1 year ago

Hard to make direct comparisons though, right? A battery fire poses different risks.

upvotebrigade• 1 year ago

In reality all the anti-Tesla stuff is just submarine campaigns by competitors who can’t build an EV to save their life, so they resort to calling Musk a Nazi instead.

chmod775• 1 year ago

Strange all I hear about with modern EVs are issues due to fire. In theory EVs should be far safer than any fossil fuel cars.

Never try to extrapolate frequency or risk based on news headlines.

Combustion-engine cars catch fire all the time, but that rarely makes headlines.

US fire departments responded to an estimated annual average of 215,096 vehicle fires in the United States from 2018–2022[1]

That's 600 vehicle fires per day.

Search for recent results of "car catches fire" on google news or wherever, and you'll only get a dozen incidents for the past day.

If a car burns down and few are impacted in any way, it doesn't make the news. Unless it's an EV.

[1] https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-re...

woleium3• 1 year ago

Humans are notably bad at evaluating low probability, high impact risk. An ICE car burning in the street has lower potential for life threatening damage than a PHEV burning when in a garage of a house overnight (ignoring the difficulty fire crews have dealing with battery fires).

Besides, Volvo has safety at the heart of its brand image, so it makes sense that they would issue an overly cautious warning.

aedis• 1 year ago

Most of them have big issues with cooling and thermal protection of batteries. Follow EVClinic on X to see ridiculous things from manufacturers.

sightbroke2• 1 year ago

100 years ago batteries didn't have thermal runaway issues.

It's true that currently commercially available EV tech today has a lot of engineering involved to prevent fires.

However, on the bright side safer chemistries and tech ranging from iron phosphate cathodes and sodium ion to solid state are just around corner. Which is pretty cool from an engineering and design perspective.

woleium3• 1 year ago

I wonder what the energy density of 100 year old batteries was.

numpad0• 1 year ago

There's been no known fire incidents for Nissan Leaf. They've sold ~1m of those, so it's not like they made too few of them.

Actually, there was one in Japan recently, but that later turned out its occupant was moving around some container of kerosene inside while smoking cigarette which lit fire on fuel(wtf?) so doesn't count.

Volvo Tells Plug-In Hybrid Owners to Stop Charging

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