Noted on 3 Nov 2026

Petrol cars catch fire 7 times as often as electric ones, according to figures a transport minister gave Parliament in March. When MPs asked to see the analysis behind them, the Department for Transport said it isn't public, and that it hadn't assessed it or corroborated it.

Before I use a number I like to know where it came from, so I went looking. The figures are 1 fire per 100,000 battery electric cars a year, 3 for hybrids, 7 for petrol and 11 for diesel. They come from a 2022 Thatcham Research study of insurance claims, done for the insurance industry.

The question that prompted the March answer said the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency had found about 3,475 fires per 100,000 hybrids. Those numbers match a US car insurance comparison site's study from a few years ago, counted per 100,000 cars sold, and I can't find them anywhere in the Swedish agency's work.

Its own report has 40 electric and hybrid car fires in Sweden in 2024, against just over 3,100 car fires in total. That comparison gets shared a lot, but the 40 leave out arson and only include fires where the battery, charger or cabling was involved, while the 3,100 include arson. The agency found the 40 by searching free-text incident reports, because the reports don't record what the car runs on.

As far as I can tell the UK doesn't record that either. The Netherlands publishes a count every year of fire brigade call-outs to alternative fuel vehicles, broken down by what powers them.

I'd still bet electric cars catch fire less often than petrol ones. But car park operators, insurers and anyone running an electric fleet are making decisions on numbers nobody in government has checked, and the next fire that goes viral will be argued over with the same ones.

Does anyone have more reliable figures here?