Electric vehicle (EV) drivers should pay more in insurance to cover the cost of fighting battery fires, which are harder to extinguish, says Greg Smith, a Member of the UK Parliament who serves on the Transport Committee.
Smith noted that fire services have had to spend seven-figure sums on submersion tanks for fires involving lithium-ion batteries, which present a unique challenge to fire brigades, according to a report by the Telegraph.
“It doesn’t take a genius to work out that a seven-figure capital expenditure on one of these things, by the time every car on the road is battery-electric, even if you have 0.1 percent setting themselves on fire you’re going to need more than one tank,” Smith said.
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The Member of the UK Parliament added that taxpayers would end up footing the bill for the fire equipment, but that insurance companies should be the ones responsible for doing so.
“Something we actually need to be looking at is cost recovery for the public sector, particularly the fire service,” Smith said.
“Just as there is precedent that insurance companies pay out on medical issues caused by road traffic accidents, for example, I think that is the way you would solve the problem of who pays for putting electric fires out,” he added.
As Breitbart News previously reported, fires involving electric vehicles are considered difficult to control, and present a new challenge for firefighters.
Last year, electric vehicles catching on fire in Florida after becoming waterlogged during Hurricane Ian gave firefighters “a new challenge” they “haven’t faced before,” Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer and state fire marshal, noted.
“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start. That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale,” Patronis said at the time.
Craig Mackinlay, a Conservative MP in the UK, noted that a car yard near his district that was full of burnt-out electric cars, according to the Telegraph report.
“Electric car fires are very, very difficult to put out because the lithium batteries once they catch water really doesn’t do it frankly,” Mackinlay said. “You almost just have to let them burn out. The amount of noxious fumes that come out of them is really quite serious.”
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