LETTER: Electric car fire truths shared
Published 9:00 am Saturday, March 28, 2026
In response to Bob Johnston’s EV ‘bomb’ letter suggesting that all electric cars will inevitably blow up.
At first reading, I thought the dire warnings were so ridiculous that it must be tongue in cheek. In case it wasn’t, I’ll go over a few statistics to set things straight.
Firstly, as an electric car builder Elon Musk was concerned about electric car fires so he checked through his records and found that from 2012 to 2021 there was one Tesla fire for every 210 million miles traveled.
By comparison US Department of Transport reported a vehicle fire in only 19 million miles travelled.
Clearly this indicates gas cars catch fire a lot more often than Teslas.
No doubt Mr. Johnston will claim these are biased statistics because they are from an electric car manufacturer, so lets look at Norway.
Norway has the highest number of electric vehicles per capita worldwide and it’s increasing. 95.9 per cent of all their new passenger car registrations in 2025 were electric.
So what do Norwegian emergency services have to say about car fires in the first half of 2025?
They recorded 403 vehicle fires. Of these, 359 were gas cars, 12 hybrids and only 30 fully electric cars.
So the share of electric vehicle fires in the total number is 10 per cent.
These are totally unbiased statistics confirming gas cars are much more likely to catch fire than electric cars.
So, Mr. Johnston, I suggest you check the facts before sounding off.
Mike Baxter
