Weren’t these supposed to save the environment, not destroy it?
A huge fire has been raging out of control in southwestern France, so far destroying over 24,000 acres of forest. Thousands have been evacuated as the inferno keeps spreading, despite the efforts of firefighters. While you might hear some blame the cause of this blaze on climate change, because a temporary spike in temperatures in Europe now qualifies as climate, the actual point of ignition was an electric car.
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That’s right, this little detail is being left out of many big media reports here in the US and elsewhere because it’s an inconvenient detail. While we know gas-burning and even diesel vehicles have started fires when the driver has parked on dry grass, weeds, etc. but this might be the first time an EV has been cited for sparking a wildfire.
Here’s the weird part of this story: so far we have no idea how the electric car started the forest fire. It was near a wooded glen, but we don’t even know the make and model of the EV. Since the French have been pushing electrification big time it could be any one of the many electrified models used in the European nation. Will more information be forthcoming or will this detail of how the fire started be kept under wraps?
This is hardly the first time there’s been a problem with EV fires in France. France rolled out a whole fleet of electric buses, but after two caught fire this year, they were all parked out of caution. While nobody was hurt, these types of incidents call into question the utopian electric car future story spread around in the media so readily.
Was the fire caused by the electric vehicle catching fire? Did the owner park over some dry grass, the hot batteries igniting the blaze? There are so many questions, but for the sake of not making EVs look bad, we might not be entreated with many details.
Source: AA
Images via YouTube
