The National Transportation Safety Board says the U.S. is woefully unprepared to deal with EV fires, which require different strategies than gasoline vehicle fires.
31 percent of fire departments don't train for EV fires, and half say they don't have special protocols in place to deal with EVs after a crash, the agency's report found.
Note the caveats, though. There are more than 29,000 fire departments in the U.S. This survey only asked for information from 32 of them.
If you have been reading Car and Driver for a while, there's a decent chance you remember the news when a Tesla Model S caught fire in 2013. Or that the NTSB was investigating Tesla fires in 2019. Or when a Porsche Taycan went up in flames earlier this year. You might remember those things, because electric-vehicle fires make headlines.