New Euralarm guidance document on fire safety of EV parking garages

Euralarm has published a new guidance document that focuses on the fire safety of parking garages for electric vehicles.

The new Euralarm guidance document discusses the statistics, research on fire behaviours and safety measures associated with both electric and combustion vehicles, providing an overview for safety professionals, and policymakers.

The scope of the document is to provide factual information on the fire risk of electrical vehicles in parking facilities in comparison with other types of vehicles and to guide through solutions that can be applied. The guidance document focuses on electric (EV) and conventional (ICE) vehicles. Where parking garages also offer storage of micro-mobility, e.g. e-bikes and e-scooters, such as for security or employee/resident convenience, the increased risk of this must not be ignored. Where such is also provided with charging facilities, the risk and need for protection increase and the content of this guidance should be applied with scale.

Background

Electric vehicles (EVs) present unique risks such as the thermal runaway propagation within their traction batteries.

The nature of EV construction is to protect the battery cells from weather, surface water spray, and damage in normal use, and this presents a challenge in delivering extinguishant to the cells. Therefore, it is extremely challenging, if not impossible, to stop in-cell thermal runaway inside the traction battery. or slowing cell to cell propagation.

The increase size of modern cars - to those of the 1970s, including internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and modern EVs - is well documented, however the size of most car parking spaces has not retrospectively been changed. The resulting increased proximity and reduction in space between cars, speeds car-to-car fire propagation which is exacerbated by the significantly higher plastic content of modern cars. Increased parking density, such as car stackers and the probable emergence of autonomous parking, compounds this further still. Even with new construction, allowing for larger cars, there has been car-to-car spread evidenced.

Copies of the new guidance document can be downloaded from the Euralarm website.