Electric vehicles have suffered from a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) being spread about them over the years by various vested interests wanting to slow the EV Transition – but one of the biggest furphies is that EVs catch fire a lot.

In fact, as I wrote in my article here, EV fires are exceedingly rare: per 100,000 new vehicles sold, many fewer EVs catch fire than either petrol or hybrid vehicles.

However, Insurance firm Axa Switzerland recently accidentally tried to add to the “FUD” surrounding EV fires by staging a simulated EV crash (using a Tesla Model S) that purportedly showed a typical way in which a battery can be damaged and catch fire due to such an event. (See video here).

However, there were a few caveats to the event: the battery pack had been removed ‘for safety reasons’ (meaning the vehicle had to be towed through the ‘crash event’), the actual damage type caused in the simulated crash was in fact not capable of breaching the battery pack and, to add insult to injury, pyrotechnics were used to create the headline creating photo opportunity of a burning EV.

It seems the PR department wanted a good headline-creating event to get AXA Switzerland into the news. As it turned out, AXA Switzerland ended up making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

With such things as the doors springing open whilst still in the air (which they could only do if the door locks have been removed), the rear bumper falling off for no apparent reason and no discernible damage to the underside of the car: it did not take long for their fakery to be caught out.

As a result, within days of the video’s release, AXA Switzerland issued an apology that effectively said their intention was to “point out the danger” of a cell fire that could potentially result from damage to the underside of an electric vehicle.

Unfortunately for AXA Switzerland, the video also shows negligible damage was done to the underside of the car as a result of the crash – as EV batteries are designed specifically to withstand much worse events, AXA’s demo as it was set-up seriously overstated the danger from a dented battery pack.

Thankfully, EV FUD like this is becoming harder to pedal as the public becomes more familiar and informed about EVs, so hopefully we will see fewer examples of EV FUD being accepted as ‘fact’ as the general public use their growing knowledge of EVs to sift fact from Hollywood-style fiction.

As a final note (and I have to give credit to AXA Switzerland for quickly apologising for the faked EV fire) – they still managed through their apology to potentially perpetuate another bit of EV FUD.

In this case, it was that EVs deserve higher insurance premiums than ICE vehicles.

Included in the apology was this statement: “… compared to drivers of traditional combustion vehicles, owners of electric cars are responsible for 50% more collisions causing damage to their own vehicle. They also show drivers of powerful electric vehicles are more likely to cause damage to their own vehicle or to third-party vehicles”.

One could read that as painting all EVs as being an equal risk to high-performance ones and charging higher insurance premiums accordingly.

Given that for ICE vehicles, performance car insurance premiums are priced higher than standard cars, seems AXA Switzerland are attempting to justify charging higher premiums for all EVs (as some insurance companies currently do), rather than pricing them differently for high-performance Teslas, Porsches and so on as is done for the ICE vehicle insurance market.

It seems we still have a way to go before all EV urban myths are consigned to the dustbin.