You may be aware that the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) is currently consulting on updating the National Construction Code (NCC). It does this every 3 years. Consultation is open for another 6 weeks and closes on 1 July.
The NCC covers all aspects of building but two areas of interest to EV owners are the proposed codes for public carparks and for making provision for charging EVs in homes and public buildings:
Note this statement says "any building" which would include private residences, and makes no distinction between BEVs, PHEVs and hybrids. FRNSW Commissioner Jeremy Fewtrell retreated from that at a NSW Road Safety Inquiry in to Electric And Hybrid Vehicle Batteries on 30 April, saying the intent was not to require this in home garages, only smoke detectors, but the position statement has not been amended to state that. While FRNSW has no jurisdiction in this area, and what they say does not in any way represent a "rule" that anyone needs to follow, they are likely to make a submission to the NCC consultation recommending controls along these lines be mandated as part of the code.
I plan to make a submission after reading the relevant the material - of which there is a lot. FRNSW seems to have relied a lot on two papers released by the AFAC (Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council) which frankly I think are low on science and data, and heavy on inference and hand-waving.
A much better paper is this one by consulting engineers Arup on fire safety in car parks. I would actually encourage everyone to read it - it's one of the best documents I have ever read on EV fires due to the depth of research, data presented, and level-headed conclusions. The key parts are Sections 5 to 7.
There is a massive amount of interesting data in here that can be used to tackle head-on a lot of the FUD people post in various social media forums. Things like:
So if anyone has the time and inclination to read all this stuff and make their own submission, I would encourage you to do so.
The NCC covers all aspects of building but two areas of interest to EV owners are the proposed codes for public carparks and for making provision for charging EVs in homes and public buildings:
- PCD 2025 - Carpark fire safety improvements
- PCD 2025 - Assisting future electrification and EV charging in homes
Note this statement says "any building" which would include private residences, and makes no distinction between BEVs, PHEVs and hybrids. FRNSW Commissioner Jeremy Fewtrell retreated from that at a NSW Road Safety Inquiry in to Electric And Hybrid Vehicle Batteries on 30 April, saying the intent was not to require this in home garages, only smoke detectors, but the position statement has not been amended to state that. While FRNSW has no jurisdiction in this area, and what they say does not in any way represent a "rule" that anyone needs to follow, they are likely to make a submission to the NCC consultation recommending controls along these lines be mandated as part of the code.
I plan to make a submission after reading the relevant the material - of which there is a lot. FRNSW seems to have relied a lot on two papers released by the AFAC (Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council) which frankly I think are low on science and data, and heavy on inference and hand-waving.
A much better paper is this one by consulting engineers Arup on fire safety in car parks. I would actually encourage everyone to read it - it's one of the best documents I have ever read on EV fires due to the depth of research, data presented, and level-headed conclusions. The key parts are Sections 5 to 7.
There is a massive amount of interesting data in here that can be used to tackle head-on a lot of the FUD people post in various social media forums. Things like:
- Data from Norway shows that EV fires are much less common than fossil fuel vehicle fires (p.40), e.g. in 2022 there were 22 fires involving EVs (and this includes plug-in hybrids) while there were 20 fires involving hybrids and 703 involving petrol/diesel vehicles. Note this includes vehicles involved in collisions. In 2022, EVs/PHEVs represented 27.5% of all passenger vehicles on Norwegian roads, but were only involved in 2.9% of all fires. Implying that fossil fuelled vehicles are nearly 10 times more likely to be involved in a fire. This study did not indentify how many of the 22 EVs fires were actually started by the battery.
- Case studies of major fires in car parks internationally - of which only 4 were caused by EVs, collectively damaging a total of 9 vehicles. The largest and most damaging fires resulted from the ignition of fossil fuelled vehicles. The most recent one (which is actually not listed) was the Luton Airport car park fire in October last year which destroyed 1400 cars and was started by a diesel vehicle. Another fire at the Liverpool Echo Arena carpark in 2017 also destroyed 1400 cars.
- Did you know that on average in Australia there are 352 fires in carparks per year? An average of almost one a day! Do these make the news?!?!
- The paper cites a number of studies and experiments burning fossil fuelled vehicles and EVs, measuing the "Heat Release Rate" and showing that EV fires, in general, do not burn hotter than ICE vehicle fires (see pages 49 to 52).
- Toxic gas release is not worse from EVs fires compared to ICE (p.52) - "similar quantities of CO2, CO, NO and NO2 were released from BEVs and ICEVs" and that "BEVs are not unique in producing toxic gases – all fires produce toxic gases".
- Water runoff from Li-Ion fires is not more polluted either and a lot of the pollutants are similar to fossil fuel fires (p.55) - with the major difference being lead released in higher concentrations in fossil fuel fires.
So if anyone has the time and inclination to read all this stuff and make their own submission, I would encourage you to do so.
