Research study
EV charging garage fires: what the incident data shows so far
Most of what is published on this is alarmist or promotional. Here is what we could verify, and the longer list we could not.
Written by HyreGarage Research Desk Primary-source research and data analysis
Audited by HyreGarage Research Desk Citation, computation and retrieval-date audit
The finding
No federal dataset counts garage fires caused by EV charging. NTSB Safety Report SR-20/01 records one EV battery fire in a garage, at Lake Forest, California, in 2017, and it began with a high-speed crash, not charging.
CPSC’s recall database lists zero recalls for EV charging equipment. A 2021 HLDI study found EV non-crash fire claims comparable to gas cars.
What did we find?
The evidence is thin, and that is the finding. No federal dataset produces a number for EV or home-battery charging fires that start in a garage. We will not make up a rate the available sample cannot carry.
NTSB Safety Report SR-20/01 documents four lithium-ion EV battery fires. Exactly one happened in a garage, at Lake Forest, California, on August 25, 2017. That case began with a high-speed road crash, not with charging.
On charging, the closest verified comparison is a 2021 Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) study, cited in the Department of Energy’s February 2024 fire primer. It found non-crash fire insurance-claim frequencies comparable between EV models and their conventional counterparts.
We queried CPSC’s own recall database and found zero recalls for EV charging equipment. One garage-adjacent recall exists, for Tesla’s Powerwall 2 home battery. That is stationary storage, not a vehicle charger. Our garage door recall record used the same CPSC database.
What does this page claim, and what not?
With so little data, the limits matter more than any single number. Read these first.
No federal dataset produces one, for reasons set out below. If you see a number elsewhere for a per-vehicle or per-charging-session garage fire rate, check it against a primary source before you trust it.
The Lake Forest, California fire began when a car crashed into the garage at high speed, not while it was charging inside. We report it as the clearest documented case of an EV battery fire inside a garage. It is not evidence about charging risk.
A Powerwall is a stationary lithium-ion battery, often installed in garages next to EV charging equipment (see where home charging gear lives). It is not an EV charger, and we do not present its recall as evidence about chargers.
The national comparisons on this page cover vehicles overall, in all places and situations. None of them isolates “charging in an enclosed home garage” as its own category. The data to do that does not appear to exist yet.
NFIRS, the national fire incident reporting system, has no dedicated code for a lithium-ion or EV-charging ignition source. Our garage fires study documents this in full. Here we state only the conclusion.
A January 2025 Washington State Patrol EV fire study returned HTTP 403 when we tried to retrieve it. We cite no figures from it, because we could not verify them ourselves.
What happened in the one documented EV garage fire?
A crashed Tesla set a garage and house on fire, and its battery reignited several times. On Friday, August 25, 2017, at 6:17 p.m. Pacific time, a 2016 Tesla Model X lost control on a residential street in Orange County, California. Its own event data recorder showed it had accelerated to 82 mph.
It crossed a sidewalk, an embankment and a drainage ditch. It struck a culvert, then a property wall, then an open garage and an unoccupied parked car inside it. Fire spread from the SUV to the parked car, the garage and the house.
The wall between a garage and a house is meant to slow exactly this kind of spread; see our fire separation code study.
Orange County Fire Authority arrived within eight minutes and attacked the vehicle fire with water. By 6:44 p.m. most of the visible fire was out. But fire had reached the attic above the sagging garage, and firefighters worked until about 7:00 p.m. to keep it from the house.
The vehicle fire seemed to be out, then reignited several times. After the SUV was pulled onto the driveway, its high-voltage battery pack, by then identified as the fuel source, reignited again at 8:04 p.m. That was about 45 minutes after the previous extinguishment.
Firefighters said it burned in a “blowtorch” manner, and it needed water at up to 200 gallons per minute.
HyreGarage analysis: NTSB studied this case because it shows something a gas-car garage fire rarely does. The battery reignited again and again, hours after it seemed out. NTSB calls the cause “stranded energy”: energy left in a damaged high-voltage battery. That, not the crash, is why the case matters for EV garage fires.
NTSB used this and three other cases to name two safety issues. One is weak manufacturer emergency-response guidance for first and second responders. The other is gaps in crash-safety standards for high-voltage batteries in high-speed, high-severity collisions.
Neither finding is about charging equipment or home wiring, and we do not stretch it to cover that separate question.
Are EVs more likely to catch fire than gas cars?
Not according to the national data, but none of it isolates garage charging. These are the closest verified comparisons we found, reported at the scope they cover.
| Comparison | What it measures | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Highway Loss Data Institute, April 2021 (cited in DOE’s Feb 2024 primer) | Non-crash fire insurance-claim frequency, EV models vs. their conventional counterparts | Comparable frequencies between EV and non-EV counterparts. This is the comparison closest to a parked or charging car, though not garage-specific |
| NTSB analysis of NHTSA FARS data, 2013–2017 (cited in the same DOE primer) | Fires occurring during FATAL crashes, by fuel type | 1 fire in 51 EV fatal crashes (about 2%) vs. 7,939 fires in over 250,000 conventional-fuel fatal crashes (about 3.2%). A crash-fire comparison, not a charging comparison |
| NFPA, 2022 (cited in the same DOE primer) | All registered US vehicles, any powertrain, involved in a reported fire | 290 million vehicles registered; about 222,000 (0.07%) involved in a reported fire. Not broken out by powertrain or location |
Every figure here is quoted or closely paraphrased from DOE’s "Electric Vehicle Fire Primer for Fleet Managers" (DOE/GO-102024-6132, February 2024), retrieved directly, 2026-09-06. DOE notes that EVs have been in service for less time than gasoline vehicles, which makes rate comparisons hard. We did not try to correct for that.
How many EVs are in HyreGarage’s ten states?
Our contractor database covers ten states. We summed DOE’s EV registration count for each, only to size the population this question could one day apply to. This is not a risk estimate.
| State | Registered EVs, 31 Dec 2023 |
|---|---|
| California | 1,256,646 |
| Florida | 254,878 |
| Texas | 230,125 |
| Washington | 152,101 |
| Georgia | 92,368 |
| Colorado | 90,083 |
| Arizona | 89,798 |
| North Carolina | 70,164 |
| Nevada | 47,361 |
| Tennessee | 33,221 |
Sum across these ten states: 2,316,745 registered EVs, or about 2.32 million. Source: DOE Alternative Fuels Data Center, counts derived with data from Experian Information Solutions, dated December 31, 2023, retrieved 2026-09-06. This sizes exposure only. A fire-risk claim needs a separate incident dataset, which we could not find for garage charging.
Why do lithium-ion battery fires behave differently?
This is about how these fires behave, from the DOE primer and the NTSB report. It says nothing about how often they happen.
Thermal runaway
UL Research Institutes, quoted in the DOE primer, describes it as a state in which "the lithium-ion cell enters an uncontrollable, self-heating state."
Triggers include crash damage, too much heat, water getting in (especially salt water), penetration, vibration, crushing, an internal cell short, or a manufacturing defect.
Stranded energy and reignition
A damaged high-voltage battery can hold a lot of energy even after a fire seems out. NTSB calls this "stranded energy". It creates a real risk of reignition hours, days or even weeks later, as the Lake Forest case shows.
More time and water to put out
The DOE primer names two general ways to fight a high-voltage battery fire. One is to aim a large volume of water at the battery pack. The other is to let it burn out under controlled conditions.
No other tool or product is currently proven to reliably put out a high-voltage battery fire. That is why it can take much longer, and more water, than a similar gas-car fire.
Toxic off-gassing
All vehicle fires can release toxic vapors from burning plastics and upholstery. A lithium-ion battery in thermal runaway can also give off its own toxic gases. The DOE primer flags this hazard for emergency responders.
What does DOE recommend, and how does it apply at home?
These come from DOE’s published guidance for fleet managers. We did not invent them. None is a mechanical or electrical DIY instruction.
DOE recommends fleet managers ask the manufacturer for this before or at delivery, and confirm it is posted publicly. A homeowner can reasonably ask a dealer the same at purchase.
The battery management system (BMS) watches over the battery. DOE recommends asking how it detects a developing problem and what it tells you to do if it flags one. Ask before an incident, not during one.
DOE points to NFPA’s and manufacturers’ own libraries of emergency response guides, which first responders use. Keeping the guide handy (glovebox, registration folder) is a low-cost step DOE recommends for fleets. It is reasonable for a household too.
NHTSA’s interim guidance, cited by DOE, recommends storing a severely damaged EV at least 50 feet from buildings or flammable materials. That is a fleet-yard rule, but it targets the same reignition risk seen in the Lake Forest garage case.
Register it for manufacturer safety notices and act quickly on any recall; see the CPSC recall record in our sources. This is standard practice for any major electrical appliance, not an EV-specific step.
What could we not find?
A national count of garage fires caused by EV charging. NFIRS has no dedicated ignition-source code for this category, as our garage fires study explains. USFA’s own guidance sends departments to a general free-text field instead. Until that changes, no defensible national count exists, and we did not estimate one.
The Washington State Patrol’s January 2025 EV fire study. A direct retrieval attempt returned HTTP 403. We found it through search but cite no figure from it, because we could not verify the content ourselves.
A Massachusetts pilot tracking tool figure. A search result described a state tool that identified 50 lithium-ion battery fires in six months. mass.gov returned HTTP 403 on direct retrieval, so we do not repeat that number. Our garage fires study handles the same source the same way.
A recall for a home charger (Level 1 or Level 2 EVSE). EVSE is the charging equipment itself. We queried CPSC’s SaferProducts API directly under several product-name terms and found none. That is a real absence in the database we could query.
It does not prove no charger has ever had a safety issue. A company could recall a charger under a brand or model name our terms missed, and we did not search company by company.
Whether the Tesla Powerwall 2 recall’s five reported fires happened in a garage. The recall record does not state where units were installed, and we found no source that says. We report the recall’s own figures without adding a location.
One thing we chose not to do: combine “EVs are not more fire-prone than gas cars, nationally” with the missing garage data to suggest garage charging must be safe. Those are different claims on different evidence. Treating the first as proof of the second is a leap the data does not support.
Questions
How common are EV fires that start while charging in a garage?
Is charging an EV in a garage more dangerous than parking a gas car there?
What happened in the Lake Forest, California EV garage fire?
Are there any CPSC recalls for home EV chargers?
What is "stranded energy" in an EV battery?
Can an EV battery fire reignite after it looks out?
Which states in HyreGarage’s market have the most EVs?
Does NFIRS track EV charging garage fires separately?
What should I do if a home battery like a Powerwall overheats or smokes?
Is this page saying EV charging fires in garages are not a concern?
Written and audited by
HyreGarage Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are not a garage door company. We read the agency file, the code record, the standards document or the public register ourselves, compute the figure from it, and publish it with the source and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify. Our own company records cover ten states; nothing national is ever derived from them.
- 10
- states our own company records cover — and the limit of any claim made from them
- 3,901
- garage door companies in the store
- 457
- license records verified against a state board
- 0
- national claims made from a ten-state store
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Injury counts come from CPSC. Housing counts come from the Census file, not from a summary of it. Code history comes from the building commission that adopted the code. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we retrieve the source and do the arithmetic ourselves.
- Every figure carries its retrieval date. Registers change, datasets are revised and codes are amended. A number without the date it was read cannot be checked, so every study states one.
- Fact, calculation and analysis are labeled apart. A quote is a quote, a HyreGarage computation says so, and an interpretation says “HyreGarage analysis”. Presenting our reading of a dataset as something the agency stated would be the easiest way to lose the only thing this desk is for.
- Limitations go above the fold. If a figure is an upper bound, a bracket, or an association rather than a cause, that is said before the figure is quoted rather than in a footnote underneath it.
- No DIY instructions for spring, cable or track work. Those components hold enough stored energy to cause serious injury, and CPSC records the consequences. We describe what has failed and what a competent repair involves; we do not tell you how to do it.
Data as of NTSB Safety Report SR-20/01 and DOE EV fire primer, retrieved 2026-09-06. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold.
Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Sources & retrieval dates
Adding a garage EV charger or home battery?
Ask any installer for the exact equipment model and its listing (UL 2594 for EVSE, UL 9540 for stationary storage). Ask them to confirm dedicated circuit protection sized to the manufacturer’s specification. Matching is still being built, so nothing goes to a company unless you agree.
HyreGarage is not a garage door company, electrician, fire authority or vehicle maker, and does not perform, supervise or warrant any of this work. This page reports what the federal record shows. It is not a risk assessment of any home, vehicle or charger. Electrical work belongs with a licensed electrician following the manufacturer’s instructions.