A Mercedes-Benz Fire Jolts South Korea’s E.V. Transition
The government is aggressively promoting electric cars. But a dramatic blaze in an underground lot has left some potential buyers worried about safety.
By Jin Yu Young
Reporting from Seoul
Published Aug. 27, 2024Updated Aug. 28, 2024
The flames and smoke from a burning Mercedes-Benz electric sedan spread rapidly through the underground parking lot of an apartment complex in South Korea this month. The fire damaged almost 900 cars, and 23 people suffered smoke inhalation.
It took firefighters more than eight hours to put out the blaze, which reached temperatures above 1,500 degrees Celsius, according to officials in Incheon, the city near Seoul where the fire broke out around dawn on Aug. 1.
Fires are much less common in electric vehicles than in gasoline-powered ones, and the cause of the Incheon blaze has not been disclosed. But across South Korea, one of the world’s biggest car producers, it caught the public’s attention because of its scale and intensity, and it raised safety fears that some say could impede the government’s aggressive push toward electric vehicles.
One popular secondhand car sales platform, K Car, said that listings by E.V. owners hoping to sell their vehicles had nearly tripled since the fire.
“I know that E.V.s might be the more environmentally friendly choice, but I’m still afraid of it catching fire,” said Lee Min, an office worker in Seoul who is hoping to buy her first car. “I got even more scared after seeing the Incheon incident.”
News coverage of the fire, and social media’s reaction to it, have focused on perceived risks from battery charging, and car makers and government officials have tried to assuage those fears. The municipal government in Seoul said that by the end of next month, it would prevent E.V.s from being fully charged in parking lots beneath residential buildings, limiting them to 90-percent capacity to prevent the risk of overcharging, though some experts have questioned whether that would do much to improve safety.
Some automakers, including Mercedes-Benz Korea, have offered owners free safety checks on their E.V.s and identified their battery suppliers. The German automaker said a Chinese company, Farasis Energy, had supplied the battery in the sedan that caught fire. Farasis did not respond to a request for comment..
“The popularity of E.V.s is going to decrease for the next while,” said Lee Ho-Guen, a professor of automotive engineering at Daeduk University in the city of Daejeon. “People are scared.”
Before the fire, South Korea’s E.V. market had been growing at a clip, accounting for 9.3 percent of new cars in the country last year, according to official data.
The national government has rolled out subsidies for buyers as well as tax breaks for E.V. makers, part of an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2018 levels. It hopes to end sales of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. The government has spent 371.5 billion Korean won, or about $280 million, to install charging facilities.
There have been almost 200 electric vehicle fires across the nation over the past six and a half years, according to government figures. That does not include a fire at a lithium battery factory near the capital that killed 23 workers in June, one of the country’s worst industrial disasters in recent years.
Lithium, which is used in most E.V. batteries, can store large amounts of energy in a small space, but it burns intensely when on fire. There are no government-approved extinguishers designed for lithium battery fires, according to South Korea’s national fire department.
Electric vehicles catch fire less frequently than other types of vehicles. For every 100,000 E.V.s, there are just 25 fires, compared to 1,530 for gasoline-powered vehicles, according to the United States’ National Transportation and Safety Board. Battery fires, however, can be much larger and more damaging, Mr. Lee, the engineering professor, said.
Despite the statistics, fires have raised concern about E.V.s’ safety in many countries, including the United States. The Incheon blaze resonated in South Korea because many people live in apartment blocks and share underground parking lots.
Security video footage released by news outlets shows smoke coming out of the Mercedes EQE 350 before it burst into flames. The vehicle, which was on a floor with a capacity for about 2,000 cars, was not plugged in at the time, according to the local fire department.
Hundreds of residents have been temporarily moved out of the building while repair work takes place.
Days after the fire, Mathias Vaitl, the president of Mercedes-Benz Korea, said the company would pay 4.5 billion won, or around $3.4 million, to affected residents. Mercedes-Benz said in a statement it was deeply sorry to all impacted by the fire, but did not comment on the cause.
The German automaker released a list of its battery suppliers in the wake of the fire, and other companies followed suit, including Hyundai and Kia. Over the weekend, the government said it would require all automakers to disclose their battery suppliers by early next year.
The government discussed comprehensive measures to alleviate public concern and ensure that such a mass fire doesn’t happen again, a spokeswoman said at a televised briefing on Sunday.
Mr. Lee, the engineering professor, said the government needed to upgrade charging infrastructure and fire-response systems. He said that a 90-percent cap on battery charges, on its own, was unlikely to prevent all fires.
“It’s like asking a smoker to smoke two cigarettes instead of three,” he said.
1,500 degrees Celsius Lithium not the answer.
