Model 3 catches fire near Goulburn, as discarded MG battery destroys five cars at airport

A Tesla Model 3 has caught fire near Goulburn on the same night that a discarded battery from an MG electric SUV caught fire and destroyed five vehicles parked in a lot at Sydney Airport.

The fire in the Model 3 occurred after debris from a truck struck its battery – and is believed to be the first EV fire in Australia caused by road debris.

The Model 3 fire occurred on the same night as a widely reported fire at Sydney Airport, where a battery pack that had been taken out of a MG ZS EV – not a luxury EV as has been reported – and stored on the ground nearby caught fire and destroyed five vehicles, including the MG.

The Model 3 fire was the first EV fire for the local Penrose Rural Fire Brigade. It posted on Facebook that it took more than half an hour to extinguish. The driver and passenger had got out safely.

On the airport incident, An MG Motor Australia spokesperson told TheDriven that they’re aware of the incident and are working with the Fire and Rescue NSW investigators to piece together circumstances surrounding the unusual incident.

“This is unfortunate and as far as we’re aware, is an isolated incident. MG Motor Australia takes all safety concerns very seriously. Our customer’s safety in our vehicles continues to be of paramount importance and it remains our objective to have all vehicles subject to any damage or issues rectified as soon as possible,” they said.

Such fires feature so-called “thermal runaway” that can occur in lithium batteries when a pack is damaged and short circuits. Chemical reactions in the battery trigger an uncontrollable increase in temperature and then a fire. 

EV fires remain rare, and at a significantly lower rate than petrol and diesel vehicles. EV Fire Safe has verified 415 passenger EV battery fires around the world since 2010, of which about seven have been caused by road debris, says project director Emma Sutcliffe.

“With every single fire there’s been some kind of abuse that’s happened to that car for it to go into thermal runaway,” Sutcliffe told The Driven.

The MG ZS however was a “weird one” and the details are yet to come out about why the battery was on the ground and for how long, she says.

Fire and Rescue NSW Superintendent Adam Dewberry told TheDriven the car at the airport had suffered mechanical damage, and says EV car fires are not a concern for the service, considering there are some 150,000 EVs in the state and fires are vanishingly rare.

“Not for cars, they’re stable, they’re safe they’ve got great technology around them. They meet great standards,” he says.

“Where we have a bigger concern is the smaller lithium ion batteries in EV bikes and scooters, as we are seeing an increasing number of fires in them.”

No more bush mechanics with EVs

Sutcliffe’s team identified the airport car fire as an MG ZS from the video provided by Fire and Rescue NSW, although Dewberry says they haven’t confirmed this yet. 

“It’s a bit of a mystery as to what the background to that is,” she says, adding that taking lithium batteries out of vehicles to do some on-site tinkering is definitely not recommended. 

“We can’t use these bush mechanics for electric vehicles anymore. The risk is too high of something going wrong,” she says.

“It needs to be done in a controlled environment by a qualified person with consideration to fire safety, because if the battery has been dropped out because of some kind of fault or previous impact on that battery pack, it’s what we deem as a higher risk.

“That controlled environment should include a hoist and dropping the battery pack on to some kind of trolley, so it can be moved without being picked up by a forklift. It should be in an environment with some kind of CCTV monitoring and put under a fire blanket, so if it does go into thermal runaway it doesn’t spread.”

This is to prevent the risk of a secondary fire.

Until a damaged lithium battery is shredded, there is a risk – even months later – of it catching fire again and again. 

Tesla batteries have a sacrificial plate that drops damaged cells out of the car to protect against thermal runaway, MG ZS models however don’t although they do include a design that compartmentalises individual battery cells to improve cooling in normal operations and lower the risk of thermal runaway consuming the entire pack.

On government radars 

Fire services in Australia are developing processes for dealing with thermal runaway fires, but these are still worrying the United Firefighters Union of Australia and prompted charging provider Jet Charge to demand national standards on fire safety requirements.

EV fires are on the federal government agenda. The National Electric Vehicle Strategy, released this year, identified EV fires as a risk and the government has proposed funding fire safety guidance and training around battery safety.

According to EV Fire Safe data only about 40 per cent of fires in EVs involve the battery. For example, this week 10 EVs caught fire in a German car park, but so far it doesn’t appear that the batteries were involved, Sutcliffe says.