Thursday, August 8, 2024

Electric vehicle in South Korean underground parking spontaneously combusts, eight hour fire destroys vehicles, causes building evacuations for hundreds

 It took just seconds for an underground South Korean residential parking lot to be engulfed in flames. The culprit: a Mercedes-Benz EQE electric vehicle that hadn’t been charging. 

The blaze incinerated dozens of cars nearby, scorched a further 100 vehicles and forced hundreds of residents to emergency shelters as the buildings above the parking lot lost power and electricity. Nobody died, but the fire took eight hours to extinguish. ...

The country had already been on edge about battery-related fires, after a blaze at a lithium-battery factory in late June that killed nearly two dozen people. The Mercedes EV blaze, in the port city of Incheon, occurred last week. Then, on Tuesday, a Kia EV6 caught fire in a parking lot in a central South Korean town.

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