One option for electric vehicle fires? Let them burn.

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One option for electric vehicle fires? Let them burn.

In the fall of 2024, a trucking company in Falls Township, Pennsylvania, temporarily stored a storm-damaged Tesla at its yard. A few weeks later, the car burst into flames that grew out of control within seconds, some shooting out 30 feet. A local fire company tried in vain to squelch the blaze, spraying more than 2,000 gallons of water on the vehicle. Eventually, the firefighters requested help from a fire company in neighboring Bristol Township, led by volunteer fire chief Howard McGoldrick. He’d been fighting fires since 1989, but this conflagration was unusual: It was a chemical fire in a lithium-ion battery, meaning it provided its own heat, fuel, and oxygen. And it was incredibly challenging to extinguish. McGoldrick was encountering fires like this more and more often. The previous year, he says, several rowhouses were badly burned after overcharged lithium-ion batteries in racing drones ignited inside. In another nearby incident, old lithium-ion biomedical devices at a scrapyard got soaked in a rainstorm and combusted. The Tesla fire felt like a breaking point. “We were like, ‘Okay, this is just too many incidents in a short amount of time,’” McGoldrick recalls. He went in search of someone who could help his company get better at responding to fires in lithium-ion batteries. He found Patrick Durham. Durham is the owner of (and mustache behind) StacheD Training, one of a growing number of private companies helping first responders learn how to deal with lithium-ion battery safety, including electric-vehicle fires. Although there isn’t solid data on the frequency of EV battery fires, it’s no secret to EV makers that these fires are happening. Yet the manufacturers offer no standardized steps on how to fight them or avoid them in the first place, leaving first responders scrambling to search through each car’s emergency response guide—something that’s hard to do when you’re standing in front of an immolating vehicle. In this void, Durham offers a wealth of resources to first responders, from easy-to-follow video tutorials to hours-long in-person workshops. In 2024 alone, Durham says he trained approximately 2,000 first responders around the country. As more people buy EVs, in part to help address climate change, the need for this training has only grown; in less than two years, Durham’s YouTube channel has attracted almost 30,000 subscribers. (The US doesn’t currently collect data on the frequency or causes of EV fires, but this year the US Fire Administration and the Fire Safety Research Institute are rolling out a new data collection system for fire departments.) A circumspect man with a shaved head, brown eyes, and a thick horseshoe mustache framing his mouth, Durham previously worked as a mechanical engineer developing battery boxes for EVs. He is also a volunteer firefighter, and in 2020 he offered his first training on fires in lithium-ion batteries to his local department. From there, his reputation spread by word of mouth. Today, StacheD Training is Durham’s full-time work. He’s also the captain of his local volunteer fire department in Troy, Michigan. As more EVs hit the road, what worries Durham most isn’t just the growing likelihood of battery fires—it’s their intensity. “The severity of the fire is significant compared to a regular vehicle fire,” he says. “The traditional car fires that you and I grew up with—the majority of those always start in the engine compartment,” says Jim Stevenson, a fire chief from rural Michigan who has taken Durham’s training. “So we basically get there, we pop the car hood, and then we put out the fire from there, and if it gets into the inner compartment of the car? Not a big deal. You spray it down with the hose, and it’s out in no time.” With EV fires, Stevenson says, “it’s just a completely different monster.” SHAWN HAZEN An EV battery is essentially a tightly packed array of thousands of cells, each of which ranges from approximately the size and shape of an AA battery to the size of a legal envelope, depending on the battery model. If a single cell gets damaged–such as by getting crushed, overcharged, or waterlogged–that cell can heat uncontrollably in a process called thermal runaway. It will release so much heat and flammable gas that it generates its own fire, which spreads to the other cells. Older lithium-ion battery packs exploded “like a pipe bomb” when that happened, Durham says; today’s battery packs have release valves so that during thermal runaway they avoid an explosion by instead spewing flames in what Durham describes as “essentially a blowtorch.” The location of an EV’s battery—underneath the car, between its axles, within a protective case—complicates things further. The batteries are much safer from collision damage than they would be under the hood, but they are also much harder to reach and douse if they ignite. The result? Fires such as one at an Illinois Rivian plant in 2024, where one EV caught fire and approximately 50 cars parked nearby ended up burning. Or one in Hollywood, Florida, in 2023, where a Tesla was accidentally driven off a dock and burst into flames even though it was underwater. Durham worries that if an EV battery catches fire in a high-speed crash, it will burn so intensely that first responders won’t be able to save anyone inside the vehicle. Putting out a fire in an internal-combustion car might take as little as 30 minutes and a few hundred gallons of water, he notes, while an electric car battery fire could take upwards of 4,000 gallons of water and many hours to extinguish—and much more for commercial trucks. Indeed, when a Tesla Semi drove off Interstate 80 in Northern California in 2024 and burst into flames, first responders had to douse it with 50,000 gallons of water and close the highway for 15 hours. What’s more, with EVs, it’s never entirely clear whether the fire is truly out. Cars may ignite, or reignite, weeks or even months after the battery is damaged or a battery fire is initially suppressed. Durham points to one salvaged Tesla in California that burst into flames 308 days after it had flooded in a Florida hurricane. The vehicle hadn’t initially ignited, but saltwater intrusion into the battery pack eventually corroded it enough to produce a chemical fire leading to thermal runaway. According to Durham, the simple truth is that the best way to manage EV fires right now is to let them burn—while making sure to protect the surrounding area, including other vehicles and people’s homes. Allowing the fire to run its course will ideally also destroy any cells that might otherwise ignite later. This goes against firefighters’ instincts. When they respond to EV fires, they will spray water “because they want to do something to fix the problem,” he says. [But] … it’s not really doing anything.” Stevenson worries about how bystanders will perceive first responders waiting out a blaze. “It’s going to be ugly,” he says, “because the public’s going to see us standing on the side [of the] road just watching it burn, which looks bad for us.” But at the same time, he adds, “we don’t have [an] actual way of getting to the battery to knock it out.” For now, Durham’s training focuses on the options that first responders do have with EV fires. An important if simple one is using a fire blanket to cover a vehicle and prevent the blaze from spreading as it burns out. Although they hadn’t yet received Durham’s training, that’s exactly what McGoldrick and his crew did when they responded to the burning Tesla last fall: After the facility used a forklift to move the burning car to an isolated part of the yard, first responders covered it with a fire blanket. The car reignited several times over the next few days, McGoldrick says, “but it was contained. We just put it in the middle of an open lot and basically let it go.” It’s a significant cultural shift that first responders need to make, Durham says, and there’s another one, too: being extra-vigilant about the personal protective equipment they wear from the first moment they arrive at a burning EV. There isn’t yet enough information to compare the toxicity of EV fires and those in gas-powered cars, but Durham warns that first responders could inhale high levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and heavy metals from burning EVs. Overall, Durham says, he is not against EVs, but he thinks there needs to be a change in attitude to handle them safely. When an EV battery catches fire, he says, “until that battery has been removed from the vehicle and shredded and fully recycled, it’s always going be a hazard.” Maya L. Kapoor is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes about climate change, biodiversity, and environmental justice.

A local fire company tried in vain to squelch the blaze, spraying more than 2,000 gallons of water on the vehicle. Eventually, the firefighters requested help from a fire company in neighboring Bristol Township, led by volunteer fire chief Howard McGoldrick. He’d been fighting fires since 1989, but this conflagration was unusual: It was a chemical fire in a lithium-ion battery, meaning it provided its own heat, fuel, and oxygen. And it was incredibly challenging to extinguish.

McGoldrick was encountering fires like this more and more often. The previous year, he says, several rowhouses were badly burned after overcharged lithium-ion batteries in racing drones ignited inside. In another nearby incident, old lithium-ion biomedical devices at a scrapyard got soaked in a rainstorm and combusted.

The Tesla fire felt like a breaking point. “We were like, ‘Okay, this is just too many incidents in a short amount of time,’” McGoldrick recalls. He went in search of someone who could help his company get better at responding to fires in lithium-ion batteries. He found Patrick Durham.

Durham is the owner of (and mustache behind) StacheD Training, one of a growing number of private companies helping first responders learn how to deal with lithium-ion battery safety, including electric-vehicle fires.

Although there isn’t solid data on the frequency of EV battery fires, it’s no secret to EV makers that these fires are happening. Yet the manufacturers offer no standardized steps on how to fight them or avoid them in the first place, leaving first responders scrambling to search through each car’s emergency response guide—something that’s hard to do when you’re standing in front of an immolating vehicle.

In this void, Durham offers a wealth of resources to first responders, from easy-to-follow video tutorials to hours-long in-person workshops. In 2024 alone, Durham says he trained approximately 2,000 first responders around the country. As more people buy EVs, in part to help address climate change, the need for this training has only grown; in less than two years, Durham’s YouTube channel has attracted almost 30,000 subscribers. (The US doesn’t currently collect data on the frequency or causes of EV fires, but this year the US Fire Administration and the Fire Safety Research Institute are rolling out a new data collection system for fire departments.)

A circumspect man with a shaved head, brown eyes, and a thick horseshoe mustache framing his mouth, Durham previously worked as a mechanical engineer developing battery boxes for EVs. He is also a volunteer firefighter, and in 2020 he offered his first training on fires in lithium-ion batteries to his local department. From there, his reputation spread by word of mouth. Today, StacheD Training is Durham’s full-time work. He’s also the captain of his local volunteer fire department in Troy, Michigan.

As more EVs hit the road, what worries Durham most isn’t just the growing likelihood of battery fires—it’s their intensity. “The severity of the fire is significant compared to a regular vehicle fire,” he says.

“The traditional car fires that you and I grew up with—the majority of those always start in the engine compartment,” says Jim Stevenson, a fire chief from rural Michigan who has taken Durham’s training. “So we basically get there, we pop the car hood, and then we put out the fire from there, and if it gets into the inner compartment of the car? Not a big deal. You spray it down with the hose, and it’s out in no time.” With EV fires, Stevenson says, “it’s just a completely different monster.”

An EV battery is essentially a tightly packed array of thousands of cells, each of which ranges from approximately the size and shape of an AA battery to the size of a legal envelope, depending on the battery model. If a single cell gets damaged–such as by getting crushed, overcharged, or waterlogged–that cell can heat uncontrollably in a process called thermal runaway. It will release so much heat and flammable gas that it generates its own fire, which spreads to the other cells.

Older lithium-ion battery packs exploded “like a pipe bomb” when that happened, Durham says; today’s battery packs have release valves so that during thermal runaway they avoid an explosion by instead spewing flames in what Durham describes as “essentially a blowtorch.” The location of an EV’s battery—underneath the car, between its axles, within a protective case—complicates things further. The batteries are much safer from collision damage than they would be under the hood, but they are also much harder to reach and douse if they ignite.

The result? Fires such as one at an Illinois Rivian plant in 2024, where one EV caught fire and approximately 50 cars parked nearby ended up burning. Or one in Hollywood, Florida, in 2023, where a Tesla was accidentally driven off a dock and burst into flames even though it was underwater.

Durham worries that if an EV battery catches fire in a high-speed crash, it will burn so intensely that first responders won’t be able to save anyone inside the vehicle. Putting out a fire in an internal-combustion car might take as little as 30 minutes and a few hundred gallons of water, he notes, while an electric car battery fire could take upwards of 4,000 gallons of water and many hours to extinguish—and much more for commercial trucks. Indeed, when a Tesla Semi drove off Interstate 80 in Northern California in 2024 and burst into flames, first responders had to douse it with 50,000 gallons of water and close the highway for 15 hours.

What’s more, with EVs, it’s never entirely clear whether the fire is truly out. Cars may ignite, or reignite, weeks or even months after the battery is damaged or a battery fire is initially suppressed. Durham points to one salvaged Tesla in California that burst into flames 308 days after it had flooded in a Florida hurricane. The vehicle hadn’t initially ignited, but saltwater intrusion into the battery pack eventually corroded it enough to produce a chemical fire leading to thermal runaway.

According to Durham, the simple truth is that the best way to manage EV fires right now is to let them burn—while making sure to protect the surrounding area, including other vehicles and people’s homes. Allowing the fire to run its course will ideally also destroy any cells that might otherwise ignite later.

This goes against firefighters’ instincts. When they respond to EV fires, they will spray water “because they want to do something to fix the problem,” he says. [But] … it’s not really doing anything.”

Stevenson worries about how bystanders will perceive first responders waiting out a blaze. “It’s going to be ugly,” he says, “because the public’s going to see us standing on the side [of the] road just watching it burn, which looks bad for us.” But at the same time, he adds, “we don’t have [an] actual way of getting to the battery to knock it out.”

For now, Durham’s training focuses on the options that first responders do have with EV fires. An important if simple one is using a fire blanket to cover a vehicle and prevent the blaze from spreading as it burns out. Although they hadn’t yet received Durham’s training, that’s exactly what McGoldrick and his crew did when they responded to the burning Tesla last fall: After the facility used a forklift to move the burning car to an isolated part of the yard, first responders covered it with a fire blanket. The car reignited several times over the next few days, McGoldrick says, “but it was contained. We just put it in the middle of an open lot and basically let it go.”

It’s a significant cultural shift that first responders need to make, Durham says, and there’s another one, too: being extra-vigilant about the personal protective equipment they wear from the first moment they arrive at a burning EV. There isn’t yet enough information to compare the toxicity of EV fires and those in gas-powered cars, but Durham warns that first responders could inhale high levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and heavy metals from burning EVs.

Overall, Durham says, he is not against EVs, but he thinks there needs to be a change in attitude to handle them safely. When an EV battery catches fire, he says, “until that battery has been removed from the vehicle and shredded and fully recycled, it’s always going be a hazard.”

Maya L. Kapoor is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes about climate change, biodiversity, and environmental justice.

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Executive Roundtable: AI Infrastructure Under Pressure

California joins US states clamping down on data center gold rush

“Dismissing fears around water consumption, for example, by showing a spreadsheet at a local planning committee meeting, doesn’t resolve concerns for a community that is already suspicious,” he said. Community opposition “is real, and it’s everywhere,” and the new strategic pillar for data center builders and operators is social outreach, Kimball noted. Those proposing data centers must be able to provide credible answers about usage and community impacts, listen to concerns, and commit to transparency. Most enterprises aren’t building gigawatt campuses, he pointed out, but they are paying the price downstream in colocation availability, lead times, pricing, and other factors. Predictability is the big question, supply is already tight, and every delayed project removes capacity factored into forecasts.

Communities are blocking data centers before they’re even proposed

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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