A new report from UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute is aiming to close a persistent knowledge gap for the fire service: how electric vehicle fires actually behave compared to gasoline vehicle fires, and which suppression tactics genuinely work once a battery pack is burning. The report, titled “Full-Scale Electric Vehicle Fire Experiments and Recommendations for Fire Incident Response,” was released this week and is built on eighteen full-scale vehicle burns conducted under controlled conditions. The research team ran nine free burns, meaning fires allowed to progress without any suppression applied, to establish a baseline comparison between EVs and internal combustion vehicles. It then burned nine additional EVs to test how common suppression tactics performed against a battery fire, including water alone, EV-specific fire blankets, and water combined with an added suppression agent. Every EV tested was fully charged before ignition. Fires were started with a propane burner and allowed to grow for six minutes before crews began suppression, a delay chosen specifically to mirror typical fire department response times across North America. Fire Behavior Looks More Alike Than Different One of the report’s central findings works against a common assumption: that EV fires are a fundamentally different, more volatile hazard than fires in gas-powered vehicles. According to the free-burn data, EV and internal combustion vehicle fires tracked closely in fire growth rate, peak fire size, and overall fire duration. The EVs did release more total energy on average, but researchers attributed that difference to the added mass of the vehicles rather than to some unique property of battery combustion. Adam Barowy, principal research engineer for the Fire Safety Research Institute, framed the findings as reassurance for a fire service still adjusting to a rapidly growing fleet of battery-powered vehicles. Barowy said the research is meant to help first