EV Car Fire Blankets: What an 8m x 6m Blanket Actually Does (and Who Needs One)

Equipment guide · Electric vehicles

A car-sized fire blanket is one of the few pieces of safety equipment where the buying decision has almost nothing to do with how likely a fire is. It has everything to do with what happens in the fifteen minutes after one starts.

If you run a workshop, a dealership, a service centre, a fleet depot or a basement car park, you have probably had the EV fire conversation at least once in the last year. Usually it arrives as a question from an insurer, a building manager, a WHS officer or a nervous board member, and usually it is framed the wrong way round: how likely is it that one of these things catches fire?

That is the wrong question, and the honest answer to it does not help you. Here is the better one: if a vehicle in my building goes up, what stops it becoming every vehicle in my building?

Start with the honest numbers

We sell fire safety equipment, so it would be commercially convenient for us to tell you electric vehicles are a fire waiting to happen. They are not, and the data is not close.

EV FireSafe, an Australian research body funded by the Department of Defence to track electric vehicle battery fires, had positively identified 772 high voltage battery fires worldwide as of October 2025. Against an estimated 78 million plug-in vehicles on the road globally, that is roughly one in 100,000 (Schmidt, 2026).

The lithium-ion fire problem in Australia is real, but it is not sitting in your car park. Fire and Rescue NSW attended 315 lithium-ion battery fires in 2024/25. None of them involved an electric vehicle. The three leading sources were e-mobility devices such as e-bikes and e-scooters (111), small portable devices such as laptops (99), and battery chargers (31) (Schmidt, 2026).

So why would a workshop or a car park buy a blanket sized for a passenger car?

Because the number that hurts you is spread, not ignition

On 10 October 2023, a vehicle drove into Terminal Car Park 2 at London Luton Airport already showing light smoke from the engine bay. The driver did not notice until the third floor. Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service later confirmed the cause as an accidental electrical fault or component failure, and confirmed the vehicle was diesel powered, not a hybrid or an EV (Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, 2024).

We use that example deliberately, because it was not an EV. It makes the point cleanly: the risk in a car park, a workshop or a depot is density. Vehicles parked close together, under a roof, with no sprinklers or with sprinklers not designed for running fuel and battery fires. The ignition source is almost incidental. What matters is whether anything on site can interrupt the spread in the first few minutes, before the brigade arrives.

An EV changes the character of that fire rather than the arithmetic of it. Battery thermal runaway produces jet-like directional flames at temperatures reported up to 1,000°C, dense vapour clouds, audible popping as cells fail, toxic gas including hydrogen fluoride, and the capacity to reignite hours or even days later from stranded energy in unburnt cells (Larsson et al., 2017; Schmidt, 2026). It is harder to suppress and it takes longer. Containment matters more, not less.

What an 8m x 6m blanket actually does

A car fire blanket is a containment tool. Deployed over a burning vehicle, it does three things:

• Restricts oxygen to the surface fire. It smothers the flaming combustion of the cabin, tyres, fluids and trim, which is the part of a vehicle fire that actually spreads.
• Blocks radiant heat. This is the one people underrate. Radiant heat is how a fire in bay three becomes a fire in bays two and four. A high temperature fabric barrier between the burning vehicle and the next one buys the brigade a very different scene on arrival.
• Buys time and keeps people back. A covered vehicle is a contained hazard with a defined boundary, instead of an open fire that staff feel compelled to approach with a hose reel.

And what it does not do

We are equally direct about this, and you should be suspicious of any supplier who is not.

Specifications, and what the standards actually cover

Size	8m x 6m, sized to fully cover a passenger EV or hybrid
Material	High silica fibreglass fabric, silicone coated
Weight	Approximately 25kg
Maximum working temperature	1,100°C (manufacturer rating)
Fire classification	A2-s1, d0 to EN 13501-1:2018, tested by SGS
Warranty	12 months
Use	Single use. Replace after any fire exposure.

Two points of honesty on the standards, because this is where most of the marketing in our category quietly falls over.

There is no Australian Standard for lithium-ion battery fire equipment. AS 1841 does not yet carry a lithium-ion classification, which we have confirmed in discussions with CSIRO and SGI. That means no Australian certification pathway currently exists for this class of product. Any supplier telling you their blanket is "Australian Standard certified" for lithium-ion fires is describing something that does not exist.

The EN 13501-1 classification covers the fabric, not the product. Our A2-s1, d0 result from SGS is a reaction-to-fire classification of the blanket material, determined through EN 13823 and EN ISO 1716 testing. A2 is the highest practical non-combustible band for a material of this type, s1 means very limited smoke production, and d0 means no flaming droplets. It is a rigorous, independent, verifiable result. It is not a product type approval, and we do not present it as one.

Getting the size right

The 8m x 6m is specified to drape a full passenger vehicle with enough margin to reach the ground on all sides, which is what makes the oxygen restriction work. Undersize it and you have an expensive bonnet cover.

Most sites that buy the car blanket also end up with a smaller one, because the actual statistical risk on a commercial site is usually the e-bike in the staff room or the tool battery on charge overnight, not the fleet EV in bay six. Both risks are worth covering, and they are covered by different equipment.

Deployment reality: plan for two people

This is a 25kg blanket. That weight is the whole point, it is what lets the fabric sit down over a vehicle and stay there in wind and thermal updraft, but it means deployment is a two-person job.

• Call 000 before you touch anything. Specify that the vehicle is electric or hybrid so the responding crew can plan for it.
• Two people, one on each end. Approach from upwind and from the side, never the front or rear where jet flames vent.
• Deploy from the front of the vehicle backwards, walking it over the roof and letting it fall to the ground on both sides.
• Then get clear and stay clear. Do not lift the blanket. Do not go back for anything.
• Practise once, dry, when it arrives. Sixty to ninety seconds is achievable with practice and much slower without it. Store it in its bag, mounted or in a labelled cabinet, close to where vehicles are parked or charged and not behind them.

Who this is actually specified for

If EV fires are rare, the honest answer to "should I buy one" is that it depends entirely on your consequence exposure rather than your probability exposure. The sites where it makes sense are the ones where a single vehicle fire has somewhere to go:

• Workshops, service centres and dealerships, where damaged, recalled or post-collision vehicles are parked indoors, often with adjacent stock worth seven figures.
• Multi-storey and basement car parks, where spread, smoke logging and structural heat are the real loss drivers, and where Fire and Rescue NSW has recommended treating EV parking and charging as a special hazard in large buildings (Schmidt, 2026).
• Fleet depots and council yards, where vehicles are parked in rows and charged overnight unattended.
• Strata and body corporate buildings, where the car park sits directly under people who are asleep.
• Towing, salvage, smash repair and dismantling operations, which routinely handle exactly the vehicles most likely to fail: collision damaged, submerged or previously fire involved.

Collisions and road debris impact account for around 22.5% of identified EV battery fires globally, with manufacturing defects at 9.7%, water submersion at 5.6% and arson or external fire at 6.9% (Schmidt, 2026). If your business handles vehicles after they have been damaged, your exposure is not the fleet average.

This article is general guidance only and does not constitute a fire safety engineering assessment, a WHS risk assessment or emergency response advice for any specific site. In a fire, call 000 immediately and follow the directions of emergency services. Product specifications are current at the time of publication.