The construction of electric vehicle charging stations has become a common part of modernizing residential buildings, administrative facilities, and industrial sites in recent years. However, as the number of electric vehicles increases, safety requirements are also rising – especially in the area of fire protection. Installing chargers today does not simply mean “adding electrical infrastructure,” but also verifying whether the building is prepared from the perspective of a Fire Safety Design (FSD) project.

In the previous parts, we showed that EV fires behave differently from fires involving internal combustion vehicles and that the suppression of visible flames often does not mean the end of the risk. Persisting temperatures, the risk of re-ignition, and the release of toxic gases make EV fires a complex, multi-phase event.

For this reason, it is increasingly clear that when dealing with electric vehicles, it is not sufficient to rely on a single tool or a single response step. The effective management of an EV fire requires a coordinated system of measures that complement one another.

In the first part of this series, we explained why EV fires differ from fires involving internal combustion vehicles and why this topic has been receiving increasing attention. We also showed that fire blankets play an important role in the initial phase of response, particularly in the rapid stabilization of the situation.

With electric vehicles, however, the suppression of visible flames often does not mean that the incident has been fully resolved. On the contrary, once the first phase of the response is completed, additional challenges emerge that are not immediately visible but have a significant impact on the safety of subsequent actions.

EV fires have become one of the most widely discussed topics in fire safety in recent years. Not because electric vehicles catch fire more often than internal combustion engine vehicles, but because when a fire does occur, its behavior, risks, and consequences are fundamentally different. Electromobility is transforming transport, infrastructure, and energy systems – and in the same way, it is changing how we must approach fire prevention and fire response. This article is the first part of a three-part series focused on these changes. The series gradually examines how EV fires differ from traditional vehicle fires, what practical challenges they create during emergency response, and why they require a different way of thinking from operators, facility managers, and emergency services.

In this first part, we look at the basic context – why electric vehicle fires are specific, why they are being discussed more frequently, and what role first-response measures play in the initial phase of an incident.