Many electric cars suddenly caught fire after being flooded.

Firefighters in the United States are having to adapt their methods of fighting vehicle fires as more electric vehicles hit the streets. Lithium-ion battery fires are notoriously difficult to tackle with a traditional fire hose; some fires require tens of thousands of gallons of water to put out.

By pageNewsNation, there have been at least four Tesla car fires in just one year.t last week, after the storm in the US. Seawater and lithium-ion batteries do not mix well, because the salt in seawater is corrosive and can destroy sensitive components inside the battery pack or the surrounding structure. When an electric car catches fire, it is extremely difficult to put out the fire because the heat is so great. And that is also the reason why the battery pack can "suddenly" catch fire many days after the initial fire.

Firefighters in Florida are working to extinguish a Tesla fire after days of storms. (Screenshot).

According to Tesla’s firefighting manual for the Model S, it takes 3,000-6,000 gallons of water to put out a fire, three to eight times more than it would take to put out a gasoline car fire. In addition, the risk of electric cars suddenly catching fire again days after the fire has been extinguished has led some fire departments to submerge the entire car in fresh water for a period of time as a precaution.

This is a risk not just for Teslas, but for electric vehicles in general. There have been several high-profile incidents involving battery fires, most notably a ship carrying millions of dollars worth of Porsches and Bentleys that caught fire and sank in the Atlantic after the cars’ lithium-ion batteries caught fire in their cargo hold.

In fact, the battery of an electric car is not easy to completely extinguish, and can only be cooled with a large amount of water. Therefore, the burned part of the car will have to be kept in a water tank or a special container to avoid sticking.