EV battery fire at Sydney Airport under investigation

Fire and Rescue NSW are investigating the cause of a battery fire at a Sydney Airport car park on Monday night that destroyed five vehicles.

Firefighters were called to a parking lot on Airport Drive, Mascot, where flames had engulfed an electric car – identified as an MG ZS EV – before spreading to another four other motor vehicles.

Fire authorities have pinpointed a high-voltage battery pack located on the ground in front of the MG as the source of the fire.

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“A battery, which had recently been detached from the luxury car and stored in the lot, was quickly identified as having sparked the blaze,” read a statement from Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW).

The circumstances around the blaze are unusual, to say the least.

Vision from FRNSW clearly shows the battery pack lying on the ground in front of the vehicle, which is located in a vehicle holding yard at the base of Sydney Airport’s control tower.

It is understood that the battery had been damaged before it was removed from the vehicle and had been exposed to the elements for some time.

Given the close proximity of the vehicles in the parking compound, several have been badly damaged by the fire.

However, the fire damage is not as comprehensive as it could potentially have been, with the structures of the cars still visible and the battery pack of the MG still recognisable.

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It’s not known if the MG’s battery was a later-model lithium iron phosphate type, which is less prone to what is known as thermal runaway than lithium-ion batteries.

However, the circumstances around the battery being removed from the car and stored in such a haphazard and unsupervised way will require considerable investigation.

The Fire Investigation and Research Unit (FIRU) are piecing together the circumstances surrounding the incident, according to the FRNSW.

Research officers from FRNSW's Safety of Alternative and Renewable Energy Technologies (SARET) team have also inspected the scene.

MG Australia has been working with the fire department since the incident yesterday.

“MG understands the customer’s vehicle and battery were already damaged and the battery was not in the vehicle. We understand the vehicle was being stored at an airport holding yard and also not in a driveable condition," the company said in a latest statement released Thursday.

Electric vehicle fires are very rare in Australia, though the damage they can potentially inflict can be catastrophic.

A recent fire – also on Monday night – aboard a Tesla Model 3 sedan, captured by fire crews in Penrose, NSW [↗], resulted from debris hitting the car's underside while travelling on a freeway. No one was injured in the incident.