Some new regulation was quietly announced last week, at the intersection of EVs and fire safety.  NSW Fair Trading, having given consideration to the evidence and consulting widely, are implementing a phased set of requirements around e-bikes, e-scooters, and similar products.

The final order is gazetted here. We understand that the staged implementation is going to look like:

Stage 1: From 1 February 2025: All declared articles must comply with the prescribed Standards however, there will be no requirements to obtain tests, certificates or markings.

Stage 2: From 1 August 2025: Sellers must obtain tests and certificates of approval to be able to sell the declared articles. There will be an exemption from marking requirements.

Stage 3: From 1 February 2026: All declared articles must be tested, certified and marked in accordance with the G&E Act.

This is what excellence in regulatory response by government looks like. Consultative, evidence based, with clear and reasonable timelines and requirements for participants in market, addressing a specific challenge without over-reaching into other areas.

Notably, road registered electric vehicles are explicitly excluded from the new measures.  This is appropriate, given the well documented evidence that shows that they’re actually significantly safer than petrol cars, and already very well regulated.

We’ve seen similar evidence based work in this domain from the Australian Building Codes Board, who are proposing to tighten up some requirements relating to car parks in the 2025 National Construction Code, without going overboard in a manner likely to excessively drive up construction costs for dwellings during a cost of living crisis.

The ABCB are also looking to improve the degree to which we make our buildings ready for EVs, because our buildings last decades, and the fleet mix is going to move to 95%+ EVs during the life of the buildings we’re putting up today.

Again, this is being done on the basis of ‘what’s the minimum cost impact that’s consistent with landing a good result for the citizens we serve’. You can read more about this here.

We’re also seeing evidence based work in this field in the electrical products domain.  As international standards that have a bearing on safety of EV charging equipment evolve globally, the EVC is among the industry bodies pushing for them to be adopted here.

The latest version of IEC62752 is an example, which we expect will lead to the introduction of regulatory requirements for new portable EV chargers of a type that a majority of drivers currently use in their homes (level 1 / mode 2) to have temperature sensing built into the plug that connects to the powerpoint on the wall – with the function being, “if the plug gets too hot, charging stops”.

This one isn’t a particularly large risk – no house fires have occurred as a result of people using mode 2 chargers that we’re aware of, though there’s photos floating around of old, scorched powerpoints, and surveys dating back to 2017 in Norway identified it as an issue.

It is an easy thing for a charging equipment manufacturer to include this feature in their product – many are already doing so – and it’ll make us all a little bit safer as EV uptake scales.  So, aligning Australian requirements with an international standard designed to fix the issue at the product level makes pretty good sense.

In parallel with all this excellent evidence-based work, opponents of road registered EVs are continuing to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt …. seeking to create the impression that it’s not safe to park electric cars in our building car parks, when in fact, electric cars are far less likely to catch fire in our buildings than petrol cars.

We’ve had 7 fires involving the batteries in electric cars since 2010 in Australia – none of them had anything to do with charging, all of them had obvious and significant external causes – and all of them were capably handled by our fire fighters.  By comparison, Fire Rescue NSW roll out to about 7 petrol and diesel vehicle fires every day, just in NSW….

The current position statement from FRNSW, as an example, treats electric cars and their charging equipment as a ‘special hazard’. This is despite the CEO of the Australian Building Code Board publicly calling out that that’s not what the ‘special hazard’ mechanism is for.

It also seeks to overrule the evidence-based settings in the National Construction Code relating to fire resistance levels, which are intended to help building developers strike an appropriate balance between risk and cost.

Ultimately, we expect evidence to win over fearmongering, but it’s an uphill struggle today for consumers fighting against dis-information.

While the petrol car fires that happen every day aren’t news, any EV fire will be front page news for a while yet, because EVs are new…. ‘Fear of new things’ is unfortunately a stronger motivator of clicks and shares than sensible, evidence-based, regulatory reform of the kind that filled the first three quarters of this article.

With a hat tip to Bluey, “Boring things are still important!”

Ross de Rango is head of energy and infrastructure at the Electric Vehicle Council.