EV Fire Risk: What Shops Need to Know Now

In this episode of The Collision Vision, Cole Strandberg dives into a topic that’s moving quickly from “emerging” to mission-critical for collision repair operators: EV fire safety. As electric vehicles continue to scale across the country, they’re bringing with them a very different risk profile. Lithium-ion batteries, especially when damaged in a collision, can experience something called thermal runaway — a chain reaction that can lead to fires that burn hotter, last longer, and even reignite hours or days after the initial incident. That changes everything from how we intake vehicles, to where we store them, to how we protect our teams, our facilities, and our customers. In this episode Cole chats with Bruno Lucarelli of EV Safety, a company focused specifically on helping operators understand, prepare for, and mitigate these risks. They talk about what’s actually at stake, where shops are most exposed today, and how to think about building the right safety infrastructure as EV volume continues to grow. This is one of those conversations where awareness alone isn’t enough. Action is what truly matters.

Cole Strandberg: Looking forward to an awesome conversation. We’ve had a few of them. You’re down here in South Florida local to me. So we’ve gotten to know each other over the last few months and you’re working on some really important and exciting stuff. Definitely merits a lot of conversation, I think, across the industry. Before we dive into that, give us some background on yourself. How did you end up focused here? I know it’s been a winding road throughout automotive and interested to hear your background.

Bruno Lucarelli: Well, I’m a former director at Ebay Motors. I’ve worked with Cox Automotive as well. I really, really dove into the automotive retail business after 20 some odd years in television. And I learned at the feet of some of the great dealers in the, you know, in this country about operations, about how important it was keeping the doors open, keeping the lights on and how difficult that is. And this, this particular project relates directly to that that we’re doing. It’s about continuation of business operations. And you know, as I say, Learning from all these great businessmen, all these great car dealers, these, these legends in the industry and, you know, people from the automotive retail and Manheim and places like that, I think prepared me and I kind of put the pieces together when I saw what was happening with, with electric vehicles, lithium ion batteries, and I, I’m an inventor. I’ve been inventing things for years and years, and I just started sketching out some ideas and here we are.

Cole Strandberg: I love it, man. There’s no better way to figure out kind of where industries are heading, what the trends are, where the blind spots might be, and than learning from the best and speaking with the best. It’s been a very cool side effect of the collision vision. It’s helped shape my viewpoint on the industry, and so it makes sense that helps shape your viewpoint on the automotive industry as a whole. Talk to me about what led you to found EV safety. What problems were you seeing or what blind spots were you seeing across the market?

Bruno Lucarelli: One thing I was noticing was whenever there was an EV fire in a retail situation, there was a complete lack of protocols. Now, protocols are very important. You can’t run a service department, you can’t run any kind of business without protocols. Where are we parking the cars? How are we moving the vehicles from point A to point B? And nobody seemed to be taking this into consideration. People seemed to. It always just seemed to be wrong place, wrong time when there was an EV fire. So I looked at the problem and I said, well, you know, how do we, you know, how do we make this less dangerous? And I learned a tremendous amount. I knew absolutely nothing about it going in several years ago and had to change my way of thinking, had to throw a lot of ideas out. But eventually, you know, I settled on a few and filed some patents and some friends of mine who are very successful people said, what are you waiting for? We’ll help you out. And they became my co founders. So it’s a great story. And, and I love the fact that my co founders are all friends and people that I can rely on and people that I can bring in to help solve problems when I need to.

Cole Strandberg: Heck of a team too, man. And, you know, you mentioned a few of the different players when it comes to EV fire safety and the risks associated with that. There’s OEMs, there’s retailers, there are charging companies, there’s also collision repair. From a collision repair standpoint, what should we be thinking about here? And when did you realize that collision repair was a big piece of this conversation?

Bruno Lucarelli: Well, I’m sure Like you, I started noticing the, the uptick in fires. If you do a Google search for auto body shop fire just over the last month. This morning, I was shocked. There were half a dozen that just popped up right on top. And what I’m noticing is the characteristics of these fires, they’re becoming much more devastating. It’s becoming much harder for the fire marshals to determine the origin of the fire. Now, that speaks directly to a lithium ion battery fire. Because it burns so hot, it’s so devastating that it literally destroys all the evidence of the point of origin because there’s, there’s nothing bigger than this left inside the shop. So I didn’t know a lot about collision repair. And I, I dove in and what I was observing was, you know, people that were very well trained, but not well trained in avoiding the hazards of what these batteries can do. So there’s a, there was a big delta there. And I realized that this was probably why all of a sudden there were so many devastating fires, is that people were treating these like ICE vehicles, the same mistake that the car dealers were making. But every car in a collision center is what we call a hot potato. And a hot potato is a car that has a questionable origin as far as why is it there. In other words, if an EV is damaged in any way, shape or form. So many of these EVs have built their batteries into the frame of the vehicle that if there’s frame damage, we have to assume that there’s battery damage. And if there’s battery damage, that car doesn’t belong within a hundred feet of a structure, yet there’s a dozen of them lined up mirror to mirror outside a collision center. So that’s a huge mistake.

Cole Strandberg: And hopefully outside. Right? So much of this conversation is going to be an education on some stuff that’s not super fun. However, the good news is, toward the end of the conversation, we’ll get into some solutions and best practices to help mitigate some of these nasty risks we’re going to talk about. But let’s level set. You mentioned how we treat EVs the same as ICE vehicles. In a lot of cases. What actually happens in an EV fire scenario and how would it differ from an ICE vehicle fire?

Bruno Lucarelli: Well over 90% of the injuries. And we’re a life safety company, so let me be clear. We save people first. Our primary goal is to avoid death and injury. Okay. Property damage is secondary to that. So when you say EV fire, what you’re referring to is a thermal runaway event, Right? We all know that term this thermal runaway event, what makes it dangerous are the toxic gases, are the hydrogen what’s leaking out of that battery. So if there is frame damage and the seam of the battery is even imperceptibly split, it’s going to start leaking hydrogen, among other things. And that alone, let’s hope nobody’s around. But that alone is the origin of these incredible explosions that we see that collapse the roof of buildings. You fill a room with hydrogen, it will explode and the explosion has to go somewhere. So Faraday, for instance, Faraday, the electric vehicle company in Los Angeles, they left a car overnight in a non ventilated room and the hydrogen explosion literally moved the wall of the entire building out 16 inches and made the building unstable and unsafe. So now imagine you’re just a small repair shop and you’ve got this hydrogen building up. So you notice we haven’t talked about fire yet, okay? Because one small ev, one Chevy Volt, anything, even, even the smallest ev, if it’s at a higher state of charge, it can release up to 50, 000 liters of poison gas. And that gas is the real danger. Most of these injuries, 92% of these injuries in a UK study done over the last several years were inhalation injuries. This is why people have to be aware of what the danger is. So the true danger, the fire, comes kind of last. But what happens before the fire is what injures and kills most people.

Cole Strandberg: At what point in repairing an EV are shops most exposed today? Is it when it’s coming in the shop? Is it when it’s being torn down? Is it storage overnight, as you mentioned post repair? Where should we be most cognizant of these risks?

Bruno Lucarelli: Well, there’s property risks and then there’s human risk. Right? Certainly while that car is sitting overnight, that’s the property risk. Once that car is touched and pulled into the building, then it becomes a risk to the humans. So there’s, you know, there are protocols that people have to start adopting and have to start following. And if they don’t, then it’s just, you know, on a long enough timeline, you are, if you allow evs on site. Now, I have noticed, and you and I have discussed this, when somebody owns a dozen collision repair shops in a, in a county, in a city, they tend to send the EVs to two or three of those. So they’ll make eight or nine of them EV free. All right, that’s very smart. Right? So don’t spread the risk. Right? Consolidate the risk. But even then at those two or Three shops where they’re, quote, specializing in evs. They’ve got to adopt protocols. And I have not seen that happen yet. And that’s the. The root of this, you know, this danger, this problem.

Cole Strandberg: Yeah. You know, whenever you talk evs, it represents, from a business case, a tremendous opportunity. But every time I speak to people, whether it’s repairing or. Or in this case, obviously, fire safety and related things, it’s terrifying. How much I don’t know, and I assume so many people know, but it’s not really a safe assumption. Do you have a sense of. You mentioned just this morning, Googling body shop fires? Do you have a sense of the prevalence of EV fires both across the country and globally?

Bruno Lucarelli: Well, the Chinese fire services last year reported 47 EV fires a day. So China’s a pretty big country. They’ve got a very high EV percentage, you know, penetration. So, you know, don’t read too much into that number. It sounds like a high number. It is a high number. But they also have a lot of EVs. Right. What we figure now is in this country, you know, the. The lower 48, so to speak, we’re looking at about a half dozen fires a day. From the. From the information that we’ve been gathering, what’s interesting is it used to be a year ago, year and a half ago, when an EV caught on fire, there’d be a, you know, a helicopter from the TV news there. Right. It was big news. They’re not being reported as much. So instead of Googling the news, we actually are now looking at social media, and we’re finding on social media, that’s where all the EV fires are, because it’s just not news anymore. You and I are here in South Florida. We’re the EV fire capital of the United States. Why? Because we have salt water flooding. When you drive these cars through salt water, and. And there’s a question that I asked at, when we were just at the EV Charging Summit, and only one person in a room of 100 got it right. And the question was, what’s the average clearance below an electric vehicle in this country? And somebody said five inches. That’s it. Wow. This is your clearance. Okay. So when you take that through. And, hey, this is southern Florida, we drive through a foot of salt water like it’s nothing, Right? That’s just, you know, when you’re down in Miami or anywhere along the coast, it floods. Well, that salt water, of course, starts corroding the leads. Everybody I know that owns an EV down here, I tell them, buy a $35 a month subscription to a car wash and keep your undercarriage clean, go through two or three times a week because it’s a different type of maintenance scheme. You’ve got to keep these batteries clean. So we have a lot of EV fires down here in the Miami area. Okay, they have a lot in Los Angeles, they’ve got a lot in New York. What do they all have in common? They’re all coastal cities, and they’ve all got brackish and saltwater flooding. So, yeah, we figure about half a dozen a day right now in the US and that’s anecdotal. The problem is that fire departments are not required to register these incidents in a national database. So we’ve got to. You know, My partner is Captain Patrick Durham, of course, from stashed training, 30 million YouTube views and counting on his channel. Certainly he’s become the source for the whole world for these videos, explainer videos. And he makes a lot of calls, calls around to different cities and fire chiefs. So we try to gather this information, you know, like a human flesh search engine. Right. And right now that’s what we figure, about a half dozen a day. But then we’ll see a rash of them. Sure. So, you know, that’s an average.

Cole Strandberg: Very interesting. You mentioned the thermal runaway term. And it is a term that most of the industry is certainly familiar with. Let’s double click on that, though. Walk us through exactly what that means. And let’s get a little scientific as to. All right, the genesis of a problem is happening. We have some sort of thermal runaway incident coming on. What does that mean? What is the outcome of that? Typically,.

Bruno Lucarelli: How it, you know, how it relates to our industry. There are separators between these cells, right. So we have these battery cells. They look like, you know, they’re a little bigger than a double A battery. Right. We’ve all seen them. And in between these. So these cells are in packs, and in between them they have these separators, and it’s made out of extremely thin material. Now, the difference between A battery on $100,000 car and a battery on a $20,000 car is the quality of these separators. Okay? This is some of the most expensive material in the entire vehicle. Okay. Is this material, it’s almost molecular thin between these batteries. When one of those batteries gets knocked into another, it breaks through the separator and it starts the chemical process that we call thermal runaway. And that might just be a minor thing for two weeks or three weeks or four weeks, but. But eventually it is the spark that is going to light the fire for the other 5, 600,000 cells depending on the size of the battery and the type of battery. So how do these happen? Well, if you punch the side of the battery, minor damage, you hit a curb, you hit a rock. Now remember what was our clearance? 5 Inches. In Tampa a few years ago was a well known event where a, a young lady was driving her Tesla. She hit what she claimed was a restaurant tomato can, you know, the big industrial size can she hit. She saw it in the road, couldn’t avoid it. The second she ran over that, her battery exploded. She drifted to a stop of all places, on the lawn of a Chevy dealer, managed to get out of the car, jumped out of the car, was a little singed, but she was okay. And that car proceeded to, you know, being engulfed within a couple of minutes. So different types of vehicles, hybrids, battery might be a little more protected from a, a road damage, but it’s not protected when there’s an accident. If again, if there’s frame damage, a hybrid becomes just as dangerous. So remember, we’re also talking about hybrids. Let’s not confine the conversation to battery electric vehicles only because a hybrid, you’ve got the lithium ion batteries, multiple lithium ion batteries, and then you’ve got a gas tank that these days is made out of plastic. So if that battery goes in a thermal runaway, it is going to melt that plastic gas tank. And now you’ve got a gasoline and a hybrid and a lithium ion fire. So that is, you know, damaging those cells. Okay. Now there are other things such as dendrite growth, okay. Anode overhang, these are internal that are going to happen regardless that you can, you can call them manufacturing defects, you could call them design defects. So as you noticed, a lot of recalls are not related to, you know, a software issue or a damage issue. They are related to, you know, dendrite growth or they’re related to anode overhang. It was just the design of the battery wasn’t good. So over time, the battery starts developing characteristics that make it more dangerous. Okay. And both of those can also cause thermal runaway. Why? If you go into that battery and stir the pot, change the chemistry in any way, shape or form, its natural reaction is thermal runaway just by nature of the chemicals that are inside there. So what does that mean? I mean that means you’ve got upwards of 400,000 vehicles driving around this country now that have, that are, that are considered dangerous. Okay. That are on recall that they see you’ve heard it don’t, don’t charge it above 70%. Park it away from a building. Well, hey, I’m a collision center, okay? So, you know, I can’t park it away from a building. Collision centers traditionally have no room at all to park cars. Right? What was the last collision center you saw that had, you know, able to park cars 10ft from each other? So collision centers need to make sure that they’re running the NHTSA database on every EV that comes in, just to make sure that on top of the damage it’s being, that’s already done to it, that there’s no further recall on it.

Cole Strandberg: Man, that’s a great point. And from your perspective, you’re in the field a lot. You’re on site, you’re seeing different setups, you’re seeing different solutions. Are most shops under prepared, totally unaware or somewhere in between of these risks and the kind of correlating solutions?

Bruno Lucarelli: 99.9% Of scrap yards, collision centers, and repair shops and dealerships have absolutely no preparation for this and no protocol.

Cole Strandberg: And probably unaware it’s not burying their head in the sand. More often than not, I would imagine it’s unaware of the risks associated with that. And where can folks learn more about these risks? I know you mentioned your partner. What resources are out there to go ahead and get a crash course, for lack of a better term, on getting educated on a lot of this, other than listening to the rest of this podcast, because it’s going to be extremely helpful in itself.

Bruno Lucarelli: We actually offer a very inexpensive program ourselves and we, we are the first people to do this where for civilians, we call it non technical employee training. And anybody can pass this. It’s, it’s not a science course, but it does touch on science. And it’s, and it’s done by my partner, Captain Durham, who’s the best at this. And it just teaches you a very healthy fear and respect. It teaches you how to identify thermal runaway. It teaches you protocols. And let’s just, let’s start simple. Don’t park an electric vehicle up against a building in a retail or a collision center environment. Okay? Many building fires are a result of just the car was parked up against the side of the building. Don’t do it. Don’t stage an electric vehicle up against a wall, okay? We sell barriers, okay? They’re exclusive to our company. We invented them. And you can park the car between them and it’ll contain the fire for about 10 or 15 minutes. Okay. Give the fire department enough time to get there, but it’ll make it A, you know, a non event. So we do, we have seen people do something that they shouldn’t do, and that’s get these concrete kind of highway barriers and put them on the lot and then they park the EVs in there. A couple of things wrong with that one. I don’t know how well ventilated that area is, whether it’s a windy place or not. But what you’re doing is creating kind of a bowl for the hydrogen to build up. And you don’t want that. Okay. You need these cars in as, you know, open air as possible. And sticking them inside an alcove like that is inviting, you know, a hydrogen explosion. Secondly, if you do have a fire, okay, well, yeah, sure, the concrete, you know, maybe contain the fire. But now you’ve got, I don’t know, 4 tons of highly contaminated concrete that has cobalt, arsenic, hydrogen fluoride contamination depending on the state you live in. You can’t keep that on your property and you can’t just put that in a dumpster and send it to a, you know, a dump, a yard. So you’ve got to go the epa, you got to file paperwork and I don’t even know how much it would cost to dispose of that much hazardous waste. So you essentially bought yourself a huge hazardous waste disposal bill by using these concrete barriers, man.

Cole Strandberg: A big time misconception. I think from a layman’s perspective, it seems like a pretty good turnkey solution. You don’t think through the whole kind of life cycle and the cause and effect there. Let’s double click on that and talk about solutions. You’ve mentioned a couple of the offerings at EV Safety, we. What are the core components of a proper EV safety approach using collision repair as the example?

Bruno Lucarelli: Number one is safety awareness. We have a certification. Again, you can do it on your phone. Takes about 20 minutes. Because when we looked at the OSHA fines, when we looked at who was getting giant $400,000 fines from OSHA for employee injury related to lithium ion battery incidents, almost all of it was due to lack of training. Okay. In other words, an employee took a right instead of taking a left. If they had the proper training, they would have taken the left. Okay. Making people understand how truly poisonous this vapor is that is coming out of the battery. Okay, you can’t. Well, my car is on the other side. I’m just gonna run through. Okay. It’s gonna settle on your clothes and your hair in your eyes, and it’s going to interfere with your body’s ability to process calcium. It’s not a good thing, okay? You will get very ill if you’re exposed to enough of it. You’ll die. If you’ve got a preexisting medical condition, you’ll die much quicker. There were four firemen in Sacramento that were just cleaning up a Tesla accident and they already had the car on the flatbed. From what we understand. Well, the car went into thermal runaway two hours after the accident, after they thought they had put it out. And it shot a jet of hydrogen fluoride gas in these four firemen’s faces. And now all four are permanently disabled. And they were very healthy young guys. They were the, you know, they were the, you know, the young guys they leave behind to clean up, you know, the probies. So here’s four guys that are never going to work again because they didn’t follow protocol. If they were around that car, they should have had their self contained breathing apparatus and their ppe. So you can see these are professionals that are being killed and injured. What does an. What is a C tech at an auto body shop? What chance do they have or the secretary or even the customer in the waiting room? So everybody at that auto body shop needs to have a protocol. And the number one protocol is, is evacuation and evacuation away from the event. So if you come out the door and the car on the left is in thermal runaway, okay, I don’t care if, if what’s over there, you can’t go there. Okay. You’ve got to get all the customers and all the personnel out the other way and away from the building. Because if you’ve got multiple evs there, okay, the next one could be an explosion. And that explosion, we have seen that these cells have been ejected with the speed of a 9 millimeter bullet. So the explosion itself could kill anybody within 5 or 10ft. So yeah, it doesn’t matter what’s over here. If there’s a burning EV over there, you’ve got to get everybody out of that building and that way, right? And then how do you notify the fire services? You need to tell them that it’s an electric vehicle fire because they’re going to come with a different set of equipment and you need to provide the firefighters with the means to help save your business. That means you’ve got to have these fire blankets in a smart place on site and you need more than one. The most dangerous thing we have seen people do so far, surprisingly, is buy a fire blanket because they check the box. I bought a fire blanket. We’re covered on the whole Ev fire thing, you’re anything but half the people that buy them don’t even know where they are. Okay. Or they, they put them in. Some companies put it in a plastic box and they screw it to a wall near where the fire is going to be. Okay? Guess what happens to plastic at that temperature. So there’s a lot of. There’s, there’s even companies trying to sell fire extinguishers. There’s no such thing as a lithium ion fire extinguisher. They don’t exist. But we are seeing there was even a company at the. The summit trying to sell them and that didn’t work out. But. So no, there are no fire extinguishers. Okay? The only tools that the firemen have are knowledge and these ev fire blankets. And let me tell you, if you don’t have these fire blankets, you’re forcing the firemen to pour an average of 25,000 gallons through the battery of that car. Well, the hydrogen fluoride gas that’s coming from that battery by dumping 20,000 gallons of water through it, it comes out the bottom as hydrofluoric acid. So imagine I pulled a tanker truck full of hydrofluoric acid, cobalt, arsenic, radiation water, and opened up the spigot and dumped it on your property. What would you do to me?

Cole Strandberg: Wouldn’t be very happy.

Bruno Lucarelli: No. So if you don’t want your entire property become a hazmat scene, then you need to provide these blankets because what they’ll do is they’ll throw the blankets on either side of the burning car to prevent the propagation to more vehicles. How many cars do you want on fire? Well, the answer is zero, or as close to zero as possible. So if they’ve got plenty of blankets, you’ve got them on site, they throw it on the car on the left, car on the right. They’re going to j hook that burning car and they’re going to drag it off your property out into the street, out into the open, and they might just let it burn there, okay. Or they might throw another blanket on it. If it’s a very crowded urban area where there’s a lot of civilians, well, then they got to throw a blanket because that poison plume, that can be toxic up to 150ft. So you just don’t want to have anybody. So if there’s a schoolyard across the street, we can’t let that burn. Right? So. And that gas, when it settles on things, that hydrogen fluoride, that particulate matter, whatever it settles on that has to be remediated so you’ve got a real mess on your hands. You’ve got a hazmat event, so. And the firemen will treat it like a hazmat. But it’s up to you how much of a hazmat event it is, how much training you have, whether you notify them properly, and whether you have these blankets on hand for them to utilize, be it for exposure control, as a fireman call it, which is on the right or left of the burning car to prevent more burning cars, or on the car itself if they decide to do that. Once they throw a blanket on the car, they’ll start throwing water on the blanket. That creates zero hazmat. Right? Just water. But it will. It will cool down the cabin fire. Don’t forget, there are two fires here. You got the battery on fire, and you’ve got the cabin on fire. Okay? That battery fire has a tremendous amount of toxic pollutants. But as. As we know, there’s what, 10 or 15% more plastic in these cars than there used to be. So that burning plastic in the cabin fire, it’s drawing all of the toxic metals coming out of the battery up into the air and creating, you know, a soup, so to speak, of extremely harmful material. And guess what? You’re the business owner. You’re responsible for where that material goes, who is sickened by it, who’s poisoned by it, what groundwater gets poisoned by it when the firemen have to throw water on it because you don’t have any kind of blanket mitigation device. So as you can see, if you don’t have the training and the equipment, you’ve got a potential disaster, potential lawsuit that could cost you your business.

Cole Strandberg: Let’s talk a little bit further about the solutions, because it’s a sobering risk and liability from a shop perspective, both from a life standpoint, which is obviously most important, but from a property standpoint as well. What tools, training, products, and systems should shops be thinking about implementing today? If you’re starting from zero or close to zero, how do we roll out the right solution to make sure that we’re limiting this liability and this risk?

Bruno Lucarelli: Well, we’ve already seen the welding piece of it being very responsible. If your shop is working on any EVS at all, then it means that you have. Have your. Your welder has taken the certification to how to avoid the EV battery when you’re welding around the frame. It’s very specific courses that they take. That’s really important because exposing these batteries to anything above 220 degrees Fahrenheit is another way to set them off. It’s another way to muddle the chemistry inside the battery. You, you probably saw AXA UK Insurance put out an alert, I believe it was last month, that the curing process for paint is exposing EV batteries to temperatures well above 250 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not recommended by the OEMs. Except no one put those two pieces together until they apparently had a couple of fires in the EU and they realized that it was the curing process, which was, well, just, just way too hot, that was causing the batteries to explode. So immediately a warning went out. And now everybody in the industry should know that if you are going to do a, if you’ve got a paint center, if you’re doing the paint, whatever process you’re using, you need to look at other processes because you can’t expose these batteries to anything over they. 260 Degrees is, you know, is where it really starts to mix the chemicals inside the battery and go into thermal runaway. So that’s a great example of today, right now, what an auto body shop is doing. Make sure your welder has all those certifications. Watch that battery while you’re welding, okay? Don’t damage that battery. It’s a hot potato. And again, if you’re doing the paint, whatever process you have, don’t expose that car to anything higher than 2, I would say 200 degrees. Because if you’re in Phoenix, Arizona, it might already be 140 degrees when you start, right? So. And we do know the people at Phoenix at the parking authority, and they say that they literally have cars that spontaneously combust because of the heat. So heat is another issue that we haven’t talked about a lot. Everybody talks about damage, but you’ve got a lot of heat inside a collision center. A lot of, you know, like I say, the painting, the welding, be super, super careful, right? But what if the car does go in a thermal runaway? All right, what if you got a car? And here’s the thing. Remember, that car was already in thermal runaway when it arrived on your lot, most likely. Okay, we just had what, two or three weeks ago, scrap yard in the U.S. it was a Tesla. It had been there for three weeks and exploded after three weeks. We all know those stories. Thermal runaway can last as long as a month. Okay, even longer. So you, you definitely need every body shop, and I believe a lot of them already have them. But a lot of everybody needs a thermal imaging camera. Okay? And none of these pieces is the total answer, but they’re all pieces, right. Of a puzzle we need to put together. Why a thermal imaging camera? Well, because if the car is in thermal runaway, it could look perfectly fine. But if you shoot it with the camera, you’ll see an angry little orange dot or red dot in the middle, depending on how your camera’s set. If you point the gun at that car and it has a red dot, you immediately have to tow that car away from everything, either off your lot completely or back in the corner of the lot because it means the car is in thermal Runway. And you know, Cole, there’s just nothing anybody can do about it at that point. The car is going to be salvage because you can’t stop thermal runaway. There’s nothing. You know, it means that today, tomorrow, a week from now, two weeks from now, it is going to blow up. And if you have a blanket, you might want to think about throwing it over the car, you know, just to, just to protect from shrapnel and explosions and things. But leave a little space under there for the hydrogen to leak out. Don’t. Don’t step on it because that’s. That might be a slow leaker. So yeah, thermal imaging camera. There’s a company called Inch Cape, an amazing company out of Britain. 200 Year old company. They own several hundred retail shops, sales, repair etc in Pacific Asia. And they taught me they have these thermal imaging guns hanging by the door of every service center. And no car enters the building until it’s scanned with the camera. Wow. Camera. Or you’re fired. Okay, but you know, it’s not a, it’s not a tough. These protocols. You’re not going to find people resisting, I suspect because they’re saving their own lives here. This isn’t some kind of corporate. Oh, corporate’s going to make more money and I, you know, I get no benefit. No, this is for you guy holding the camera, okay? This is protecting you and everybody around you. So no, I wouldn’t allow an EV into a building, in any service center, repair shop. I don’t care if it was just an oil change center. I would have these cameras and I would scan every car before they go. Now, it’s not foolproof. Okay? And that’s what I mean by it’s not like an answer. You know, Captain Durham always stresses that’s not a foolproof solution. It’s just one more protocol. And if you put all these protocols together and everybody does them, then you’ll have you know, you won’t lose, know you won’t have any injury, you won’t have any death, you might have some property damage, but that’s what it’s about. It’s just, it’s about making sure that nobody gets hurt. And you’ve got to treat these with the respect that they deserve. And no, when you say OEM, absolutely none of the OEMs. Okay. And we’ve spoken to most of them will even talk about this or have this discussion, man.

Cole Strandberg: Yeah, lot of, lot of sobering facts here. And you know, it’s an industry that over the past five, 10 years has seen so much change and EV represents a decent chunk of that change. And so we’re not strangers to some of these mindset shifts and changing of processes and adding things. Ultimately we’re in business, right. There’s no way to be in, in business with zero risk, but we can mitigate it as best as possible by being prepared, by having that safety oriented mindset. Everybody seems to win, man. I, I think we’re going to continue seeing a lot of change. And as EV adoption, you know, we have our ups and downs here certainly in this country over the years, I would imagine EV adoption will again at some point accelerate. How do you see this risk evolving over the next three, five, ten years from a shop’s perspective?

Bruno Lucarelli: Well, don’t forget, just north of us, Canada is letting BYD in, right? BYD is coming to Canada up here, Mexico already has in South America, they’re already flooded with the BYD brand. Okay, why is that important? Well, because they’re selling $21,000 cars. And don’t forget the U. S consumer buys a car on a monthly payment. They don’t care if it runs on puppy blood. Okay, if I can get to work and you can give me $125 a month payment, I don’t care if it’s an EV or not. Right? So that is, you know, capitalism. The market is driven by that. So we are absolutely going to have, we are surrounded now by under $30,000 EVS north and south. And this administration has even made statements to the effect that yeah, you know, we will, we, we will probably work it out somehow. And BYD will be here, right? Everybody knows it’s a given. BYD is kind of like what Tesla was, right? Tesla introduced the concept of the EV as a mainstream vehicle. BYD has introduced it kind of like Henry Ford did with the Model T. You can get a family car, it’s affordable and it’s available and that’s what the BYD is. Don’t forget the average vehicle in this country is over $54,000. Whose fault is that? Okay, the very OEMs that don’t want to have the conversation that we’re having. Okay. So when it, when a $54,000 car, that’s your choice as a family. Today BYD comes to town and they’re selling 26, $27,000 luxury appointed vehicles. By the way, these vehicles are all gorgeous. You feel like you’re in an Audi.

Cole Strandberg: I, I saw some of them in 2024 at Auto Mechanica. Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s shock, right? Yeah.

Bruno Lucarelli: Then you find out it’s $17,000 or whatever it is. So even with tariffs, these cars are going to be put a hundred percent tariff on a $17,000 car. Guess what, it’s still cheaper than the $54,000 Jeep. Yeah. So yeah, they’re coming. It is the new wave. It’s, you know, they’re all over Europe, they’re all over Asia. So, you know, if you’re gonna be in the business, this is your choice. Now either sell your business and get out if you don’t want to deal with it, or adopt your protocols. And you know a really great example of this, when I was working for Cox Automotive back in 2024. Two thirds now. 20, 20, 20. I’m sorry, 2014. Pardon me, 2014. Now this is 2014. Dealers still were struggling with the Internet. Okay. How much has the Internet changed everybody’s process yet? The automotive business was the last business to adopt to the Internet, to work it into their daily routine. Mm.

Cole Strandberg: Yep.

Bruno Lucarelli: They still wanted to punch people in on, you know what I mean? They didn’t. They, they. I remember dealers used to say to us a cocktail, don’t bring me your Internet customers. We don’t want your Internet people in here. Okay. I heard that 10 times a day. I actually had one dealer group in New Jersey call me in and say, listen, you need to stop harassing us. We had a meeting the other day and we’re going to sit this Internet thing out. Okay. We’re just not participating. So this is the mindset because this is a franchisee business. Right. So what does that mean? Well, that means there’s 21, 000 franchise dealers in North America and Canada and they’re owned by three or four thousand different companies. And some of those companies still have the old T111 on the walls. It’s like 1950 in there. So, yeah, this business struggles with protocols, with, with updating, you know, new business models. But I can tell you, nothing sobers you up more than the auto body shop three doors down, burning to the ground.

Cole Strandberg: Scary stuff, man. Absolutely. Well, Bruno, you’ve been so generous with your time. I want to leave you before we officially wrap up, up with one more question. If I were to say, hey, I’m a shop. I consider myself EV ready, what would that mean in reality, where you check the boxes? Who is EV ready? And what does that mean?

Bruno Lucarelli: Well, obviously, they’ve got all the, you know, repair certifications, right, from Tesla and Rivian. And we just dealt with the number one Tesla center in Toronto right now. They’re outfitting themselves up with our. Our gear. And these are very smart guys. They do the ADAs. They do. They do everything. I mean, they’re. They’re state of the art, so to speak. But in talking with us, they were kind of shocked to learn how little prepared they were for a fire and what they had to do. But they acknowledged it. It’s the cost of doing business. So they had, I don’t know, 20 Tesla chargers outside. Well, now they know they’ve got to get these barriers between the chargers. Okay, why? Because they also use them as parking spaces. It’s not a public, you know, charging spot. It’s their own charging spot. One of the other things I recommend. We recommend all the time, is don’t let that vehicle into the shop with less. I’m. Pardon me, more than a 30% state of charge. Well, something I found out. Okay, Learning new things every day. Tesla penalizes you. If you let that car go below a 20 state of charge. It’s a black mark. And enough black marks and you lose your status as a Tesla repair center. So now Tesla is forcing them to keep it above a 20 state of charge. We’re telling them, and we tell everybody, and we’re working with the ferry systems in Vancouver, and people like that don’t let anything on board that ship or into that store more than a 30 state of charge. So now these guys have to figure, how do I keep this between. I got to keep it at 21 to 29%. That’s tough when you’re working on the car. Okay, so, yeah, you need to park these cars between the barriers. You need to have these blankets on site, and every single person on site, no matter what they are, whether they’re a secretary, a manager, or a mechanic, they need to have this basic safety awareness training so that they know exactly what to do the minute they see a thermal runaway event occur. So have that minimize the amount of time that that vehicle is in your building and never Ever leave an EV overnight in a building? Okay. Try to avoid it. And if you take a battery out of a car, okay, you have it on the scissor, lift with the wheels. Always have the battery on wheels. Don’t ever put that battery on a shop bench or anywhere else because those wheels enable the firemen to evacuate the battery out of the building. Get it out into the open, okay? So keep the battery on the dolly, okay? And if you’re not working on the battery, keep it as close to the exit as possible. And you know, you’re. If it’s a nice day, put it the heck outside as long as you can, okay? Because it’s that, that single battery. We had an incident here in Miami last year at a very super luxurious, the most luxurious collection in Miami. And they had the battery going to thermal runaway. They dropped it out of the car. Thank God they had it on the dolly. But some fluid, they made a mistake. They kept it under the car. Some fluid from the car leaked into the guts of the battery and set it off. It went into thermal runaway. Okay? So now shop people don’t touch fire blankets. Now these guys did. It didn’t do them any good and they shouldn’t have. But they had a smaller fire blanket I think, you know, for like the tools and they threw that on top, you know, like a mini almost kitchen fire blanket. It did nothing. But the first thing the firemen did, they ran into that service center and it was on a second floor. They took some poles and they pushed that battery down the ramp out into the street and then they just, you know, dumped water on it and then they got it the hell out of there. So if they didn’t have that battery on wheels at that moment, they might have burned the entire building in the ground. So keep it on some.

Cole Strandberg: Yeah, we, we have the benefit today of learning from others mistakes to allow us to avoid the same mistakes. And Bruno, you are a wealth of knowledge friend. Really appreciate you taking the time with us today. For folks who want to reach out, learn more about how to be EV ready themselves. Where can they get in touch and follow along?

Bruno Lucarelli: Well, they go to our, our website, EV safetyproducts.com follow our LinkedIn page. EV safety. EV Safety Inc. Our 800 number is 844. EV fires. Sorry about that. It was the only one available that it was even close. It’s a, a little dramatic, but yeah. Eight, four, four. EV fires. Give us a call. Come to our website. We love talking about this stuff. So if you just have questions, give us a call. We learn more from everybody than they learn from us. And we’re always getting calls from people asking questions and we’re, we’re happy to answer them. And look at my partners YouTube Stashed training S T A C H E D Stash training the number one in the world on YouTube for lithium ion explainer videos. It all comes together to help you protect your business to these are going to happen. EV fires are inevitable. It doesn’t mean that you have to lose your business. Just takes a little bit of common sense. Sorry. A little more investment in equipment, little more investment in training and then you’re prepared, you’re ready and you’ll sleep at night.

Cole Strandberg: Bruno, thank you so much, man. An amazing resource here, an amazing educator. And thank you for joining us on the Collision Vision.

Bruno Lucarelli: Love the Collision Vision. Can’t wait for the next episode. Thank you Cole.

Cole Strandberg: That is all for today’s episode here on the Collision Vision with Bruno Lucarelli of EV Safety. And if there’s one takeaway, it’s this. EVs may represent a large part of the future of our industry and but they also require a different level of prep and discipline than what many shops are used to today. It’s change, it’s evolution, something we in this industry are very used to. But we need to make sure it is top of mind. The risks are real, not necessarily more frequent, but often more severe and unpredictable, with potential for delayed ignition, toxic gas release and extended burn times. And as operators, that puts the responsibility squarely on us to rethink how we handle intake, storage, training and overall readiness for your facility and your business. The shops that get ahead of this, those that treat EV safety as a core operational capability and not an afterthought, are the ones that are going to win long term. If you found this episode valuable, be sure to hit that subscribe button and leave a review wherever you enjoy your podcast and you if and share it with your team and your network as well. As always, on behalf of the Auto Body News team and myself, thank you for coming along for the ride.