Electric buses have a curious habit of reminding us that every technology carries its own weaknesses.
In winter, batteries lose capacity. Cold weather shortens range and complicates operations. Transport operators have yet to learn how to manage that reality.
Summer presents a different challenge.
Heat.
When lithium-ion batteries fail, they do not behave like conventional fuel systems. They enter what engineers politely call thermal runaway—a wonderfully understated expression for a process that is anything but polite.
The recent bus fire occurred in a depot.
That was fortunate.
Depots can be isolated. Fire crews have room to work. Damage, while potentially expensive, remains geographically contained.
Now imagine precisely the same event unfolding during the morning rush at Oxford Circus.
One of London’s busiest transport hubs.
Thousands of pedestrians.
Buses.
Underground entrances.
Delivery vehicles.
Emergency services attempting to establish a safety perimeter while one burning battery pack continues generating extraordinary heat.
The disruption alone could be immense.
Those are the kinds of scenarios cities ought to think about before they become reality.
Lithium-ion battery fires are not ordinary vehicle fires.
Once thermal runaway begins, extinguishing the visible flames is often only part of the challenge. The battery itself may continue generating heat internally, requiring enormous quantities of water for cooling and sometimes prolonged monitoring to prevent reignition.
That makes these incidents operationally very different from the typical combustion-engine vehicle fire.
I still remember the electric bus that burned in Paris.
The videos were extraordinary.
The intensity of the fire.
The sheer amount of heat.
The duration.
It was not the sort of incident anyone would voluntarily recreate in the middle of a crowded commercial district.
Firefighters understand this distinction well.
A conventional vehicle fire is often brought under control relatively quickly once crews arrive with the appropriate equipment.
A large battery fire can require a very different response. Cooling, containment and monitoring may continue long after the visible flames disappear. The event is measured not merely in minutes, but sometimes in many hours.
Cities are complicated organisms.
Introducing new technologies into dense urban environments should never involve looking only at their benefits. Failure modes matter just as much as normal operation.
Engineering depends upon asking what happens when something eventually does go wrong.
Different technologies require different emergency procedures, different infrastructure and different assumptions about acceptable risk.
The real question is therefore not whether electric vehicles are fashionable, nor whether they help achieve environmental objectives.
The real question is whether our cities have adapted as quickly as the technology itself.
Because if the answer is no, then we have quietly shifted the burden onto firefighters, emergency planners and everyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby when the exceptionally rare—but exceptionally demanding—failure finally occurs.
The first responsibility of a city is not to embrace novelty.
It is to protect and service its inhabitants. Do big Electric Vehicles have a place in that scenario at all?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/25/electric-london-bus-fire-heatwave/