“No more” electric buses in Germany? Watch out for this viral message

• A text relayed more than 4,000 times on Facebook warns against electric buses, claiming that they are "finished" in Germany after three fires that broke out this year in depots where there were electric buses.

• For at least one of these three fires, the electric buses would not be the cause of the start of the fire.

• If there is a risk of a fire starting when loading, measures are taken to limit it, recalls an expert interviewed by

  20 Minutes

  .

“No more” electric buses in Germany?

This is the incorrect title of a post published on Facebook on November 21 and relayed more than 4,000 times.

“It turns out that electric buses have three times been responsible for major fires in the depots of Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Munich while being charged at night.

These fires destroyed huge fleets of vehicles.

They are now already banned in the city of Munich since yesterday ”, we can read on this post.

The Internet user indicates that he obtained this information from the German newspaper

.

FAKE OFF

Three fires have indeed taken place in bus depots in Germany this year, as reported

October 9 

 : April 1 in Düsseldorf, June 5 in Hanover and September 30 in Stuttgart.

However, the fire in Düsseldorf was probably not started by an electric bus: the fire would have started in a different part of the depot than the one where the electric buses were parked, according to the

.

Diesel buses were also on site.

Insurance and prosecution experts have ruled out the hypothesis of an outbreak of arson and concluded that there is a "technical" cause, which the city police also confirms at

In Hanover, the cause of the fire is still "unknown"

In Hanover, the cause and the place of the start of the fire are still "unknown", specifies

Üstra, the transport authority.

The cause would be "technical", according to the police quoted by 

, the public radio of Lower Saxony.

Nine buses were destroyed in the fire.

In Stuttgart, it is an electric bus which is at the origin of the fire which caused the destruction of 25 vehicles, confirms the police with

.

"Shortly before the start of the fire, an employee had started the loading process", add the police, for whom the cause of the fire is, with "a high probability", a "technical fault".

As for MVG, the Munich transport authority, it has not definitively stopped running its electric buses: on the contrary, it put them back into service on 25 October. Only one bus, which is the subject of a recall by the manufacturer, has not been put back into service.

While the number of electric buses in circulation in France is set to increase, do these vehicles present a higher and proven risk of fire than thermal vehicles? We put the question to Benjamin Truchot, project manager within the fire, dispersion and explosion department of Ineris (National Institute for the Industrial Environment and Risks): “It is a little difficult to say that it is is proven with the feedback that we have today, he says. What we are seeing developing today are lithium-ion battery technologies. There is a risk of a fire starting from the battery, especially in certain charging phases and in certain specific uses. "

However, underlines the expert, security measures are taken to limit them: “We are also all aware - manufacturers, constructors, operators, etc.

- of these phenomena and behind there are many security measures that are developed to avoid them.

"

Thermal vehicles also present risks, recalls the expert: "When you start to puncture a fuel tank or to tear it and there is a flow of diesel on the road, the risk is not the same but it is also there ”.

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