Hyundai Kona EV exploded in a garage, blowing the door off

Firefighters in Montreal believe that a Hyundai Kona EV, the all-electric version of the Kona, exploded and caused a garage fire in Île-Bizard on Friday.

Piero Cosentino bought a Hyundai Kona EV in March.

He told CBC that the electric car was in his garage unplugged on Friday afternoon when he saw dark clouds of smoke coming from the garage.

The Kona EV reportedly exploded – blowing the garage door off in the process.

Firefighters were on the scene quickly and controlled the fire. No one was injured.

Cosentino said:

“If we were in front of the garage door, we could have been in the hospital,”

Here are a few pictures of the aftermath of the fire (by Mathieu Daniel Wagner/Radio-Canada):

CBC reported that Louise Desrosiers, with Montreal’s fire service, “said that there didn’t seem to be any other factors inside the garage that could have caused the explosion.”

The Montreal Fire Department is reportedly investigating the fire.

We contacted Hyundai about the situation and we will update if they have a comment.

Electrek’s Take

As usual, we like to remind everyone that there’s no evidence that electric vehicles catch on fire at any higher rate than gasoline-powered vehicles.

This is actually the first instance of a Kona EV fire we have seen to date, but this case is interesting.

It sounds like the car didn’t just catch on fire but it actually “exploded” – blowing the garage door off its hinges in the process.

That’s crazy.

To be fair, gas-powered cars can explode too when they catch on fire, but electric car fires mostly result in smaller battery cell-level explosion – not something that could do something like that to a garage.

It’s also interesting that the vehicle apparently wasn’t charging or even plugged in.

I am sure that Hyundai is going to investigate the cause of the fire/explosion.

Currently, there’s a fairly strong heatwave hitting the northeast and it was extremely hot in Montreal yesterday. I don’t know if it had something to do with the fire, but it’s something to consider.