What’s really driving recalls of cars at risk of bursting into flames? It’s not EVs.

Electric vehicles for years have been dogged by worries about fire.

Headlines from the early 2020s were filled with Teslas burning in garages and Chevy Bolts taken off the road due to flammable batteries. Federal safety investigators urged automakers to give emergency responders better guides on how to fight lithium-ion battery fires.

It seemed like EVs represented a new kind of fire risk.

But EVs are not driving the recent growth in recalls warning that vehicles could erupt into flames at any time, even when parked and turned off.

A Washington Post analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall notices found that conventional gas and diesel vehicles made up the vast majority of vehicles covered by the “park outside” label since 2021. Last week, The Post wrote about an alarming surge in these so-called “park outside” recalls.

Federal authorities already have announced 17 new “park outside” recalls in the first seven months of 2026, covering 1.7 million vehicles. That already makes 2026 the second-highest number of vehicles since this type of recall began more than a decade ago.

A total of an estimated 3.4 million vehicles currently have outstanding recalls of this kind, according to vehicle history provider CarFax.

Safety experts say the surge in “park outside” recalls appears to be caused by other changes to modern gas and electric vehicles, such as the additional technology in everything from transmissions to seat warmers.

“It’s a mix of things causing this,” said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research and Strategies, which specializes in auto safety analysis. “It’s messy. It doesn’t lend itself to simple description of what’s happening. But it boils down to growing electronic systems and the number of components.”

Gas and diesel vehicles still account for the vast majority of vehicles covered by “park outside” recalls, according to NHTSA data. In part, that reflects how gas and diesel still dominate the U.S. market. About 94% of light-duty vehicles have conventional internal-combustion engines, while about 6% are hybrids and fully electric.

They’re known as “key-off fires,” said Frank Borris, a former NHTSA investigator who now works as a safety consultant.

“The engine is off,” he said, “but the circuits are still hot and they stay hot all the time.”

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Earlier this year, Kia needed to recall 463,000 Tellurides because of the risk that the front power-seat switch could overheat and ignite the seat.

That was the second time Kia had issued a recall for that one defect. The first recall, in 2024, didn’t fully address the problem.

More than 66,000 Ford Expeditions and Lincoln Navigators from the 2021 model year were recalled due to circuit boards in the battery junction box that could short out. At least 16 fires were blamed on the problem, which often ignited when the vehicles were parked and turned off.

NHTSA has issued 93 “park outside” recalls since 2021, according to a Post analysis.

Nearly half — 44 recalls — covered vehicles exclusively with conventional internal-combustion engines, while 38 recalls were just for EVs or hybrids.

So the number of campaigns were nearly equally divided between gas and electric or hybrid vehicles.

But gas vehicles pull away when comparing the size of the recalls.

Gas-only campaigns covered a combined 4.6 million vehicles with “park outside” recalls over the past five years, compared to only about 662,000 vehicles that were EVs or hybrids.

The largest number of recalled vehicles had “mixed powertrains” — meaning the recalls included models with conventional engines, as well as EVs and hybrids.

But gas and diesel cars also dominated the “mixed” powertrain category.

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A single, sweeping NHTSA announcement of two recalls in September 2023 accounted for about two-thirds of the 5.1 million vehicles with “mixed powertrains.” That’s when Hyundai recalled nearly 1.65 million vehicles and Kia recalled more than 1.73 million vehicles “due to the risk of fire.”

The automakers said “the safest place to park [the vehicle] is outside and away from homes and other structures. Fires can occur whether the vehicle is parked and turned off or while driving.”

Hyundai’s recall covered more than a dozen models, mostly gas engines and fewer than 100,000 hybrid and fuel cell versions. Gas engines made up almost all of the dozen Kia models recalled.

The Hyundai and Kia vehicles shared the same defect: The anti-lock brake system could leak brake fluid and cause an electrical short, triggering an engine fire even when the car is parked.

“They’ve figured out more ways to catch fire than any other vehicle,” Kane said.

But little is known about the relative fire risk in EVs compared to gas cars — at least in the United States.

Regulators historically have not collected data on vehicle fires by powertrain. That is beginning to change, said Adam Barowy, principal research engineer for the Fire Safety Research Institute.

Starting this year, fire agencies nationwide switched to a new federal reporting system that includes information about vehicle powertrains. That should help provide some answers.

“Right now there’s pretty limited data on whether they are more likely to catch fire — at least for North American cars,” Barowy said.

Other countries have provided limited looks at the EV fire issue, such as a United Kingdom government review of data from Norway finding that gas and diesel vehicles had a fire incidence rate that was four times higher than EVs from 2016 to 2021.

But the fear of fire with EVs is hard to give up.

A few years ago, catastrophic fires inside two packed parking garages caught the attention of fire researchers.

One was on New Year’s Eve 2017, when 1,400 cars burned in a garage at an arena in Liverpool, England. Then, in 2020, a fire damaged hundreds of vehicles at Norway’s Stavanger airport. No one was hurt, but both blazes grew dangerously out of control.

Investigators wondered what made these fires such disasters.

Did electric vehicles play a role?

“Something changed, so what’s going on?” Brian O’Connor, a senior fire protection engineer with the National Fire Protection Association, said in describing the inquests.

But the resulting report found neither blaze was started by an EV.

The fire in Liverpool started in an old Land Rover. And Norway’s blaze was blamed on a diesel Opel car.