A Mercedes-Benz Fire Jolts South Korea’s E.V. Transition

The flames and smoke from a burning Mercedes-Benz electric sedan spread rapidly through the underground parking lot of an apartment complex in South Korea this month. The fire damaged almost 900 cars, and 23 people suffered smoke inhalation.

It took firefighters more than eight hours to put out the blaze, which reached temperatures above 1,500 degrees Celsius, according to officials in Incheon, the city near Seoul where the fire broke out around dawn on Aug. 1.

Fires are much less common in electric vehicles than in gasoline-powered ones, and the cause of the Incheon blaze has not been disclosed. But across South Korea, one of the world’s biggest car producers, it caught the public’s attention because of its scale and intensity, and it raised safety fears that some say could impede the government’s aggressive push toward electric vehicles.

One popular secondhand car sales platform, K Car, said that listings by E.V. owners hoping to sell their vehicles had nearly tripled since the fire.

“I know that E.V.s might be the more environmentally friendly choice, but I’m still afraid of it catching fire,” said Lee Min, an office worker in Seoul who is hoping to buy her first car. “I got even more scared after seeing the Incheon incident.”

News coverage of the fire, and social media’s reaction to it, have focused on perceived risks from battery charging, and car makers and government officials have tried to assuage those fears. The municipal government in Seoul said that by the end of next month, it would prevent E.V.s from being fully charged in parking lots beneath residential buildings, limiting them to 90-percent capacity to prevent the risk of overcharging, though some experts have questioned whether that would do much to