This New Fire Truck Is Designed Just for EV Fires

• Modified Toyota Hilux fire truck features Coldcut Cobra system for extinguishing EV battery fires at an early stage.

• The 6x6 conversion increases the payload of the truck, while giving it great flexibility off-road.

• The truck is small enough to get into basement and multi-story parking structures, where regular fire trucks cannot enter.

The electrification age has brought with it not only new car manufacturing techniques, but also new types of car accidents. Early on, fire departments around the US took some time to adapt to traffic accidents involving EVs, not only when it comes to battery fires, but also in finding and disconnecting the 12-volt batteries and handling other systems in instances when there isn't a fire.

Car manufacturers have since made a lot of training documents available to first responders around the country, detailing various access points on EVs. But this doesn't mean battery fires have become easier to fight, still requiring up to 8000 gallons of water in instances when first responders actually decided to put the fire out, instead of letting it burn out over several hours. Getting to the scene of the fire itself can often be tricky for firefighters, in instances when EV fires erupt in multi-level garage structures or basement garages.

A new type of fire truck has been developed by UK-based Prospeed Motorsport specifically for EV battery fires early on in the process, to prevent the fire from spreading.

Based on a modified 6x6 version of the Toyota Hilux pickup with a new chassis, stretched by 48.4 inches, the Hiload 6x6 fire truck is small enough to enter parking structures. The truck features the Coldcut Cobra system for fighting EV battery fires, which uses an abrasive suspended in water that can cut through the floor pan of an EV and inject water at a pressure of 300 bar (that's over 100 times the pressure of air in a car tire) into the battery module in case of a thermal runaway. This has the effect of cooling the battery inside the module and preventing the spread of a battery fire.