An ICE car is a known risk. People know where the fire prone parts are, many carry extinguishers ( small, but still), and fire departments know how to quell such fires.
A Li-Ion fire cannot be stopped once it starts, it has to burn to the end. Recently there was a string of electric bus fires in Paris, and having unstoppable fires with thick black clouds in a dense urban city is not great. Solutions need to be found because it can become a real problem.
And yet, hundreds of people die in ICE vehicle fires and you just shrug it off as "such is life". How can you be worried about one thing and shrug off the other? The solution to that major risk is everybody switching to EVs. You'd save hundreds of lives that way. Every year.
The risk profile of a EV fire is mainly damaged property. You get to walk away from an EV fire almost every time because unlike petrol fires, such fires are not explosive. The random incident you mentioned (again, hundreds of thousands of ICE car fires in the US, every year) is a good example. This was a vehicle that burned for days on end. Super annoying but sounds more like it was smouldering and people probably got to walk away and watch from a safe distance. Petrol burns up quite quickly once it gets going. Extinguishing a petrol fire is not a thing. Mostly it's gone by the time the fire trucks get to the scene.
Extinguishing an EV fire is like every other fire, take oxygen out of the equation and cool the situation to below the point where it stops burning. The main challenge with batteries is that a shorted battery might heat up again to the point where it starts burning. Annoying but something fire men can be trained to deal with. A lot less dramatic than "unstoppable" fires of course. Most EV fires are complete non events. No drama with explosions. No casualties. A thing burned/smouldered, firemen showed up and took care of it, end of story. And they are rare to begin with.
One of the things I'm noisy about is mechanical door locks in BEVs. A thermal runaway event in an EV is equivalent to immediate arc welding temperatures where a gasoline fire burns a great deal cooler and unless the fuel tank gets super heated there is time to get out. In disasters like the Houston doctor tragedy...
...Having electric door locks that no longer work is catastrophic in these types of situations. A great deal more needs to be done on BEVs to create better fire walls and battery protection if they ever become mainstream transport.
I posted the link to the spectacular exploding Paris bus earlier. Here it is again.
I gotta say, electric door opening is one of the big reasons I'll never own a Tesla. In an emergency, you can't waste time trying to remember where to find and how to use the mechanical override.
As a side note, how many Tesla owners here train their passengers on how to get out in an emergency before giving them a ride?
A Li-Ion fire cannot be stopped once it starts, it has to burn to the end. Recently there was a string of electric bus fires in Paris, and having unstoppable fires with thick black clouds in a dense urban city is not great. Solutions need to be found because it can become a real problem.