A drone operator in Houston captured video of an electric Amazon delivery van at a fulfillment center appearing to explode while firefighters worked to put out the blaze on Monday. And with the Rivian-made van’s proximity to charging stations, many car experts are wondering about similar fires that have happened recently.
First reported by The Autopian and Jalopnik, the footage was captured by Third Coast Drone and posted to YouTube on Monday.
“Today while leaving the office for lunch, I looked to the west towards the Amazon warehouse and noticed a large plume of black smoke,” the anonymous drone operator says in the video. “I put the drone up in the air and went for a closer look.”
That closer look revealed firefighters already on the scene, having trouble putting out the blaze, as you can see in the video below.
“We’re grateful no one was injured and are thankful for the Houston Fire
Department’s rapid response,” a spokesperson told Gizmodo on Tuesday over email. “We’re working with a third party
investigator and experts from Rivian to investigate and are not going to
speculate,
so we won’t be sharing additional details until we’re confident in the
facts.”
Houston hit 98 degrees on Monday and the heat isn’t forecast to dip below 90 until maybe Tuesday of next week, according to the Weather Channel. And that kind of weather can be an issue for electric vehicles.
As Jalopnik explains, chargers can be the cause of fires when they’re not properly cooled or when they’re improperly wired, though it’s still not clear what caused this fire in Houston. Especially since professionally installed chargers, like the ones that were presumably at this Amazon fulfillment center, have far fewer issues than people who tinker with the wiring of their home chargers.
All that said, there have been recent reports of Amazon delivery vehicle fires that make car experts wonder about the potential causes, including reports in Manchester, New Jersey in May and one in northern California back in 2022. There was also a case last year where Amazon vans near chargers in Salt Lake City went up in flames.
Gizmodo has reached out to Amazon about the cause of Monday’s fire and will update this post if we hear back.
