They're especially unprotected. Most electric vehicles don't fail as spectacularly or often as Teslas, eg losing power and locking people inside to burn and igniting in crashes. I'm sure some examples of some other models will crop up but they likely got banged around a lot more by the floodwaters.

[–] Chronicon@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

yeah it's honestly crazy for a stationary car to catch fire from like 8 inches of non-moving saltwater. I don't expect the car to work after flooding but catching fire? That's gotta be poor design right? I've seen how hybrids are designed, and they seemingly have way more safeguards than this, despite having much smaller batteries. things like contactors electrically splitting up the pack when not engaged, shutting everything down if there's any leakage current to chassis ground, etc. I guess I don't know how well all those would fare against salt water but like, the batteries don't catch on fire just from discharging unless it's a short circuit, and just saltwater isn't that conductive to cause a dead short, especially if the battery were electrically separated into several chunks.