Ford LIES!

[chl]

There have been reports of those ohmmu batteries catching fire and or just drop a cell and shut down completely. Sounds like you got one of the good ones.

Yes, that fire gave me pause...

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[CoolViper777]

That lithi battery fire is very sobering. Better to keep lead/acid for accessory battery.

While EVs look like normal cars, they really aren't. When gassing up an ICE car, the "dangerous" flammable part happens far from your home and garage. Barring some major issue with your car, like a fuel leak or electrical short, it's not going to catch fire once it's off.

Not necessarily with an EV, especially if you are charging. For EVs, about 25% of fires occur during charging. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable charging indoors TBH. It's a an always on appliance. When I get my Lightning, charging will happen outdoors, even when I have a garage that can fit it. At least until I "trust" it to not have electrical issues.

https://www.tl-x.com/post/ev-charging-fire-statistics-safety-facts-2025

my truck hasn't stranded me yet, but I have the nearly the exact usage pattern you do, with the addition that I disabled the vehicle idle power off timer and leave it running pretty much anywhere I go. before I got my new evse setup, the truck would sleep at least every 2 weeks, often more. pretty dumb. now I have a tapered charge profile so it's quite literally abc, always be charging. mine is automatic, but you can manually lower the charge rate in the app/truck to similar effect without an external maintainer.

¹0

Yes, that fire gave me pause...

 

[chl]

That lithi battery fire is very sobering. Better to keep lead/acid for accessory battery.

While EVs look like normal cars, they really aren't. When gassing up an ICE car, the "dangerous" flammable part happens far from your home and garage. Barring some major issue with your car, like a fuel leak or electrical short, it's not going to catch fire once it's off.

Not necessarily with an EV, especially if you are charging. For EVs, about 25% of fires occur during charging. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable charging indoors TBH. It's a an always on appliance. When I get my Lightning, charging will happen outdoors, even when I have a garage that can fit it. At least until I "trust" it to not have electrical issues.

https://www.tl-x.com/post/ev-charging-fire-statistics-safety-facts-2025



¹0

A lot of safety built-in to the Lightning, but a few wrinkles, one of which may have led to the Ohmmu fire: the battery charging current can be rather high when the battery is significantly discharged, based on observations and measurements made by some owners.

Although the Ohmmu claims to be plug-n-play compatible and has its own internal BMS, something went wrong in the case of the fire that Ohmmu did not anticipate.

The Lightning does seem to allow the 12v battery to get rather significantly discharged and does not effectively limit the charging current to no more than what a manufacturer of a 35Ah battery would consider safe and optimum, of no more that 10.5A.

My solution along with other owners is to use a battery maintainer with an AGM mode to keep the battery topped off to 100% using a relatively low charging current, whenever the truck is not in use, generally overnight.

That avoids 2 problems. 1) the battery will get topped off to 100% driving off sulfates that could be come permanent if not done, and 2) avoiding excessively high charging currents which could result in internal heat causing swelling and venting and leading to a loss of electrolyte.

To make it convenient, I added an SAE charging wire at the charge port next to the hinge and connected to the 6mm battery downstream of the BMS sensor - I may have already posted above, but here is a link again about putting trickle charger/maintainers on the battery and how to make it easier by adding a trickle charger wire:

https://www.f150lightningforum.com/forum/threads/charging-12v-battery.16979/

My truck:

EV battery fires are relatively rare, but the F-150 Lightning has had a few, and some other HVB battery issues due to battery manufacturing problems.

I am not overly concerned about it, but if Ford's quality control were better overall, I would feel a lot better about it for sure.

ICE vehicle fires are more common, and sometime they do happen in garages, for example, when there is a faulty ignition system component leading to a short and an electrical fire, for example which affected some Ford Rangers.

Kitchen cooking fires, a fire from improperly handled or disposed of smoking products, or an electrical fire from an overloaded outlet, are probably the most common causes of house fires that originate indoors.

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