Is that actually relevant though, or just an implementation detail? Perhaps you could argue a moving car seems more potentially hazardous? But then that's only learned from extant behaviour anyway?
A car being driven is guaranteed to have a person behind the wheel. (For now...) A electric car in an attached garage spontaneously bursting into flame at 2 am is a recipe for burning a house to the ground.
The major issue in these fires is the lack of someone attentive. We can leverage the existing horn in the same way as anti-theft systems to fix that. We need a way to detect the issue, but I would hope there's a thermometer somewhere we can use to sense dangerous thermals.
Even more interestingly, the car could communicate with your smoke detectors to set off the fire alarm. It would be a great value proposition for something like Nest. It can let you know that there's going to be a fire before it even starts.
I would hope that honking the horn in case of fire is something we could achieve with a software update, but maybe not.
The pipe dream would be for the car to be able to get itself somewhere safe-ish in bad conditions. We're probably a good ways off from it, and safer batteries may take over first, but worst case scenario we may be able to program some kind of "escape path" into the cars. My car has the ability to save garage door opener codes. It's not too far fetched to be able to tell it to roll up the garage door and pull out into the driveway in case of potential fire situations. You might need an automatic ejector for the charger cable, but that doesn't seem insurmountable either.
I do agree that electric cars are more dangerous for now, and will continue to be even after the updates. We can narrow that gap with software, and even more with some integrated hardware.
My dad's gas car (20 years ago) caught on fire in the garage while he wasn't there. The house was fine b/c of a a code required fire break between the garage and house. It's probably more rare nowadays, but not impossible.
In the former case there's definitely a person inside the thing that's on fire, and in the latter case there almost definitely isn't a person inside the thing (I guess once in a while somebody sleeps in their car but this isn't recommended) and that seems like a much safer situation.
Houses are replaceable, that's why people have insurance.
I still dont understand how that is safer. If the car is on fire, you can get out. I have been to many car fires when I volunteered with the FD and unless it's a wreck with entrapment, there's never any injury. In comparison, there are plenty of deaths from fires starting while people are sleeping.
Safer if you don't expect the person to get out when they see black smoke and flames coming from under their hood. Cars don't usually catch fire explosively.
