New Delhi: Electric automaker BYD have said a fire broke out at a parking garage in a Shenzhen industrial park on Tuesday morning. The garage was a parking area for “test and scrapped vehicles”, and the fire was extinguished, as told by the carmaker on Tuesday.
There have been no casualties that have been reported, the brand further said. A local fire and rescue department had reported the incident earlier in the day. The EV firm’s global headquarters is in the Pingshan district in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
4月14日上午，多名网友发布视频显示，深圳坪山比亚迪总部一厂房突发火情，现场浓烟滚滚。 pic.twitter.com/4RmQIf9cET
— 外汇交易员 (@fxtrader) April 14, 2026
A big fire sent thick black smoke blowing into the sky, with flames stretching across the long action of a multi-storey building. Fire trucks and police were deployed to the scene, and social media was abuzz with videos of the incident, which were viewed and confirmed by Reuters as well.
Why EVs burn differently from ICE cars
As is well known, EVs tend to burn slightly differently than ICE cars, with fires often lasting longer and being quite harder to extinguish as they have a tendency to reignite. Usually, inside an EV battery pack, there are hundreds to thousands of lithium-ion cells that are packed quite closely. The heat spreads through cells and causes a self-sustaining chain reaction across the battery pack. The reignition can last for days.
The EV fires last much longer due to the battery pack itself becoming a heat-generating chemical chain reaction, with hidden cells capable of reigniting long after visible flames are gone. Which means that even though the frequency might be less, the firefighting challenge is much higher.
Presently, BYD sells Atto 3, Seal, Sealion 7 and eMAX 7 in India, and Sealion 6 and Atto 2 are lined up to come soon. In India, BYD has enjoyed a decent reception and competes well in its segment.