[XorNot]

There's an entire 12V electrical system which stays active. There's also rubber and plastic parts, possible contaminants, a bevy of additives...plenty of interesting chemistry which normally does nothing but in the right sequence of unlikely events leads to an ignition.

[dataflow]

> There's an entire 12V electrical system which stays active. [...]

I'm not that illiterate about cars or basic physics. I was trying to figure out what actually went wrong in their situation. Because I'd never heard of any specific cases of these actually happening. Previously these sounded incredibly less likely to me than what I'm now discovering here.

[vel0city]

I don't remember the specifics about that situation. Something melted and slowly leaked and eventually caught fire. I don't think whatever happened in that case rose to become a recall. It was a relatively new Cadillac in the mid 1990s IIRC. I was a kid at the time it happened.

But yeah, vehicle fires happen to parked cars all the time. As mentioned I've had multiple cars have "don't park in the garage" kind of recalls, one car has even had multiple (Hyundai). In the article posted above it opens with:

> WHILE SOME FIRES in motor vehicles occur as a result of collisions, most occur in motor vehicles not involved in collisions. These non-crash-induced fires are relatively frequent (one for every 1,000 registered vehicles) but in general are less hazardous to occupants and bystanders than crash induced fires.

It later states:

> They occur on an average of one out of every 1,000 registered vehicles and can result in significant property damage

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649

[dataflow]

Thanks!