Training Firefighters for EV Battery Fires in Mixed Reality
Inside Emergency Responder Buddy, the scenario built in Parity Platform’s VR Lab to prepare first responders for a hazard most of them have never seen.
When an internal combustion car catches fire on the side of a motorway, a fire crew already knows the playbook. The chemistry is familiar, the tactics are settled, and most active firefighters have run the drill, in training or in the field, more times than they can count.
An electric vehicle on fire is a different story. The energy source is a high voltage lithium-ion pack sitting under the cabin floor, the failure mode is thermal runaway rather than a fuel pool, and the post-incident risk profile (re-ignition hours or even days later, stranded energy in the pack, contaminated runoff water) does not look like anything the standard ICE response was designed for. For most firefighters in Europe today, the first time they meet this hazard at scale will be on a real call.
That is the gap our Emergency Responder Buddy scenario, developed in Parity Platform’s VR Lab, is built to close.
Why EV battery fires resist conventional training
Three things make EV fires hard to train for through traditional methods.
They are still rare events, but rising fast.
The fleet share of EVs in Europe has roughly doubled in the last few years, but the absolute number of battery fire incidents per fire station is still low. Crews cannot reliably build muscle memory from incident frequency alone.
They are dangerous and expensive to recreate physically.
A single burn-car exercise on an EV consumes a vehicle worth tens of thousands of euros, generates toxic smoke, requires a controlled site, and can only be repeated so many times before the budget runs out. Few brigades can afford to put every shift through that experience, let alone refresh it annually.
The right response varies with the situation.
A burning EV in an open car park is not the same problem as one inside a multi-storey garage, a tunnel, a charging hub, or a tow yard 24 hours after the original collision. Each setting changes what a crew can do safely. Static classroom training does not let firefighters rehearse those judgments in a setting that feels real.
Mixed reality lets us solve all three at once. A scenario can be repeated as many times as needed, the cost per run drops to roughly zero, and the same crew can move from a roadside scene to a multi-storey garage in the space of a coffee break.
What Emergency Responder Buddy actually does
The Emergency Responder Buddy scenario sits inside our broader Buddy family of applications, alongside Electrical Buddy for EV charging installers. The shared idea across the family is the same: take a domain where mistakes are costly, where best practice is documented but not yet instinctive, and put the trainee inside an interactive, head-mounted experience that guides them through the right sequence of decisions.
For first responders facing an EV incident, that means working through the moments that matter most:
- Identifying the vehicle as an EV before approaching, and knowing where the hazard markings actually are on different platforms.
- Establishing safe distances and approach angles given the orientation of the battery pack.
- Locating high voltage cut-off points and understanding what they do and, importantly, do not, achieve.
- Reading the warning signs of thermal runaway in progress versus a contained fire.
- Choosing between cooling, isolating, and letting the pack burn out, with the trade-offs spelled out as the scenario unfolds.
- Managing the post-incident phase: re-ignition watch, stranded energy, runoff containment, and safe handover to recovery teams.
Because the scenario is a Unity application, none of this requires a real vehicle, a real fire, or a dedicated training ground. Crews can run it on a standalone XR headset, and instructors can run it on a laptop using an XR simulator when no headset is available, which keeps the barrier to deployment low for smaller stations.
How a scenario like this gets built
The VR Lab follows a four-step workflow that we apply to every immersive project, including Emergency Responder Buddy.
It starts with a design phase, an early online session with the operational stakeholder (in this case, fire service trainers) where we agree on what success looks like and produce mock-ups of the user flow. For first responder content, that conversation is dominated by which decisions are most often misjudged on real incidents, because those are the ones the scenario most needs to rehearse.
We then move into development, with weekly progress updates so trainers can see the scenario take shape and call out anything that does not match field reality. This iterative loop is critical for emergency training content, where small inaccuracies (a misplaced HV cut-off, a wrong-coloured marking) can teach the wrong reflex.
Deployment ships the scenario to whatever device the customer prefers, whether that is a dedicated standalone headset, a tethered PC-based system, or a desktop simulator for instructors. Our team supports onboarding so a brigade is not left to figure out installation on their own.
Support is the longest phase, and the one we treat as the actual product. EV platforms evolve, battery chemistries change, and tactics get revised by national fire authorities. The scenario has to evolve with them.
Why we are doing this from a software company
Parity Platform spends most of its time on the digital backbone of EV charging, through our flagship product EV Loader and through Horizon Europe research projects on smart charging, V2G, and infrastructure cybersecurity. The same understanding of how EV systems actually fail (battery management edge cases, charging-state hazards, post-collision behaviour) feeds directly into how we design first-responder training. We are not adapting a generic VR template to a fire scenario. We are building it from the inside of the EV stack outward.
That is also why the Buddy family will keep growing. The same architecture that supports firefighters today is being used for electrical installers under our Electrical Buddy work, and is a natural fit for adjacent industrial trades where rare, high-consequence events drive most of the training need.
Working with us
If you run a fire service, an emergency response academy, or a public safety programme that needs to bring EV incident response up to standard, the VR Lab team can scope a tailored scenario built on the Emergency Responder Buddy foundation. The first conversation is short, and it is mostly about what your crews are getting wrong today, because that is where mixed reality earns its place.
Book a meeting with our VR team to start the conversation.