Due to the increasing demand to minimize the global pollution, the research has made significant advances in electrically powered vehicles. This interest has also spiked in the mining industry since the current diesel-powered vehicles emits exhaust and particles, which results in the need for a costly ventilation system. But switching from a known, and widely used, propulsion system results in a step towards the unknown. This literature survey has mainly studied battery electric vehicles (BEV).

This literature survey focusses on the issues related to thermal runaway of a battery and what it might cause. This includes the toxicity of gasses and combustion products, the impact on rescue operations, the effect on extinguishment and differences in fire behavior between BEVs and internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

Full scale experiments have shown that the fire behavior might not depend solely on the energy storage as other component also contribute to the overall fire behavior as whole. These experiments have been conducted on single passenger vehicles and not mining vehicles, and it is reasonable to draw the conclusion that batteries as an energy storage do not change the overall fire behavior considerably. Changes do, however, occur when it comes to the extinguishment of a fire, since the battery design interferes with the possibility to cool the battery cells effectively. This difficulty in cooling the battery cells makes it very challenging prevent thermal runaway to stop a thermal runaway and propagation event inside the battery using conventional fire suppression methods.