This six-wheeled Toyota Hilux fire engine is specially designed for extinguishing electric cars

Electric cars are much less likely to catch fire than gasoline cars, but at the same time, they are much more difficult to put out when they do catch fire. This creates a problem for underground and multi-story parking lots: how do you extinguish an electric vehicle that cannot be reached by a conventional fire engine?

British company Prospeed Motorsport believes it has found the answer. It converted a Toyota Hilux pickup truck into a six-wheeled fire engine. Engineers replaced the chassis and also added a torque distribution system.

The total weight of the car reaches 5600 kg, and the payload is about three tons. But it is important that the height of the pickup is 1850 mm – it is low enough to drive into parking lots with limited height.

The Hiload 6×6 Rapid Intervention Vehicle can be equipped with the ColdCut Cobra system. It uses a high-pressure jet to shoot an “abrasive” that punches a hole in the floor of the electric car and injects water under a pressure of 300 bar. Thanks to this, water enters the battery module, cooling it and preventing the spread of fire. Thus, extinguishing a fire can take less than 10 minutes.

Unlike alternatives that require thousands of liters of water to extinguish, this system can prevent a fire from spreading using only 240 litres. This is only 20 percent of the car’s water tank capacity.

Hiload is currently being tested in the Czech Republic. This model is designed specifically to fight electric car fires and could prevent major fires that have seen thousands of vehicles and entire buildings burned by a single electric car.