I did the research, so you don’t have to (ahem). Many fun details of specific incidents follow the break.

In short, I could find no record of any driver or passenger of a commercially manufactured modern electric vehicle ever being electrocuted. I found a lot of cases where you’d think they would be shocked - tsunami, crashes, charging in torrential rain or with damaged charging cables - but by design, modern EVs and their charging equipment are just incredibly protective of their high-voltage battery connections, and so electrocutions are exceedingly rare.

I also found no specific record of a home-brew EV driver or passenger or of an EV technician being electrocuted, but I did find several general references to “of course this happens” - and in the case of people who work on the power lines of an EV or its charging equipment, I think electrocution is likely to have occurred at some point just as it does with those who install electrical power systems in buildings or work on grid power. This is why I specialized in digital rather than power electronics - I make a lot of mistakes, but I’m unlikely to die from 3.3 volts at 100 milliamps.

(Video still by Wu Wa of YouTube. Fair use for educational purposes is asserted.)

Here’s the best of what I found.

According to the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2021. Of these, 0 were electrocutions from an electric vehicle (EV) traction battery. This is largely because the power circuits are cut when an accident is detected, and the chances of a still-functioning internal battery circuit being exposed and connected across a surviving human body is exceedingly small. (The battery may catch fire, though with much less frequency and with a much slower rate of spread than with gasoline vehicle fires, and when a lithium-ion battery catches fire it’s more difficult to extinguish than a gasoline fire. But that’s not electrocution, which is the topic of this question.)

I could also find no specific instance in prior years of a driver or passenger electrocution while driving a commercial or even a home-built EV - even though I spent quite a bit of time searching. The latter surprised me, as I’m aware of a thriving decades-long home-brew culture for building and modifying EVs, and amateurs in particular tend to get careless and create unsafe designs. That appears to be less of a problem than I expected, though a lot of lawyers are still writing a lot of hopeful blogs.

I also could find no record of an electrocution while charging an EV. In part this is because the “cable” used to charge an EV includes a microprocessor that conducts safety checks before enabling the charging circuits and monitors the process carefully, and in part because the mechanical designs of the various charging standards have ensured that water doesn’t interact with the charging circuits even in severe environmental conditions. I’ve charged my Tesla in rain so torrential I couldn’t see the Supercharger from the front seat, but charging proceeded without interruption or any indication of danger.

I did find one technician who was electrocuted while installing an electric vehicle Supercharger in August 2015. (Did I mention I searched diligently?) This was an unfortunate industrial accident and so was counted among the 387 non-EV related electrocutions that also occurred that year. Unless you are a high-voltage electrician, this risk doesn’t apply to you, and if you are a high-voltage electrician, you have this risk whether you drive an EV or not!

I found vague references to a few electrocutions where copper thieves tried to cut through an EV charger’s power connection to the main transformer. Those didn’t end well. But far more of such cases apply to rooftop air conditioning equipment, and the vandals went to great trouble to create their own risk. Don’t try to steal copper from energized power circuits, and you’ll be safe from this one.

On a happier note, I also found a thriving sub-genre of videos on popular sites of people driving their Tesla vehicles through windshield-deep water at high speed and apparently having a blast (of fun, not electricity). I think they’re nuts, but their videos are hilarious. Stock gasoline vehicles would promptly choke out in such water, although a Jeep with a snorkel (yes, they exist - who knew?) would be OK, just with less torque.

Then there are videos like this of vehicles caught in tsunamis and flash floods, where the gasoline vehicles “drown” (from water in the air intake) while Tesla vehicles just keep on driving. No animals (or people) were shocked in the making of these videos, either.

According to Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which collects telematics data from millions of vehicles, Teslas have only half the rate of crashes of gasoline vehicles. The NHTSA reports that Teslas such as my Model 3 have “5 star” safety ratings in the event they do crash. And according to Tesla, their vehicles catch fire with only 1/10th the frequency of gasoline vehicles. Not only are Tesla owners safe from electrocution, we seem to be safer from other dangers than most comparable gasoline vehicles, too.

In short, the anti-EV activists in popular and social media who sow fear, uncertainly, and doubt (FUD) about the safety of electric vehicles appear to be (ahem) all wet.