Smoke alarms are great protectors in the house, but in the garage, tailpipe fumes or dust blown in through a large garage door opening are likely to set off false alarms. The solution is a heat alarm, a small device that sounds an alert when high temperatures are measured. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, installing a heat alarm in your garage is a good way to keep yourself safe without causing the false alarms you’re likely to get with a smoke or carbon monoxide detector.
“Car fires are relatively rare, but they do happen and lead to quite a few recalls every year,” says Gabe Shenhar, associate director of Consumer Reports’ Auto Test Center. “So even though most cars are safe, the potential is there, so a little bit of precaution is a good idea.”
More than 150,000 Jeep plug-in hybrids were recalled for fire risk in October 2024, and more than 40,000 Ford SUVs were recalled earlier this year. Over the past 12 years, more than 10 million fire-prone Hyundai and Kia vehicles have been recalled. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 3,100 of those vehicles have actually caught fire since 2010.
When you compare those numbers to the hundreds of millions of registered motor vehicles in the U.S.—Consumer Affairs says there were more than 283 million in 2023—a few thousand here and there doesn’t sound like many—until it happens to you. If the worst happens, you want to be prepared with a heat-detecting alarm. Preferably, you’ll have one that is connected to other alarms in your house or can send an alert to your phone.
The number of fires in the U.S. has fallen by 50 percent since 1980. Still, there were 3,790 deaths and 13,250 injuries associated with fires in the U.S. in 2022, the last year for which data is available, according to the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit that writes fire safety codes. Roughly three-quarters of those deaths and injuries happened in peoples’ homes, highlighting the need for reliable and redundant fire detection devices and fire extinguishers.
