Fuse is one of the winners of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards. Explore the full list of projects we’re honoring for making the world more equitable, accessible, and sustainable.

Cars, unfortunately, catch fire a lot. They contain a large tank filled with a very flammable liquid that can ignite upon impact. Firefighters have become all too familiar with putting out these fires: Between 2003 and 2007, U.S. fire departments responded to an average of 287,000 vehicle fires annually. In 2018 alone, some 212,500 vehicle fires caused more than 500 civilian deaths and 1,500 civilian injuries, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

Now, as electric cars replace that tank of flammable liquid with a battery, firefighters face new challenges in managing the chemical fires that can ignite after a crash involving EVs.

Sinan Altun, a master’s student at Sweden’s Umeå Institute of Design, worked on a solution to this problem as his thesis project. The result, a conceptual handheld device called Fuse, is the winner of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Award in the Students category. The Fuse device would allow firefighters responding to an EV crash to visualize where a car’s battery is located, and help guide them through the process of controlling the fire.

“I wanted to focus on a problem new technology brings,” Altun says. “In this case, electric cars and the electrification of society in the context of firefighting.”

Consulting with the local Umeå fire chief as well as other firefighters, fire engineers, and mechanical engineers, Altun discovered that one of the biggest issues with EV fires is that firefighters arrive at the scene with no information about the state of the car’s battery. His device aims to solve that. Firefighters would point it at a burning car and see an augmented-reality overlay that uses AI to give them data such as the temperature of the fire and the location and condition of the battery. It would also include step-by-step instructions for stopping the fire, which usually involves puncturing the battery at specific points and flooding it with water.

After Altun completed an initial concept, local firefighters helped him hone the design, making the device operable with one hand so that the person at the scene can use their other hand to make radio calls, and adding a strap so that it doesn’t need to be set down (where it could be damaged).

While Fuse does not exist as a real product, Altun hopes that the industry takes his idea beyond the concept stage. “Even though vehicles become safer every day with the new regulations and the advancements in technology, there will always be emergencies,” he says. “I believe the Fuse system can be a huge upgrade for the emergency service and the firefighters—as they currently only rely on paper documents and personal experience.”