As someone who is driving a vehicle that has burned up once, I have a "plan of action" in place. The first thing that you need to know, and the thing that keeps me up at night trembling in terror, is that you may not KNOW that you have a fire for quite some time. I keep an eye on my temp guage quite a bit, as well as looking in my rear view and side mirrors. My wife says I'm paranoid, but I prefer the term cautious. Ok. Lets say I see smoke billowing out the back. I pull over as quickly as I can and come to a stop (btw, since Vanagons aren't speed demons and I try to baby mine anyway, I am usually driving in the far right lane anyway). I run around to the sliding door and open it and pull my extinguisher from its location behind the battery box, trying to keep my cool so that I will remember to CLOSE THE DOOR. (The PO didn't do that and the sliding door panel burned to a crisp). I then take the pin out of the extinguisher and direct the spray into the opening under the rear wheel well where you can get at the engine w/o opening the lid. HOPEFULLY, this will at least cut the fire down enough so that I can then open the back hatch and, using the heavy gloves that I hope will be around somewhere, open the engine lid to inspect/ suppress any continuing flames. One final note. I have heard that it really doesn't take so much fire extinguisher "gunk" to actually put out the flames, so I will try not to "unload" on it (if at all possible) because that crap gets everywhere and is a real pain in the a** to clean up ;-) BTDT. I think the whole process should only take about 1 minute ONCE I DISCOVER THE FIRE. Good luck to all, and I hope you never have to use this plan. James in Houston, TX 87 Westy (The Phoenix)