There is no liability component to a car's engine compartment.
For a hundred years car engine compartments have been dangerous as hell.
Hazards in an ICE compartment:
* temperatures hot enough to melt/set fire to your clothing (the exhaust, which in modern engines can be found in all sorts of weird places; Audi and others now use turbochargers inside the engine banks, instead of outside them. Exhaust gas recirc systems can be in weird places, too
* moving components which could easily dismember digits, deglove your hands, descalp you. Lots of cars have stuff that isn't moving, which can unexpectedly start moving (like electric cooling fans.)
* scalding hot fluids which could geyser if released (ie the coolant expansion tank)
* battery acid, used engine oil, etc
Hazards in an electric car engine compartment: none, if you don't cut through the insulation of the bright orange HV cables or drink the fluids.
The big difference is that ICE compartments are a known measure, society has been dealing with them for almost a century so the "common sense" on it is well established (we know what mistakes an average stupid person will do and what mistakes an average smart person will do). But Electric is a whole new context, with a completely different set of safety rules, so it will take time to develop a new common sense compatible with those rules, until then there is a very big risk that people may incorrectly apply old safe common sense rules to the new context and get hurt.
It boils down to: "I have been [doing something] my entire life and it was always safe, then I got an EV, tried to do the exact same thing and got hurt". From the customer perspective the EV manufacturer turned a safe operation into an unsafe operation, so it is the manufacturer's fault.
For a hundred years car engine compartments have been dangerous as hell.
Hazards in an ICE compartment:
* temperatures hot enough to melt/set fire to your clothing (the exhaust, which in modern engines can be found in all sorts of weird places; Audi and others now use turbochargers inside the engine banks, instead of outside them. Exhaust gas recirc systems can be in weird places, too
* moving components which could easily dismember digits, deglove your hands, descalp you. Lots of cars have stuff that isn't moving, which can unexpectedly start moving (like electric cooling fans.)
* scalding hot fluids which could geyser if released (ie the coolant expansion tank)
* battery acid, used engine oil, etc
Hazards in an electric car engine compartment: none, if you don't cut through the insulation of the bright orange HV cables or drink the fluids.