To put some actual information here (there’s surprisingly little of that here, so someone actually interested wouldn’t learn much)..
No, an electric car is considerably more resistant to water or submersion than an ICE car. First of all, “shorts”. Quite literally impossible unless you drive through liquid mercury on a regular basis, but then a shorted battery is the least of your problems. A prolonged amount of time submerged in salt water will do damage to the terminals (electrolysis), and will drain the battery pretty fast. The same goes for the normal 12v in an ICE car.
Second, “wading” through something is considerably more dangerous for an ICE car than it is for an electric car. Water down the intake of your engine is one of the fastest ways to severely damage or outright destroy the engine. If you’re lucky and the engine was idling when flooded, you hydrolock it, which means you might get away with pulling the plugs and cranking it, spitting out the water. Much more likely is that you were revving the engine since you were trying to pass through water, in which case the engine is almost certainly now junk. Water doesn’t compress, which means you’ll hydraulic a piston.
No such problems in an electric car.
No, you obviously won’t get electrocuted if you drive the car into a river. The entire electric drivetrain has at least an IP67 rating, with most newer EVs getting an IP68 rating. IP67 means it protects against temporary submersion (around 30 minutes), IP68 means it protects against prolonged submersion. Which is obviously important for conditioned batteries in newer EVs, since the batteries are indeed watercooled. On top of that, in case of an accident (sensors), the enclosure gets immediately disconnected (pyro fuses), meaning high voltage will only exist within the battery itself. Plus, ground fault detection systems and fuses.
It’s pretty much impossible to get electric shocks from an EV. For some interesting (and humorous) information on this particular topic, watch “electroboom” on youtube. Particularly the video where he stands in a bathtub and drops a live wire into the water, without getting hurt (do not attempt).
Of course water will do damage through corrosion, but that’s not exclusive to an EV.
As someone who plays with high powered batteries for the hobby.. While batteries sure are dangerous, very much so indeed, water isn’t the problem.
Oxygen is. If you get into an accident so devastating that you manage to rupture the batteries/enclosure, oxygen will reach the lithium in the batteries. Oxygen + Lithium = fireworks. Thankfully, due to how battery packs are constructed, even if you rupture the casing, the fire isn’t devastating. In case of a Tesla for example, it has 7000 batteries, arranged as an array with multiple, steel enclosed compartments. It’d take a freak accident to pull a Titanic and rupture every single one, which would then of course lead to a spectacular fire. That being said: the kind of accident you need to accomplish a ruptured battery would also (multiple times over) rupture a petrol tank. As we know, petrol and a hot exhaust or spark doesn’t make it rain either.
To come back to the actual case, anyone who has an understanding wife and is allowed to spend a few grand worth of stupidity into RC cars learns pretty fast what you can and cannot do with batteries. Submerging them is fine. Some of my RCs wade through rivers without even being enclosed – and some of my batteries, while not that high voltage (biggest pack i got is 30 volts), they’re still able to push around 1000 ampere (not mA, A) over short periods of times – so i’m pretty “anorak-y” when it comes to battery safety. My crown jewel RC produces around 10hp electric, so not that far off of a Tweezy lol.