It's probably helpful to ignore Hollywood here. We see exploding cars all the time, but in real life cars don't explode.

They can burn of course, and a fireball is a fireball, but an explosion creates shock waves, and all kinds of ancillary damage. Recall the Beirut explosion recently - the fire was relatively contained, but the damage from the explosion is vast.

So yeah, talking about gasoline here - the liquid doesn't explode, it burns. However the gas (as in gas, not liquid) can explode, rupturing the tank and spraying burning liquid everywhere. The worst case is a tank mostly empty - the fumes explode, spraying the rest of the liquid. The best case is a full tank. Liquids can absorb a lot of heat, without expanding or creating pressure. Once they boil though (which requires that the liquid doesn't already "fill the tank", pressure builds leading ultimately to the rapid disassembly of the container.

Incidentally this is why throwing an _empty_ aerasol can on a fire is very dangerous, possibly more dangerous than a completely full one (depending on the contents).

But to your point, and explosion and a fire are very different animals, with very different outcomes.