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After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

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Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#51

Post by throwaway0a5e »

aaronmdjones wrote: post #42
gunapologist99 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you heard of a gasoline fire in a modern vehicle? Why is it that EV fires are so common? > Other than being afraid of new technology. ... but then you resorted to ad hominem. Why would someone have to be "afraid" of new technology in order to have serious and legitimate concerns about it? To help you out a bit, we also saw very bad lithium battery issues in laptops about ten years ago (just sea…

> When was the last time you heard of a gasoline fire in a modern vehicle? A fire in an ICE car 2 months ago shut down our local motorway for over 50 minutes during rush hour. A month prior to that, someone ran their ICE car off the road into a field; it caught fire and the driver died. ICE vehicle fires are common. The difference is that EV vehicle fires are more widely reported upon. You see more stories about EV v…

>The difference is that EV vehicle fires are more widely reported upon

A clapped out POS or a crashed vehicle catching fire isn't newsworthy.

A vehicle bursting into flames without a good reason is.

Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#52

Post by KaiserPro »

jeffbee wrote: post #31

Battery buses are a solution ahead of their time. Any old bus is better than car-based transportation, so shifting modes from car to bus is more important than changing the energy source of the bus. If shifting from car to bus is impossible because of built environment, that's the first priority. Buses powered by batteries should be way down at the end of the TODO list. If you absolutely insist on having buses that a…

I suspect that you don't live in europe.

In london, buses are a massive source of particulate and nitrogen pollution.

We've had hybrid buses for a good 5 years, some hydrogen ones as well (but only one or two routes)

However london has rolled out 100% electric buses in the last 3 years, and they've not caught fire at a faster rate than the diesel ones.

Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#53

Post by jeffbee »

KaiserPro wrote: post #52
jeffbee wrote: post #31

Battery buses are a solution ahead of their time. Any old bus is better than car-based transportation, so shifting modes from car to bus is more important than changing the energy source of the bus. If shifting from car to bus is impossible because of built environment, that's the first priority. Buses powered by batteries should be way down at the end of the TODO list. If you absolutely insist on having buses that a…

I suspect that you don't live in europe. In london, buses are a massive source of particulate and nitrogen pollution. We've had hybrid buses for a good 5 years, some hydrogen ones as well (but only one or two routes) However london has rolled out 100% electric buses in the last 3 years, and they've not caught fire at a faster rate than the diesel ones.

In London that makes sense because they already have a decent mode share. I suspect the bus mode share in Hamden, Connecticut is 1% or less.

Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#54

Post by absolutelynobo »

jeffbee wrote: post #50
absolutelynobo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying that the the unnamed town you’re in bought a few FC buses 10 years ago and is still maintaining them today? That’s great, but it’s also an anecdote. Have they bought any recently? Have neighboring towns bought in as well?

I see that you are doubling down on the “don’t know what you’re talking about” aspect of this debate. My local transit agency is AC Transit. It serves millions of people in several large cities. Last year it ordered fifty more fuel cell vehicles from its suppliers. https://www.actransit.org/zeb

Thank you for sharing that link, Jeff! It’s neat to see that ACT is going for a 70% hydrogen, 30% electric mix. Their page has a unbiased-sounding section on it:

> We will be running hydrogen and battery electric vehicles in identical service to collect real-world performance data for comparison—and to determine which technology performs better to meet the needs of our service as we move towards a complete zero-emission fleet by 2040.

It looks like they started the hydrogen bus project 20 years ago, not ten.

Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#55

Post by quartesixte »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #3
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #2

IMO this is an aspect of the shift to EV's that I don't hear all that many people talking about- is the gov giving enough resources/training to local emergency services providers to deal with these sorts of fires and the disposal of the EV materials after a fire. Totally surmountable, but I feel like I don't hear the federal gov talk about it much and instead the focus is on more chargers and tax credits to eliminate…

The entire point is that you can't "deal" with it. Since car batteries contain the fuel and the oxidizer, there isn't a way to separate them short of blowing the whole thing up. Fires can stop and start spontaneously, and often do (see pictures and videos of Teslas on fire in junkyards).

Add to the fact that the fuel is Lithium and you’re in for a badddddd time

Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#57

Post by jotux »

wongarsu wrote: post #38
gunapologist99 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you heard of a gasoline fire in a modern vehicle? Why is it that EV fires are so common? > Other than being afraid of new technology. ... but then you resorted to ad hominem. Why would someone have to be "afraid" of new technology in order to have serious and legitimate concerns about it? To help you out a bit, we also saw very bad lithium battery issues in laptops about ten years ago (just sea…

According to the first statistic I found [1] there are about 180000 highway vehicle fires each year in the US, and in 26% of them the item that first ignited was "flammable or combustible liquid, gas filter or piping". So that's about 45000 gasoline fires a year in the US (if you don't count ones where the fire started somewhere else in the car). You just don't hear about them because they aren't newsworthy (precisel…

Some quick googling says tesla is ~70% [1] of the EV market and there is someone who claims to track every telsa fire [2] which has counts 97 fires since 2013. Compare that to 45k ICE vehicles fires every year and it appears that EVs are significantly less likely to catch fire.

I think if you live in one of the top 50 metro areas of the US and listen to local traffic news between June-August you'll probably hear about a traffic problem related to a car fire every few days or weeks. ICE vehicles fires are just so common we accept it and it's not reported unless especially gruesome.

1: https://electrek.co/2022/04/26/tesla-tsla-owns-75-percent-us...

2: https://www.tesla-fire.com/

Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#58

Post by marcosdumay »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #22
londons_explore wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric cars could totally be designed to be re-ignite-proof. For example, you'd have the battery pack detect a breach - for example through a lack of pressurised coolant. That would then trigger each battery cell to have a PTC resistor discharge it - that could be entirely mechanical. The PTC resistors would discharge the battery in a few hours, maintaining the battery temperature at say 120C. As water is doused on…

How well do these safety feature survive 2,000+ºF fire burning next to them?

Badly. How well does gasoline containers survive it?

If you have a 2000°F fire, you probably have buildings collapsing and a lot of fire everywhere surrounding it. As long as things do not explode, you can't make it much worse by any action. And exploding is something the batteries don't do.

Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#59

Post by marcosdumay »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #10
bragr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not really true. There are tools and agents to address lithium fires, but you have to have them. If you just try to put them out with water, you're going to be there all night fighting reignition.

Please don’t leave us in suspense: what are these tools and agents? Got a link?

For lithium, sand is enough. If you have HF like a sibling said, sand won't do, but I can't imagine you would get enough of it to sustain a fire.

Re: After bus fire, CT pulls electric fleet from service

#60

Post by starkd »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #19

While this is unfortunate to have happened, this says more about CT being smart and having an over abundance of caution, than lack of faith in a technology. BART, which has been running for 50 years recently [1] had an issue with the heat that caused a train to derail. For several days that section of track was totally shut down. For weeks afterwards they ran the trains at an extremely low speed through the miles of…

Yes. Good thing to ground them, but it also shows these vehicles are not ready. Even if its an act of sabotoge, like someone shooting at the battery. It would not happen with a regular diesel bus.
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