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Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

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11–20 of 72 posts

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#11

Does this article extinguish anything? What does "per 100,000 sold" mean? Is that simply per 100,000 cars? This metric makes no sense unless you age-adjust vehicles; most EVs are And dismissing firefighters lack of knowledge and training and equipment to put out these fires is strange. It will be overcome, but it's a legitimate issue.

Have you seen the gear US firefighters use vs their European counterparts?

Their stuff is ancient, so much so that they need to have "smoke drills" to put their very complicated kit on when they enter a smoke diving situation. This is all because the US helmet is the same shape it was in the 1800s, because tradition or something. They just refused to modernise.

The EU version? four clips attach to the helmet, tighten, done in under 5 seconds.

https://www.firehouse.com/safety-health/ppe/helmets/article/...

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#12

I think the scooter fires are a real issue. See: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lit... Those batteries are handled, charged, and manufactured/repaired with much less care....

Yea, there's a ton of YOLO -level batteries in e-bikes and e-scooters.

Car manufacturers actually care about reliability, because they're usually bigger corporations with deep pockets.

Pretty much anyone with a contact in China can start "manufacturing" white-label e-scooters from the cheapest bidder. Then just shut down the corporation and disappear if any issues arise.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#13
post #8

You'll never catch me with a lithium ion battery larger than ~150wH inside my home. I don't care how aggressively the statistics are massaged. I've personally experienced laptop and cellphone batteries catching on fire and can see how something with 100x+ the capacity could cause some serious fucking trouble. Anyone who has one of those 1kWh+ emergency power backup things sitting inside their house right now really n…

> But I think it is much less likely to occur

You think. The point of gathering data and studying it is to attempt to replace our animal-brain intuitions with real evidence.

I honestly haven't looked into the evidence on this enough either way, since I haven't yet seriously researched purchasing an electric vehicle.

But I know that I have a big tank of gasoline sitting directly underneath a portion of my childrens' rooms, and a big pipe of methane running into my basement running to a couple little tiny flames that are always lit and sometimes turned into a big blue flame to heat the household's air, or a slightly smaller fire to heat its water.

I trust these clearly dangerous things to be safe enough, but I haven't ever researched the evidence on the safety of these either. The only difference is that I've always lived with these dangers without ever really thinking about them; they're just part of the water I swim in.

One day EV batteries will be no different. It's rational for novel dangers to receive more scrutiny than old ones, but new things become old before long.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#14

I think the scooter fires are a real issue. See: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lit... Those batteries are handled, charged, and manufactured/repaired with much less care....

Scooter batteries barely undergo any testing -> typical consumer product. I wish, that from oversees imported products would get safety and environmental labels. The consumers should somehow be educated. That one week after buying landfills filling cheap plastic thrash is no good for anything.

Meanwhile car battery is safety related part covered by dozens of regulations. Some YouTube channel was showing them under direct fire for minutes and they didn’t ignite. Maybe Rimac batteries, I don’t remember.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#16
post #7
post #6

My impression is that the concern with EV and battery fires is that they can occur in the home or while otherwise stationary, unexpectedly causing much more catastrophic damage. ICE fires, in contrast, seem to be mostly associated with collisions, or somewhat less so with driving; it seems uncommon for ICEs to suddenly catch fire in an enclosed building. e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649 I'm not an expert o…

ICE fires aren't often related to collisions. I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting. I've had multiple ICE cars recalled for catching fire when stopped. In the examples in the articles they mentioned vehicles in parking garages and on cargo ships, those weren't moving. Your general impressions don't reflect reality. Out of all the cars I've owned…

My PHEV vehicle (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid) had a recall that caused fires while parked. It turned out to be related to part of the 12v system.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#17

Does this article extinguish anything? What does "per 100,000 sold" mean? Is that simply per 100,000 cars? This metric makes no sense unless you age-adjust vehicles; most EVs are And dismissing firefighters lack of knowledge and training and equipment to put out these fires is strange. It will be overcome, but it's a legitimate issue.

Yeah absolutely. I think a different accurate headline for the same evidence could be "It will require significant time and effort in training firefighters to bring EV batteries to an acceptable level of safety".

The timeline of social adjustment to a technology is just as important as the technology itself.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#18
post #7
post #6

My impression is that the concern with EV and battery fires is that they can occur in the home or while otherwise stationary, unexpectedly causing much more catastrophic damage. ICE fires, in contrast, seem to be mostly associated with collisions, or somewhat less so with driving; it seems uncommon for ICEs to suddenly catch fire in an enclosed building. e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649 I'm not an expert o…

ICE fires aren't often related to collisions. I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting. I've had multiple ICE cars recalled for catching fire when stopped. In the examples in the articles they mentioned vehicles in parking garages and on cargo ships, those weren't moving. Your general impressions don't reflect reality. Out of all the cars I've owned…

> I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting

The ICE car combusted while the engine wasn't running? Like, it was parked, they'd turned off the car as usual, and hours later it randomly combusted? Do you have any information on what the likely cause may have been? (e.g., hot weather? unexpected sparks?)

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#19
post #8

You'll never catch me with a lithium ion battery larger than ~150wH inside my home. I don't care how aggressively the statistics are massaged. I've personally experienced laptop and cellphone batteries catching on fire and can see how something with 100x+ the capacity could cause some serious fucking trouble. Anyone who has one of those 1kWh+ emergency power backup things sitting inside their house right now really n…

I've had multiple recalls for my ICE cars that would have resulted in a fire that I wouldn't have been able to notice ahead of time. My neighbor's house burned down from a few week old car that wouldn't have been obvious it was about to burn the house down. Car fires are rarely as obvious as gasoline profusely spilling all over the place, you probably wouldn't notice it if it were to happen to you.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#20
post #6

My impression is that the concern with EV and battery fires is that they can occur in the home or while otherwise stationary, unexpectedly causing much more catastrophic damage. ICE fires, in contrast, seem to be mostly associated with collisions, or somewhat less so with driving; it seems uncommon for ICEs to suddenly catch fire in an enclosed building. e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649 I'm not an expert o…

ICE fires occur in stationary as well. It's just that we have learned to handle gas better over the years.

I otherwise agree, but it's complicated because while what you say in the first sentence is true, it was true for ICE at one point too.

So for example, this is why gas containers have pressure releases, etc.

I mean, for an ICE vehicle you go to a gas station and fill it up. It's hard these days to think about how really dangerous that is because of how safe we'd be able to make it. It's much more dangerous than charging an EV car in theory.

Even storing the gas is dangerous!

That said, what you are pointing out is that the other difference is more around the mechanism. Gasoline can't ignite as a liquid. At high temperature it just vaporizes quickly into a gas and then ignites :)

As a gas, it has a lower explosive limit of about 1.5% and an upper of about 7.5%. Within that concentration level it is flammable. Outside of it, no.

Because you can get it to combust within this range, and we've become good at avoiding this happening in "normal" circumstances through safety mechanisms developed over the years.

This was not always true, and you saw more fires in lots of situations as a result.

EV fires on the other hand are usually self-sustaining chemical reactions[1] that got out of hand. Once triggered, they result in fire unless some safety mechanism stops them.

You can see this is really not dissimilar from ICE - we spend almost all energy/safety mechanisms on preventing the ability to cause a fire in the first place.

However, that said, these chemical reactions are more "omnipresent" than ICE for sure - once they are both "off", EV vehicles are more likely to explode than ICE ones.

A lot of this is the fact that they are not really "off" most of the time.

Regardless, however, we will do the same thing we did for handling of gas in general - we will figure out how to make that safer.

If we can make hand-filling your gas tank with an explosive fuel safe i've got faith we'll be able to make EVs sitting around doing nothing safe. We actually already can, just not at the energy density we want yet :)

[1] I understand that as a nitpick, so is burning gas, but let's leave this alone at this level :)

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