141–150 of 185 posts
I say it's safe. Volkswagen group should definitely ship more cars on big ships, and if their ship catches fire again, then they should stop beating about and call it what it at that point is: sabotage.
they would need to expand on their 4% ev market share to have the need to do that
Perhaps there are forces working to ensure they don't succeed in that.
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Can we stop it with this absurd fear mongering already? There's millions of EVs on the road now. I have had my Leaf for 8 years and keep seeing this same tired FUD online. The incidents of fires from electric cars are extremely low. The scooters and other cheap vehicles you cite are a separate problem from just being Lithium-Ion batteries. They're cheap procucts with bad electronics and poor protection of the battery…
It's anything but FUD, it's just that most vehicles have very well designed battery packs, but not all of them do and when you get out of the car domain to scooters and other personal mobility devices the quality drops like a stone.
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The standard range Tesla Model 3 says otherwise. They’ve been using LFP for a while now and it actually has longer range than it’s non-LFP predecessor, albeit with somewhat increased weight. Charge rate on modern, well-managed LFP cells is not abysmal. The LFP Model 3 SR gets excellent charging speeds.
Hmm, so instead of filling the bay with 50% Li-ions, they fill it up to 100% with LFPs? I guess that sort of works but with the added mass you must get even less range than you'd have with the partial capacity setup, not to mention worse handling. Doesn't seem like too good of an option unless they're really like a quarter of the price, which I'm not exactly seeing. They seem rather on par, with maybe a 10% reduction…
This is incorrect. Range increases due to added capacity faster than it decreases due to added weight here. It's approximately the same range, even with all the extra weight.
> Since the battery is larger, yes. But per unit, no.
Not sure I see the problem here? As a (non-Tesla) EV owner, I have never once cared about what my per-unit charging speed is over the charging speed of the battery pack as a whole.
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It's anything but FUD, it's just that most vehicles have very well designed battery packs, but not all of them do and when you get out of the car domain to scooters and other personal mobility devices the quality drops like a stone.
The fact that there is some level of risk is not in dispute. What's FUD is hysterical reactions exaggerating the actual level of risk, such as throwing around punitively extreme legal liabilities.
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Elon Musk has said that he believes a significant portion of the industry will move to LFP (Lithium iron phosphate) chemistry due to its lower cost, fewer supply constraints, and better safety and stability properties. It was recently reported that Ford is working on LFP packs for their Mustang and F-150 Lightning EVs.
So they say, but the main gripe of switching to EVs has always been their too small range. Your average Li-ion 21700 cell has a capacity of 4-5Ah, whereas one with an LFP chemistry only gets 2-3Ah. That's almost a 50 % reduction in spatial density, not to mention their abysmal C rating. Perhaps they would fit for PHEV usage, but for pure EVs they would be rather shite imo.
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Why is it hard to put out a fire when EV batteries are involved? If the fire doesn't start in the EV battery why would the battery catch fire? It might sound like an odd question, but we have experience with this in Norway, and the results are counterintuitive. Cars in a large airport parking garage caught fire, and it had many EVs in it. Not a single battery pack caught fire. Only the interior of the EVs did. If the…
If the battery catches fire they are very hard to out out. But you are right that it's maybe harder to set the battery on fire in the first place.
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EVs are safe if you remove batteries. If batteries can not be easily removed and serviced, it is unsafe design. We need basic regulations around safety here.
I'm all for serviceable batteries, but I don't see how it solves the shipping safety issue. So you ship the EVs without batteries, and then... you ship the batteries?
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Why is it hard to put out a fire when EV batteries are involved? If the fire doesn't start in the EV battery why would the battery catch fire? It might sound like an odd question, but we have experience with this in Norway, and the results are counterintuitive. Cars in a large airport parking garage caught fire, and it had many EVs in it. Not a single battery pack caught fire. Only the interior of the EVs did. If the…
One of the problems is that lithium ion batteries can't be discharged fully without destroying them. Effectively, the batteries are a very large energy source that can never be fully turned off. Another problem is that (if I understand correctly) lithium ion battery fires tend to produce their own oxygen. Another problem is that a manufacturing defect in one cell could cause the whole pack to catch on fire. According…
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There's a couple videos on YouTube of vehicles on a carrier ship where the vehicles are bash around a fiar bit beyond what might happen in a passenger safety impact test. This one shows the result of a ship passing nearby a Category 3 hurricane and teh aftermath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EqGzO_qsc
I'm surprised they aren't strapped down like on a tow truck. That would prevent the majority of issues.
Shipping cars in containers sized structures could be a more realistic approach perhaps.