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Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

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Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#51

Post by audunw »

It’s kind of absurd seeing some of the FUD around EVs from the perspective of li img in Norway now. We’re getting up to 20-30% of the cars ON THE ROAD being EVs now in some areas. I’d guess a quarter of my close neighbours have EVs.

According to some, our neighbourhood should be a EV-fire hellscape and we should have blackouts every week. The roads should have to be replaced every month from increased wear. Nobody can go on road trips anymore. Yet everything is fine. Better than fine. As the statistics are pretty clear on: there’s fewer car fires when you have more EVs. Also air pollution is down

When commenting on this topic online it feels like we’re living in the future, trying to argue with people from the past. If you’re wondering what a future with lots of EVs look like, you don’t have to speculate. All you have to do is come to Oslo or Bergen and take a look around. Yet people talk with absolutely certainty about how everything will go to hell when there’s too many EVs.

(Yes, Norway has some qualities that makes the transition easier. Like a strong grid to start with, low speed limits and a strong economy. But then the technology was much more primitive and expensive when Norway got started. Also, Norway has a winter that is brutal on the range of EVs, and an insanely high share of Norwegians will drive hours to their cabins high in the mountains every other weekend in winter.. not the most ideal market for EVs)

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#52

Post by audunw »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #4

When statistics are presented on fires per car sold, does it account for car age? I'd assume that average ICE car catching on fire is older that average EV just by EV not existing when ICE was made

I’ve heard comments from a department in Norway that the lower risk exists even when comparing similar models of similar age. But I haven’t seen the raw statistics on that anywhere yet.

The difference is so large that it’d be incredible if age would close the gap.

New vehicles have some risk as well: I think defects in battery cell manufacturing can be a significant risk in the early years of EVs.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#53

Post by theshrike79 »

sanderjd wrote: post #17
itsoktocry wrote: post #2

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.

The same issue is with car mechanics. Some just refuse to change.

Meanwhile there are shops over here where people ship their EVs from around the country because they know their shit. They have the know-how and tools to fix EVs for a fraction of the cost the Official Solution (replace whole $thing with brand new part).

TBH if you're in your 60's and a car mechanic, there's no point in learning EVs unless you're personally interested. There's gonna be enough work for the next 20 years easily just with ICEs

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#54

Post by audunw »

bob1029 wrote: 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…

Cars and energy storage systems have MUCH better BMS than your laptop. And MUCH better pack level protection from the environment. An entire parking garage with several EVs in it burned down in Norway. Not a single EV battery pack caught fire. Think about that. A firey hellscape around them and not a single ignition. What if all of them were EVs. No gasoline to contribute to the fire. It’s utterly insane that so many people think ICE cars are safer than EVs. It has no roots in basic facts. No roots in common sense. No root in easily available statistics. It’s such an obvious case of people fearing something just because it’s new and different.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#55

Post by vel0city »

audunw wrote: post #51

It’s kind of absurd seeing some of the FUD around EVs from the perspective of li img in Norway now. We’re getting up to 20-30% of the cars ON THE ROAD being EVs now in some areas. I’d guess a quarter of my close neighbours have EVs. According to some, our neighbourhood should be a EV-fire hellscape and we should have blackouts every week. The roads should have to be replaced every month from increased wear. Nobody ca…

I fully agree with this "feels like we're living in the future, trying to argue with people from the past" idea.

My neighborhood isn't exactly new, it was mostly built in the 70s to very early 80s. There are several households on my street which I know have EVs. Given how many argue about the load on the grid you'd assume the power company would have had to massively upgrade the infrastructure here to support it. But in the end our actual peak power usage largely hasn't changed; we're just pulling a bit more power in the very late evenings and super early morning hours. Time when the grid around us has plenty of capacity.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#56

Post by audunw »

dpedu wrote: post #5

> [Firefighters have] had 100 years to train and to understand how to deal with internal combustion engine fires,” the NFPA’s Andrew Klock told Vox. “With electric vehicles, they don’t have as much training and knowledge.” > But MSB’s Per-Ola Malmqvist has developed webinars that explain how to safely put out battery fires. In a 2022 webinar, he described the tools and techniques that were used to put out a raging EV…

Yeah that’s one of the aspects you need new training and equipment for. Nobody is downplaying that.

But it’s pretty easy to solve now. There’s already a kind of kiddie-pool like equipment that can easily be put up around the car to keep the bottom flooded with water for a few hours.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#57

Post by Kirby64 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #40
vel0city wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, ICEs tend to cath fire while they are moving. That's the time every system in the car is most stressed. That means the odds of it catching fire on your garage while you sleep are lower. EVs by their turn are highly stressed while charging.

The way I see it, ICE vehicles have a different potential fire mechanism that isn't present in EVs.

Since ICE vehicles operate at much hotter temperatures, they inherently have a combustion potential due to leakages (brake fluid, gas, oil, etc). It's pretty common to have a bit of smoking from a fluid change, purely from accidental drips (even a little bit). If it's a continuous drip and hot enough areas such as exhaust, you can get a fire.

EVs just don't have anything that hot during normal operation. The operating temperature of both the electric motors and the batteries is much much lower than the temperature of engine operating temps (usually 200+F) or exhaust gas temperatures (something ridiculous like 1200F on catalytic converters, and 500F on exhaust piping).

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#58

Post by belltaco »

Qwertious wrote: post #39
api wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas cars spontaneously igniting are rare, but flammable liquids like solvents or gasoline for lawn equipment catching fire and causing massive destruction is fairly common. People often do things like store solvents in basements where fumes can get loose and get near furnaces and other equipment and ignite. Stored energy is stored energy. You do have a bit of a point about large lithium power bricks. I trust those th…

>Stored energy is stored energy. There's plenty of stored energy in a slab of solid steel, but that doesn't make it remotely dangerous. What makes lithium-batteries dangerous is the thermal runaway , enabled by the liquid capacitor.

> There's plenty of stored energy in a slab of solid steel

Source? Are you confusing energy expended to make steel with energy being stored in it?

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#59

Post by lunias »

Tagbert wrote: post #44
verisimi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once it is isolated, let it burn out if it reignites. Mere words do not quite convey the issue. How does one "isolate" a car? Does one take it somewhere? Where? Are fire engines able to undertake this task? It's there a concern en route to the somewhere?

The same tow trucks that would tow away vehicles after a crash would tow an EV to an impoundment yard where it could be monitored.

You tow it away while it's on fire? I'm wondering if that's even possible. You can spray the vehicle w/ foam and then cover it and then maybe you could move it w/o reignition? Seems kinda risky / might require enclosed tow trucks w/ on board fire suppression? Then there's the question of where you put them once you move them. It's my understanding that they basically need to be allowed to burn (off gassing toxic chemicals) or submerged in liquid for extended periods.

There have been some pretty horrendous chain reactions of EV fires in China. I'm not sure storing a bunch of already defective ones in various states of burn together is safe at scale.

Re: Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

#60

Post by magicalhippo »

audunw wrote: post #54
bob1029 wrote: 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…

Cars and energy storage systems have MUCH better BMS than your laptop. And MUCH better pack level protection from the environment. An entire parking garage with several EVs in it burned down in Norway. Not a single EV battery pack caught fire. Think about that. A firey hellscape around them and not a single ignition. What if all of them were EVs. No gasoline to contribute to the fire. It’s utterly insane that so many…

> An entire parking garage with several EVs in it burned down in Norway. Not a single EV battery pack caught fire.

Details can be found in the fire departments evaluation[1] of the fire, specifically page 28, where they note they did not find evidence of any thermal runaway in any EV.

They also note that cars with liquid fuel often have plastic fuel tanks, which can get damaged due to the heat and start leaking, spreading flammable liquid over a larger area...

[1]: https://www.rogbr.no/Rapporter%20og%20utredninger/Evaluering...

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