https://gcaptain.com/a-brief-look-back-at-recent-car-carrier...
Worth examination
Ship Carrying EVs Abandoned in Pacific After Catching Fire
51–54 of 54 posts
Re: Ship Carrying EVs Abandoned in Pacific After Catching Fire
#52Of the 3000 cars only 800 were EVs, and there’s no evidence yet they were the source of the fire. The headline seems misleading.
Specifically 65 full EV and 681 hybrids.
Per a link I posted, EV are not necessarily the cause of the fires, though they do consistently make it more difficult to extinguish.
Re: Ship Carrying EVs Abandoned in Pacific After Catching Fire
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea what this says. Quite literally every single English language reference returned by a simple search refutes the assertion that EV fires are not more difficult or toxic than a regular car. The fact that EV fires are more difficult to extinguish and produce substantially more toxic byproducts than regular gasoline powered cars is well established. The toxicity of battery fires is widely reported: https:/…
> a simple search refutes the assertion that EV fires are not more difficult or toxic than a regular car The assertion is that EV fires are not particularly more difficult than ICE vehicle fires if the battery has not entered thermal runaway . Most EV fires do not start in the battery (at least for EVs that are not involved in a collision). And while the battery certainly can enter thermal runaway by an external fire…
For any fire, once the fire gets hot enough, it can be difficult or impossible to extinguish.
The fundamental problem is that battery fires get to be very high temperatures 1200C and cannot be extinguished at that point. I think the distinction you’re making about presence of thermal runaway or not is really rather irrelevant because yes you can put that fire out. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the devices do runaway and when they do it’s very difficult to put them out.
The ship in the original article was abandoned because it the fire could not be extinguished. The battery fire at Moss Landing could not be extinguished for 2 weeks.
Here’s a great video of the MountainView Fire Department talking about the difficulties of putting out EV fires. They explain that they’ve had cars catch on fire again 6 days later. They purchased new specialized equipment but at the time their department was one of the only fire companies that had this in California.
Re: Ship Carrying EVs Abandoned in Pacific After Catching Fire
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a qualitative difference between a car that's likely to burn on the road when being driven, and one that's likely to burn in the middle of the night when parked in a garage attached to my house.
>one that's likely to burn in the middle of the night when parked in a garage attached to my house. ICE cars do this all the time. It doesn't make the news as much as a brand new product doing that. Granted, the "EVs are less likely to start fires" take is also misleading. It's not usually doing a "like for like" comparison, because the majority of ICE fires are in very old and poorly maintained cars. Things like wir…
Phones and laptops burn often enough that I am careful to never leave one unattended on a couch or bed.