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Comment by Jamwinner | Hacker News Reader

I have put out even large car fires with a small extinguisher. A lithium fire takes hours and thousands of gallons of water to subside. There is also the possible issue of rapid exit when electrics are dead. While the chance is clearly lower, the risk is higher to you should it occur. Currently there is no good accepted methodology for firefighters and first responders beyond 'more water' or 'let it burn'. That is a real problem.

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> A lithium fire takes hours and thousands of gallons of water to subside.

Tesla battery fires are not lithium metal fires. They are primarily organic solvent fires which evolve flammable gasses when overheated.

> There is also the possible issue of rapid exit when electrics are dead.

This is not an issue with Tesla design, all of that is handled by a traditional car battery that every car has, not the main battery. Those batteries are completely separate and in different parts of the car, I think specifically because of this safety issue.

If anything teslas are safer in this department because of the temperature sensors in the battery pack. There's several stories out there of battery fires in teslas where the fire only occurred after the car warned the driver, and after all the participants got out.

On the other hand you're unlikely to notice a fire in a gasoline car before there's smoke or fire.

I believe that in Teslas, the main battery pack is for motive power, while the vehicle's electrical system (including doors and windows) is powered from a standard 12V car battery which is kept charged from the main battery pack. Thus egress would be the same as in any other vehicle in a crash/fire.

> A lithium fire takes hours and thousands of gallons of water to subside

Doesn't lithium react violently with water? Looking online, lithium creates hydrogen gas on contact with water. That seems like adding fuel to the fire. Makes sense that it takes a lot to extinguish a fire with fuel.

A lithium battery is made of lithium compounds not raw lithium. Expecting it to react the same way as pure lithium is a profound misunderstanding of basic chemistry.

You know, you could have left it at the first sentence. There's no need to incorrectly assume what my expectations were or the source of the misunderstanding.

Kind of like when people commonly refer to table salt as “sodium”. Sodium is a highly caustic and reactive metal. The metal sodium is profoundly different than the salt called sodium chloride. Sharing a specific type of element means nothing when comparing compounds.

This is a strawman argument really: what if this very rare thing happens (battery fire), and then another really rare thing on top of that (entrapment); therefore EV bad.

Compared to flammable liquid fires at 180,000 per year, see above, which really are pretty common.

In case of accident, those two things would happen much frequently.

No, that's classical FMEA (Failure Method Effect Analysis).

>Compared to flammable liquid fires at 180,000 per year,

This is a straw-man argument too. You're comparing battery fires to all vehicle fires. Ask any mechanic and they will tell you vehicle electronics systems are the primary source of crispness with stalled electric motors and rodent damage being the primary sources. Regardless of how it gets its motive power a vehicle's power-train rarely catches fire compared to other things that catch fire (which is probably in part why the NHTSA is interested in this).

Lithium fire also ends in a damaged battery, that needs special care. Better sources in German, but the problem is still described here: https://climatechangedispatch.com/wrecked-tesla-recycle-car/

I wouldn't trust a "news source" with headlines like "Climate-Fearing Millennial Snowflake Self-Triggers During Hunger Strike" further than I could throw them.

Their clearly biased against EVs because "libtards" drive them.

Agree, link is bad. But some random burning Tesla in Austria isn’t interesting for international press. Update: battery wasn’t burning. Austrian source: https://m.auto.oe24.at/thema/Ausgebrannter-Tesla-in-Tirol-Ak...

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