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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

I think it certainly raises questions about the extent to which it's reasonable for public utilities to pick up the slack for negative externalities caused by profitable companies. Of course it's a hard thing to price because of course fossil-fuel vehicles have a laundry list of negative externalities of their own.

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I generally agree, companies should pay for their externalies.

The efficient way to do that is to tax companies and use the tax dollars to fund public services like fire departments. Expecting Tesla to send in their own firefighters when a Tesla catches fire would be ridiculous. Public services are good, and the method for funding them is well established.

If we want to have additional levies for safety regarding lithium batteries, hopefully we are making sure to do the same for oil too...

The problem is the equipment to fight a petrol / diesel fire is already covered by most fire departments. Oil fires are common in commercial and industrial areas. Levying those users of petrochemicals would likely result in a fairly insignificant cost per user, such that the bureaucracy cost to collect would end up costing more. Thus it makes sense to pay for this from general government funds. The same if we extended it to wood and paper.

Large Lithium fires are fairly uncommon right now, they don't behave like most other classes of fires that firefighters are dealing with. Personal device fires are more common, but total heat / damage is less and the fire is frequently able to be controlled outside of confined areas (aircraft).

With a relatively low volume of large lithium battery packs, and the difficulty in containing them, it could make sense for a targeted levy to cover the cost. Lithium car fires are currently dealt with by trying to isolate the burning vehicle and overwhelming the fire with water (removing Oxygen and temp), however this is very inefficient. I have heard of a former fire chief arguing that to deal with the growth of large battery packs will require either massively increasing the number of appliances (fire engines) or defaulting fire appliances to using special foams as opposed to water. The foams will increase the cost to fight ALL fires, as many engines typically have to be ready pre-mixed before dispatch.

It has also been suggested that density limits, and battery packs be designed to include fire suppression and make this mandatory to allow vehicles on the road. This would create massive packaging issues for every EV company, add significant cost while reducing performance. All in all I think we need to consider if we charge the EV / household battery pack companies for this or we all bare it in general taxes for the environmental benefits. I think bearing it out of general funds is completely reasonable, however I wonder if we are going to get safer batteries if we pass on the cost and let the rate go down as the number and severity of fires decrease. The might be some marginal improvements that quickly get implemented in that case.

Would a good solution be to test battery designs in crash tests and tax more flammable designs more? Try and incentivize companies to come up with innovative fire suppression designs

Does it? This is the same issue it's always been: things catch on fire sometimes, we've decided that the best people to handle this are firemen, paid for by the local government.

But what previous thing is most analogous to batteries on cars? Cellphones and hoverboards are so much tinier. Maybe this isn't the same issue specifically, and some scale of government can require a tax to fund e.g. more education or training.

Maybe cars powered by literally thousands of explosions per second?

So batteries on cars is analogous to cars? I mean, could be. Maybe the EV battery is just like a gasoline tank, but something suggests that there are important differences.

I freely admit this is a pedantic point, but it's extraordinarily doubtful that any road car reaches 2000 ignitions per second (the threshold for "thousands").

In a 4-stroke engine each cylinder ignites once every two revolutions, so even a 12-cylinder engine wouldn't reach 2000 ignitions per second until 20,000 RPM.

A more typical case - say, a 6 cylinder engine hitting the redline at 7,000RPM is experiencing 350 ignitions per second - so, hundreds rather than thousands.

Thanks.

I'm confused why something needs to be equivalent to batteries in cars?

Do you know what's not equivalent to an electric car? A fertilizer plant catching on fire. And you guessed it, that's also handled by the fire department.

Does it? That sounds like the kind of thing that gets some sort of higher tier involvement. Is there not higher jurisdiction for managing larger fires that require more than the local crew?

Lots of stuff... hazmats, grain elevators, etc.

It’s not unreasonable for firemen to put out fires. It’s just a novel path that requires training.

>But what previous thing is most analogous to batteries on cars?

Large tanks of volatile, flammable, potentially-explosive liquid in proximity to ignition sources in the car?

Another reminder that we have a hybrid socialist free-market system, without even mentioning Tesla subsidies or how much of the science was publicly funded or "borrowed" from history without payment to the past.

Good question, that said it's not as unnatural as when gas became ubiquitous.

Now that there's a global shared effort to make everybody able to work safely around these issues should be mandatory.

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