GM warns some Bolt EV owners: Don’t park them inside or charge them unattended
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Article on the topic:
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/federal-regulators-wa...
Here's a firefighting training video (start at 3 minutes if it does not):
https://youtu.be/8n5Wf7TlGrU?t=181
Although there are some innovative solutions coming on tap, like this special modified shipping container that you put a still-on-fire EV into and then drive it to another safer location:
https://cfpa-e.eu/container-puts-out-inextinguishable-fires-...
Gas cars have leaky oil and combustion happening (my old high school car caught on fire under the hood). Users are regularly handling gasoline at stations.
Electric cars may be a bigger problem parked or at home. Overall less maintenance that might cause a fire but batteries so far seem more susceptible than gas tanks which are dangerous but don't generally ignite. Users are installing charging stations (although should be covered by electrical codes). Fire suppression in the garage and at charging locations might become popular (encouraged by insurance discounts).
Yeah, batteries are "dangerous". We're all still carrying them around in our pockets and purses.
It's worth considering that during the life of the car, far greater time will be spent charging as opposed to time spent fueling one, and even then, a fueling station can easily be outfitted with specialized safety devices that combat fuel fires.
> Yeah, batteries are "dangerous". We're all still carrying them around in our pockets and purses.
Stored energy is dangerous. The higher the density of that energy, the more danger it presents. Vehicle battery packs are designed with integrated cooling, and thus can be far denser than what's in your pocket.
Not to be completely negative, but to expect that there won't be a "safety learning curve" with larger and larger numbers of battery operated vehicles does not seem like sound planning. Met correctly, I'm sure we'll be able to manage it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6
"The FAA issued a restriction on the carrying of lithium batteries in bulk on passenger flights"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_991
"the International Civil Aviation Organization considered applying new safety standards to air carriage of lithium batteries as a result of this"
I also wonder if it would help to have an emergency discharge port or something? In other words, a fire truck pulls up and they plug a cable from the car's discharge port that energizes some high-power heating elements to boil water or something. The idea being that the faster you can discharge the battery, the less stored energy you have to deal with catching things on fire again. (Though it might not actually help, since in the short term extracting power from the battery will just cause it to heat up more.)
(The "emergency discharge port" could just be a DC fast charger port with some method to force the contactors to engage.)
Issues with the discharge port I can see include the issues that:
- broken circuit means energy will struggle to get anywhere even if you wanted. Solving for this increases complexity substantially and non-linearly.
- maximum discharge rate of the cells could mean even at max output it could take well over 10 minutes to depower if not much longer (and discharge also has a trade off of them heating up accordingly at higher discharge rates)
Ultimately, you have a lot of embodied “loose” energy and once the reaction has left your control and the walls of the cell are breached (and enough of them), it’s more akin to a collection of little firecrackers that “combust” when they touch each other rather than a fire that can be “extinguished”. Just in slow motions because they are metals.
A lot of EV batteries have something like this already, you'd just have the ability to run external water through it instead of just going with a closed loop. You'd also need an outlet, which I guess would spill ethylene glycol all over everything if it wasn't contained, but better that than a burning car.
> “These tanks can be shot at with incendiary bullets, or cut in half with a chainsaw, and you could throw a match on them — they’d just smolder like a cigarette. You can’t say that about a gas tank. Here, only the hydrogen you need is released from the tank. When the tank’s heated, it produces hydrogen and the car burns it. So there’s never much gaseous hydrogen in this system at any given time.”
The problem is when your garage catches on fire, it heats the tank ...
[1]: https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is...
https://rumble.com/vjk4qb-electric-car-charging-station-germ...
Which is why firefighting battery fires is such an irksome thing. You can douse the battery and get the flames out, but hours to even days later the battery can have collected enough heat to reignite spontaneously.
> Use copious amounts of water to cool the battery to extinguish the fire
https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/Training/AFV/Emergency-Re...
The advice is to use copious amounts of water to cool the batteries, removing the "heat" leg of the triangle. This works but requires extended periods of cooling support due to the possibility of internal shorts re-supplying the heat, and starting the process again.
I think the general practice for EVs around here (in larger cities at least) is to extinguish it with water, then put them in a container full of water for 24 hours.
And I was already getting stressed over the NY Post article about rats chewing soy-based wiring chemicals in Teslas. Of course, rats are everywhere here.
Lithium batteries do not need external oxygen to burn and toxic smoke coming up from your backyard with no way to reach the source doesn't sound like a fun proposition.
Unless you happen to have a coal seam in your yard or live on a peat bog it's overwhelmingly more likely that it'll run out of fuel before it hurts anything.
People have been digging fire pits (or building up the ground to the same effect) for millennia because it makes fires more controllable.
Edit: Apparently they can be installed in some interior spaces. I stand corrected.
https://www.tesla.com/powerwall
"The compact, all-in-one construction features versatile mounting options for indoor or outdoor spaces."
https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...
1. An electrical short can cause the parts within the PCV valve to melt, increasing the risk of a fire, even when the vehicle is not in use.
2. Wiring that overheats could cause the electrical connectors to melt, and increase the risk of a fire, even when the vehicle is unattended.
Hmm. About 250 million vehicles in the is. If you assume maybe 100 million parked closely in lots during peak load times. Wonder what the average daily odds of a battery fire are.
This’ll probably be one of those things society will figure out, but I certainly never considered this aspect of electric cars.
If it is all lithium, well, make sure you have good insurance.
All the reactants are stored in the same place, unlike a fuel, where you have to mix the reactants before there's energy to release
If only storing hydrogen weren’t such a problem …
Car manufacturers need to find a way to get these batteries to easily extinguish before they can overtake traditional petrol cars without dry areas getting massively impacted.
I can see countries and states facing droughts putting a ban or extra tax on electric cars if manufacturers do not find a way to extinguish these fires. Rescuing people from electric vehicles is already complicated enough by the instructions for disconnecting the high voltage lines being different per model and per brand. I don't think it's reasonable for every fire department to be expected to have several shipping containers on standby to just dump and drown burning cars into.
This stuff makes me wary of the future of electric cars. Maybe the hydrogen people have a point, despite their clear connections to big oil.
[1]: https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/electric-vehicle-bat... [2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/federal-regulators-wa...
There was a company that was trying to sell water tank services via a boeing 747.
"Reese says his SuperTanker can be dispatched from its Colorado Springs base to anywhere in North America in 4h 30min – or to almost any location globally in 20h."
"tanks able to drop 72,700 litres (19,200USgal) of water or 66,300 litres of retardant"
-https://www.flightglobal.com/flight-international/meet-the-l...
That company folded. Looks like there is another active one. https://www.coulsonaviationusa.com/
a) Only two vehicles have had issues.
b) It's unclear yet whether there's a design, manufacturing or procedural fault or if there was human error when performing a recall repair on these vehicles.
(and frankly I find the other brand's fanboys far more insufferable, the Tesla guys are at least aware they're driving beta tech with teething issues)
Hyundai is also famous for adding a warning light in their gas cars that lights up to indicate a catastrophic engine fire is occurring.
Has any notable numbers of Teslas caught fire while charging?
Doesn't seem that unusual, I wanted to replace the door between my house and garage, turns out there's a specific building code specification for that door, because apparently cars catch fire in garages.
1. rain doesn't come in 2. gas leaks go out 3. it makes it a lot easier to push the car out if it catches fire while you're working on it
The slope is not enough to notice unless you pour water on it.
It didn't add any cost, it's just one of those little things I delight in.
What wouldn't a normal smoke alarm work in a garage?
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Kidde-Firex-Hardwired-Inter-Conn...
That said, they haven’t had to do a recall so maybe it isn’t as bad (or maybe GM is just more aggressive about recalls)
Recall is only needed for hardware fixes or if there is no 100% deployed software update network for the cars.
GM: throwing shade on EVs since the EV1.
It was by no means the most dangerous vehicle on sale in its time—that was probably the Volkswagen Beetle—but it was absolutely more likely to catch fire in a collision than pretty much anything else on the road that wasn't a literal fuel delivery truck.
So no, it wasn't necessarily going to kill you in a collision, but if it did, it was a lot more likely to be with fire.
> "But despite the memo's cold calculations, was Ford characterized fairly as the Kevorkian of automakers? Perhaps not. In 1991, A Rutgers Law Journal report [PDF] showed the total number of Pinto fires, out of 2 million cars and 10 years of production, stalled at 27. It was no more than any other vehicle, averaged out, and certainly not the thousand or more suggested by Mother Jones."
So again, it was no more likely to catch fire than other cars at the time.
Mother Jones is rightly a revered publication now, but their reporting on this was seriously flawed to the point of being journalistic malpractice.
"In nine staged collision tests of 1971-1976 Pinto 2-door sedans and 3-door runabouts impacted by 1971 Chevrolet Impalas at closing speeds of 30 and 35 miles per hour, two tests resulted in fires. In all of the remaining seven tests, fuel tank damage occurred with fuel leakage rates ranging from 6 to 700 ounces per minute, with an average rate in excess of 240 ounces per minute."
Does having two out of nine low speed collisions result in fire seem normal? Does having nine out of nine low speed collisions result in significant enough damage to the fuel tank to cause gasoline leakage seem normal? I would certainly hope not.
The original Pinto design was flawed and dangerous, unnecessarily killed people, and Ford was rightfully and successfully sued for releasing it.
P.S. That Rutgers PDF in your citation is about the myth of the Ford Pinto legal case, which is that whole thing about how Ford allegedly calculated that it would cost less to settle on wrongful death lawsuits than to fix their cars, not about the safety of the Pinto. The link in the article is broken but you can find it here: http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pint...
It's like you're saying that a lab test is more relevant than years of field testing with millions of miles traveled.
> The original Pinto design was flawed and dangerous, unnecessarily killed people, and Ford was rightfully and successfully sued for releasing it.
Again: it did not kill more people than the average car at the time. That was my original contention, that it was not more likely to explode than any other car.
Could it have been safer if they had designed it more responsibly? Yes. Could those deaths have been avoided? Probably. And should Ford have been sued for that failure? Yes.
But that doesn't change the raw fact that it did not explode more than the average car at the time.
> That Rutgers PDF in your citation is about the myth of the Ford Pinto legal case
The Rutgers studies provides data, which are you are still ignoring, that showed the Pinto was 1.9% of all vehicles on the road and accounted for 1.9% of all fatalities.
If the lawsuit was suggesting that Ford was negligent for not getting that number even lower, then it's still a valid lawsuit. But I wasn't referring to whether Ford should've been sued, only that the "exploding Pinto" myth is a myth in real-world observational data.
They oftentimes couldn't escape the vehicle due to crumple zones pinching the doors shut.
Sure, the "exploding Pinto" is a myth, but only on a technicality. Those people experienced your real-world observational data first hand.
The Rutgers report is about the lawsuit, not the safety of the automobile, as mentioned. It's also just an opinion piece. Though it does cite some data!
Can you check the PDF? Upon its publication the Pinto accounted for 1.9% of vehicles on the road, 1.9% of vehicles involved in fatalities, and 4.1% of vehicles involved in fatalities involving rear impact. So maybe the Pinto was actually overall a pretty safe car! Except for exploding upon rear impact. Which is, you know, the defect in question.
That site then linked to the PDF on a website that, at time of writing, returns 404. Some googling produced an article in the now defunct "student run law journal" that appears to be a hit piece or history rewrite. Perhaps it is an application for work at the law office of a major car manufacturer.