It can also be extremely dangerous to stay in a closed space i.e. underground parking if you don't have a way to turn off the fire. Most people don't die of fire in fires, they die of less than a minute of breathing in toxic fumes. To tell a volunteer to risk his life to watch a fire burn he can't turn off is a very privileged position to be in.

> That's what they're supposed to do, though, according to Tesla[1]. The firefighters are there to pour water on the fire to cool it down and wait for the battery to burn and release its energy. This is what Tesla's manuals[1] say:

No that's not what they say. They say to keep it cool to prevent it from burning. You're misinterpreting those instructions.

I'm one of those volunteer firefighters (Vacaville district). There's no way we would just walk away from a vehicle fire. If it means spraying water on it for hours, fine, then that's what we'll do. If there's no hydrant we'll have 2000-gallon water tenders lined up. On a big wildland fire it's not unusual for the pumpers to be working for hours.

You really underestimate how much firefighters love to use the equipment "for realz". I don't know anyone who doesn't dream of running into a (concrete) parking garage to put out a vehicle fire, EV or not.

Also, nobody (at least in my district) is allowed anywhere near a vehicle accident without bunker gear. If we had to rotate new pairs of firefighters in every 30m when the SCBAs run out, so be it. The department has a lot of tanks. We also have ventilation equipment on all the engines and squad units.

Also also: We're the rural team. The city departments (with their million dollar fire trucks) are even more hard core. "Make no attempt to put out EV fire" is just nonsense.

> besides keep water flowing over the outside of the battery pack while the inside self-oxidizes

But that is doing something other than just letting it burn. That's containing the damage, rather than letting the fire spread to everything around it.

Just a BTW, you can link to a specific page in a pdf with #page=. E.g.:

https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2016_Mod...

You misread that page. It says to keep it cool.

They are different situations, but I'd argue they're different in the opposite way. For a car by itself outside, letting it burn would be fine. But in an enclosed parking garage, it's rather important to keep the fire from spreading to the rest of the garage.

Who's educating these firefighters? It sounds like they're not reading the info actually about EVs and instead believing conspiracy theories.

I'm not sure if that would do anything much to help; it might just trap the heat in. I think the standard recommendation for Teslas is to just dump water on it so that the extra heat energy can be conducted away and redirected in a relatively harmless way into conversion of water into steam.

I would say that using lot of liquid CO2 must cool down a lithium fire while also denying it oxygen to continue. That's what a CO2 fire extinguisher does; it's often used to put out small fires in powered electrical installations.

At a car battery scale, especially in a garage, that would require the use of oxygen masks, and evacuating anyone around, because there won't be much to breathe. Also, of course, the fire truck must carry a large amount of liquid or solid CO2 ("dry ice").

Using liquid nitrogen would be even more efficient, but even harder to provide at scale. Liquid nitrogen is cheap, but cryogenic facilities are not.

The original poster is incorrect. The correct way to handle lithium ion battery fires is to put tons of water on them to keep them cool. Most of what's burning in lithium ion battery fires is the electrolyte being heated up by shorting batteries. You want to keep them cool so the electrolyte can't burn.