Volkswagen ID.3 Bursts into Flames in the Netherlands | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen ID.3 Bursts into Flames in the Netherlands

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69 pointshheikinh90 comments

In my ~20 years of driving I've seen many ICE vehicles catch fire. The first time I remember driving home late one night, had to pull off the road and wait for firefighters to douse an SUV that had caught fire behind the dash and eventually engulfed the whole car. The owner had pulled their golf clubs out of the trunk and was watching it burn.

Anecdotal news articles are not that useful, is there any reports on rates compared between ICE and electric cars?

> ICE vehicles catch fire.

It seems like this happened spontaneously. Do ICE vehicles ever spontaneously combust? Disconnecting it from a charge isn't really abnormal use.

Yes. Electrical fires are not unusual in ICE vehicles. It's extremely rare that the ICE part catches fire by itself.

this exactly, every recent fire / recall has been because of a short in some electrical system igniting something like the brake fluid, which also exists in EV

Please stop spamming the point that EVs also have brakes. The point was that all cars have the potential to spontaneously catch fire. Nobody has tried to make the point that ICEs are vulnerable where EVs are not, and your attempt to reframe the discussion as such is disingenuous.

no my point is the EVs have far more electrical components, so if anyone is being disingenuous and not pointing out the entire picture it's the people also posting links to articles of ICE cars also catching on fire making people think it was the gas that combusted when it was actually an electrical fault. We have to look at the actual cause. Also I'm not saying EVs aren't the future, but there's still more work to be done in making electrical systems in cars safer, whether it's ICE or EV.

Yes, I’ve had it happen personally. It damaged a garage it was parked near — thankfully it was parked outside. It was a blackened ruin after, tires had gotten so hot they popped, etc.

What was the cause? That seems unlikely without external cause.

Commonly electrical systems and/or the battery itself in ICEs cause unattended fires.

I had a vehicle catch fire whilst unattended about 20 years ago. The cause was either faulty wiring or a smoldering butt end left in the ashtray. The fire service and the insurer were both happy with this explanation.

Hyundai recently recalled a ton of ICE cars because they could catch fire. They had the possibility of catching fire when parked.

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-...

GM recalled over 1.4 million vehicles due to fire risks from oil leaks which could happen while the engine was hot and parked.

https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/

> About 85% of the fires took place when the car was shut off and there was no one around the car, GM spokesman Alan Adler said.

Pre-emptively recalling vehicles for potential problems is a lot different than those problems actually occurring.

I'm glad the people who need to know these things (ie actuaries) will be making the decisions, not the "yeah, but!" crowd.

Are people ignoring that Tesla's battery pack in Australia has already burst into flames and they had trouble putting it out?

> Pre-emptively recalling vehicles for potential problems is a lot different than those problems actually occurring.

In both of the listed recalls hundreds of cars had self-immolated. In the GM one I personally knew a few people who had their homes catch fire from the car catching fire while parked in their garage.

Stationary car combusts, causing over $100M in damages:

https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...

“Brake fluid leaking from the master cylinder reservoir cap had been reported to enter the vehicles’ automatic braking system (ABS) wiring harness electrical connectors, causing short-circuits, melting, and fires,” the NTSB reported. By 2012, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration knew of at least 260 vehicles that experienced a non-crash related fire.

Last i checked EVs also use brake fluid and they could end up exploding the same way. Please post a link to an ICE vehicle spontaneously combusting while off due to spontaneous combustion of the gasoline contained in its tank.

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking for, or what your point is. Why that specific threshold? Lithium in EVs also doesn't catch fire by itself, it's usually a fault somewhere else in the system first. Most bizzarely, I think you're assuming that I'm taking a side here? Like....there are no sides to take, it's just an article meant as a reply for someone who asked if ICEs ever spontaneously combust.

EVs do have brake fluid, but the brakes are used significantly less in EVs than in ICE vehicles. (Most slowing is done via magnetic resistance from regenerative braking.) Presumable this means brakes in EVs are subject to a lower rate of degradation caused by use.

Not all fires are created equal. The problem with battery fires is that they are hard to put out. The surest way how to put out an EV is to drop it into a big water tank and let it soak for days.

And while ICE cars are generally in use when this happens, EVs seem to love this doing stuff while not in use and in your home. You can never quite turn off an EV.

I'd love to see what the actuarial tables look like in a few years for home insurance. "Do you have an EV?" might become a factor, and not in the good while.

Happens with ICE cars all the time as well, there’s more than enough energy in a lead-acid battery to start a fire. I think our impression of the regularity is just a function of media attention.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bmw-mystery-fires-abc-news-i...

https://www.nfpa.org//-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-s...

A lead-acid battery has enough power to start a fire however it is itself not particularly flammable. The danger with EV batteries isn’t that they have enough energy to cause an electrical fire, it’s that they are themselves quite flammable.

I know of several people who have had their houses burn down because of an ICE car deciding to catch fire in the garage. Hyundai has recently recalled almost a million vehicles because they tend to catch fire while parked.

last i checked electric vehicles also use the same braking mechanisms and could catch fire for the same reasons : https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-... , please post an actual link to a known case of an ICE vehicle spontaneously combusting while being turned off due to some component of the gas/gas system being the main cause of the combustion.

That's not really the argument, though. The argument is that all types of cars catch fire. It is not that ICE cars catch fire more.

Oil leaking on to an exhaust manifold count?

https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/

As someone else mentioned, I wasn't trying to argue either car catches fire more or less. The parent was suggesting ICE cars catching fire while parked practically never happens, when millions of ICE cars in the last few years have been recalled for such things. Lots of people have had their houses burn down from ICE cars being parked inside. A parked car catching fire isn't something new to battery vehicles.

yes, thanks for pointing that out!

Parked ICE cars burn down too, here's an example where a completely stationary car caught fire and caused $100M in damages.

https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...

To be fair Ford issued a recall for the fire risk and the owner didn't take it in to get fixed.

> as a result of the blaze, much of it was trashed, all over a 2002 Ford Escape under recall.

Of course, and I'm sure if there is a wider issue with the ID3 then Volkswagen will issue a recall too. I'd imagine a lot of issues where the car can catch fire result in a recall.

>>and the owner didn't take it in to get fixed.

Yes, which actually resulted in a fascinating legal battle, because Ford says it's not their responsibility as they have issued a recall, and the owner says she changed address and there is nothing that would legally require her to inform the manufacturer of her car of that fact. So she really didn't know about the recall, which means the responsibility here is.......unknown, and at the heart of the $100M legal battle. One of the other fascinating things is that the Department of Justice has literally stepped in and said they don't agree for the owner of the car to be a side in such expensive case, and they are taking her place instead.

I am way more concerned by all the batteries in my house than the one parked in the garage. There are probably so many powerbanks, laptop batteries and other things lying around and in drawers where they are forgotten that it's a lot more likely that a house catches fire because of those batteries than an EV

Random gadgets with Li-ion from AliExpress is most dangerous one in my house. I don't keep it charged them unless I'm at the room.

Firefighters regularly put out EV fires it just takes water from a hose. The biggest issue is a lot of the chemicals used to aid firefighting doesn’t work as well on battery fires. https://youtu.be/8n5Wf7TlGrU

Also, there are 200,000 car fires in North America per year, it’s extremely common. ICE cars are actually 10x as likely to catch fire as EV’s. ICE cars also frequently catch fire while parked.

Even taking your figure as accurate, how many fires per vehicle-mile driven? (And is NA just the US? US+CA+MX?)

It’s about 56 per billion miles which is a significant improvement over 40 years ago, but also a recent upswing.

https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st...

>ICE cars also frequently catch fire while parked.

I don't think you and I have the same definitions of "frequently" or "extremely common".

>Also, there are 200,000 car fires in North America per year

There are almost 500,000,000 cars in North America.

...so the probability of a fire in an ICE car is about 0.04% per year? Assuming fires are randomly distributed (which is a bad assumption, granted) then over a lifetime of car ownership, the average individual has about a one in fifty chance of experiencing a vehicle fire. That is very much higher than I would have expected.

It is in relationship to fighter fighters not cars. Residual fires are only about twice as likely.

* residential

If there is nothing nearby just let it burn down whats left is p save for the scrapyard.

Put it in water is nonsense. A cell that has not been damaged is watertight and wont react with the water but later on can burst into flames due to corrosion that opens the cell somehow or due to mechanical damage.

If you would put an fully functional EV into a lake for 3 weeks then let it dry for a few days it would burn just as good as it would have before it was soaked.

Concerning the recent recalls related to the chevy bolt battery fires - they appear to be at least 7 times as likely to catch fire and up to 35 times as likely when compared to ICE cars.

https://allev.info/2021/07/early-chevy-bolts-much-more-likel...

It's unfair to condemn EVs in general by comparing the fire rate of ICE vehicles in general to that of a specific EV that's under recall for a fire risk.

Right, similar to a citation[0] from another comment in this thread, I would guess that the fire risk of cars that are under recall for fire risk is quite high indeed!

0: https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...

I didn't condemn them, I was just providing data for comparison, which the previous commenter asked for.

they appear to be at least 7 times as likely to catch fire and up to 35 times as likely when compared to ICE cars.

Bolts are ~6 times less likely to catch fire than an ICE.

A subset of Chevy Bolts, IF they have a Korean battery, IF the fire happened while parked, IF only compared to cares 2 years old or newer, then they a higher rate of fire than cars with ICE. That's relevant, but it is misleading to give the numbers without the context.

I provided the link as context.

Also for what it's worth chevy just announced a recall for all bolts 2017-2022 (which is every model year they've released) and even the EUV models from 2022 - so the problem appears to be more widespread than initially thought.

https://my.chevrolet.com/how-to-support/safety/boltevrecall

Pretending that this single event, a brand new latest electrical model from Volkswagen spontaneously burning, its just a normal statistic fluke and not a Highly Unusual event, where there is nothing else going on...Reminds me of this:

https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

As it seems many did not like the comment... I will provide you with a quote from Taleb. Maybe that will help some understand what I was try to get into.

“If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull – you don’t even know how many sides the dice have!”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Yep, this is the same effect as plane crashes vs. car crashes. Every plane crash and EV fire makes international news, so people are irrationally afraid of flying and EVs. Meanwhile, ICE fires and car crashes happen way more, but usually don't even make local news.

Many? I have been driving almost as long as you and probably many more miles, having driven professionally for roughly a year. I can count the number of times I have seen a car on fire on two hands. Out of likely hundreds of thousands vehicles seen I would not call a less than a dozen many. Anyway just my experience.

I don't drive very much, and I've seen several ICE car fires just this year. Almost all in the mountains, which are hard on cars.

I rent cars a couple of times a year in Germany. I think I spotted a burning car on the side of the road on my last two such trips. It's very common but rarely fatal. Basically, cars are allowed to drive very fast here and some cars don't actually handle that abuse to well and catch fire.

Electric cars have a fire rate much lower than ICE, apart from specific problems like the LG batteries that caused 1 order of magnitude more fires for EVs compared to ice.

This is way too defensive.

Why can't it just be news that a woman barely got her baby out of 'the car that will save driving (as we crash into mass extinction)'?

I wanted to translate the Dutch text under the source Video for my fellow-HN'ers but Google translate can actually do a pretty decent job! So for your convenience here is the text as translated by Google (and proof read by a native Dutch speaker):

----

GRONINGEN - An electric car, a Volkswagen ID 3, caught fire at the Helper Brink in Groningen at the end of the morning on Saturday. The driver had just put her child in the car and wanted to get behind the wheel herself. She took the charging plug out of the car for a moment. Then the car started smoking. She quickly got her child out of the car and brought herself to safety. The flames quickly spread from the car and 911 was called. The fire brigade rushed to the rescue but was unable to save the vehicle. The car burned out completely and there was little left of the car that was towed by a recovery company. A car parked next to this car was also damaged by the fire. The cause of the car fire is not yet known, but it is believed to have a technical cause.

Proofreading from natives is sometimes all we need. It is sad how much amazing content we miss because of being only available in Russian, Deutsch, German, Spanish, etc.

DeepL has been a blessing for this. While at least for German it tends to use rather formal language sometimes, it's far better than Google translate and generally reliable enough to not require a native to check it.

I've translated quite a few things I've written in Dutch to English with both DeepL and Google Translate as a matter of experiment, and didn't really find either of them better. Sometimes DeepL gets it better, but other times Google Translate gets it better; this can differ per sentence. I couldn't really determine one was significantly better than the other.

Ha, I used DeepL for translating to French once and it translated "best regards" to something like "I hope the president of the EU will find this all in accordance" or something similar to that. I presume it was because most European language models were trained on UN and EU documents that are made available in tons of languages.

I've learned to throw the output of any machine translated text into a reverse machine translator and see if the text still makes sense. For non-European languages, I just assume the translated text is flawed but will hopefully get the message across well enough.

oh, wow! You even converted 112 to 911. Nice touch :-)

Fun fact: if you're going to pick a number to use in an emergency, you should nearly always use 112 if you don't know the local number for the specific service you need. In theory, it will work on any GSM carrier as it's part of the GSM standard, and certainly does throughout North America and Europe despite many countries in these regions more commonly listing other emergency numbers. According to Wikipedia, it's an nearly universal alternate number across the other continents as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_numbe...

112 actually works in the US too, on mobile phones anyway, as it's part of the GSM standard; it just gets forwarded to 911. It should work pretty much world-wide.

Does it also work the other way around? If not, then US citizens are disadvantaged when abroad.

Evidently a translation to American English! In the UK we'd call it 999, though 112 does work too.

Wouldn't you call 0118 999 881 999 119 7253 these days[0] ;-)?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWc3WY3fuZU

Those comparing this to ICE car fire statistics are missing the point. The problem with EV fires is that they're often related to charging. And charging is an active process that happens during the most vulnerable time in a home (for about 10 hours while sleeping). This is a legitimate reason for having fear about EVs. ICE cars are completely off during the same time. It was bad enough with the Bolt EV that GM was recommending overnight charging the car outside the home garage. If this fear is not addressed in a strong way by the car manufacturers, it could sink the entire EV movement since overnight charging at home is the foundation of it.

And yet many ICE cars have caught fire in unattended "off" condition. did that 'sink' their movement? the car makers ARE taking big steps to address these things, much more so than in the past for ICE vehicles.

What amazes me is that they put out the fire. I thought that when these batteries catch fire, they can burn for days and it's impossible to stop it.

That was also what I was thinking, and apparently it was freshly charged too. So I guess there are some EV fire types you can put out and some you can't?

The danger of EV fires is that it’s a thermal runaway situation - one cell catches fire and heats up the (perfectly good) cell next to it until it catches fire and so on and so on. I guess if you have enough water to keep the nearby cells cool while the faulty one burns out you can stop the reaction early.

> you have enough water to keep the nearby cells cool

Or if all cells burn roughly at the same time ;=)

Through from what I remember (I might be wrong) the ID.3 packed there battery cells into what you could describe as "grid of metal cells/walls" so that might have helped, I guess.

Does anyone know if:

> apparently it was freshly charged too

makes a difference wrt. how long, hot and likely a battery burns (through not how likely full charging causes it to burn, that is a different statistic).

Several years back this happened here in India, with the first mass produced, battery-operated car, the Tata Nano. Many of them caught fire and later for political reasons more than anything else, the entire line became a failure. But now electric vehicles are making a comeback thanks to ever-rising fossil fuel prices.

It's interesting that India has some of the highest fossil fuel taxes in the world despite being a developing 3rd world country.

Well it is the current party which has been in power since 2014. They are not in favour of any kind of subsidy, though as you note the majority of the population heavily depends on various subsidies to make ends meet. It is a case of squeezing the public wallet to the absolute extent so govt coffers can be built up.

"A Review of Battery Fires in Electric Vehicles"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338542510_A_Review_...

PDF:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Xinyan-Huang-3/publicat...

Imagine this happening in a parking garage packed with EVs.

What's the battery chemistry? I assume it uses NMC.

Is Volkswagen poaching Tesla employees?

Do you mean Chevy employees? For how many Teslas are on the road, there have been very few fires.

I think Chevy and VW are both using batteries made by LG Chem.

ID.3 did not spontaneously 'burst' into flames. Driver reported malfunction (probably a short) after charging.

Fire might have started outside of battery, perhaps within charging module that caused battery thermal runaway.

Did the battery catch fire, though? From how fast they were able to put it out, it could also have been the charging port setting everything but the battery on fire.

It's not reported.

Through I have heard that VW isolates cells a bit more then some older EVs which could mean you might be able to cool down the "battery pack" enough to prevent the fire from "jumping" over to other cells.

I checked a number of ID.3 in depth reviews. The vehicle looks so anachronistic by today's standards on the inside. It's best to say is a first gen mass market EV coming out to market in 2021. For example, it has a 12V lead acid battery, and equally anachronistic 12V electric system.

https://insideevs.com/news/464773/how-0783-update-avoids-id3...

ID.3 is a botched, very hastily engineered car WV put onto market as a placeholder to have just anything in the EV category before they can engineer something proper.

Tesla famously has a lead acid secondary battery too, but we can take that Model S is the first mass market EV.

None EVs I've seen in China had a lead acid 12V battery. Even hybrids used lithium pack as the main battery for everything.

Tesla Model 3 has a 12V Lead Acid Battery: https://blog.tesbros.com/replace-12-volt-battery-in-tesla/

Nissan Leaf NE1 has a 12V: https://youtu.be/me2_hC5j5gQ

MG ZS EV: https://www.whatcar.com/news/mg-zs-ev-long-term-test-review-...

BYD e6: https://youtu.be/T-HTF_jiNzY (at 6:55 you can clearly see a 12V battery)

These are all 2nd/3rd generation EVs. Seems more like VW is following an industry standard than anything else.

Putting in a 12V classical car battery makes a lot of sense.

Sadly I don't remember all the details but:

- You want a 12V circuit to be able to use "standard car components".

- You want to be able to power some components of the car separate from main battery in a way which can be powered from the outside (e.g. by replacing the 12V battery or attaching cables to it).

- Just because a batter is well suited to drive a car motor doesn't mean it's also well suited to power a AC, entertainment system etc. Especially it might not be good at only powering such a system (i.e. it might not be good at such outputting some comparatively small load without to much peaks, loss or similar).

I'm pretty sure you can find some resources on the internet which explain this is more detail with more technical knowledge :=)

But just the fact that it allows you to "have a electric system like every other car" when it's not driving or charging makes it probably worth it for the manufacturer. And I would not be surprised that even if 12V Acid batteries go away EV still would have a secondary battery replacing it.

I worked in consumer electronics, but I can't fathom at all why having two parallel electric systems is though to be simpler than one. A backup battery, maybe, but not a split system.

> - Just because a batter is well suited to drive a car motor doesn't mean it's also well suited to power a AC, entertainment system etc.

This has no basis whatsoever from electronics engineering standpoint. All these cars have something to provide regulated 12V from main battery already.

> All these cars have something to provide regulated 12V from main battery already.

Yes but as far as I know not while charging and neither while the car is "standing still/parked".

Lead acid batteries are relatively eco-friendly because they are nearly 100% recyclable, even the plastic casing. Lithium Ion batteries on the other hand currently cause quite a lot of troubles in that department.

Manufacturers use the lead acid battery for all 12V components. It's easy to use as a buffer.

Handling lead isn't exactly 'eco friendly'

Given how long the tech has existed it's no surprise to see recycling has developed for it. Especially given the ruinous effect mining for it has had in some places. No doubt efforts will develop to handle more modern battery tech as time progresses.

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