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Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Moreover, the issue isn't new cars today.

You know when you saw that old Chrysler Grand Caravan burning on the side of the road, and you hear the story that the person has been holding it together solely with thoughts and prayers and maybe $500 between tires and oil for the last 7 years of its 19 year life?

That's the current inevitability. I'm not worried about someone's 6-month old Bolt or 2-year old Model 3. The issue is when we're eventually talking about a 22-year old Model 3 that's had 13 years of deferred maintenance, is totally clapped out, and is only on the road because someone paid some mechanic off to look the other way during a state vehicle inspection for the past 5 years.

Germany is starting to standardize on towing an electric car away to dunk it in a tank to ultimately handle fires.

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> and is only on the road because someone paid some mechanic off to look the other way during a state vehicle inspection for the past 5 years.

Making mechanics liable - maybe jointly as a business and an individual - for their failure to inspect vehicles properly would be a pretty simple mechanic to reduce this risk.

These inspections are nothing but pointless revenue generation for the state, checking for the check engine light and inspecting 1 wheel at most usually. Lots of states don't even have them.

In Germany they are very serious about vehicle inspections, and insurance requirements.

Didn't the big German auto manufacturers literally develop the hacks to bypass diesel emissions inspections? I'm not sure I'd hold anyone up in a pedestal on this score...

Those cars still passed the inspection. Which means they were physically sound. A battery isn't going to shift into an alternate mode where it becomes a spontaneous fire hazard.

Those have nothing to do with each other: Germany indeed has a company level corruption problem (especially in combination with the conservative party), but pretty low corruption at the citizen level, i.e. where vehicle inspections happen.

They got caught.

Not by any German regulator or agency.

That sounds more like an argument for effective inspections being universally required more than anything else? Apologies if I've misinterpreted.

We get by fine without rigorous inspections, and they amount to a regressive tax like a lot of other fees related to keeping a car.

Death by burning from an exploding battery from an uninspected, poorly-mainteained car in the garage of your shared low-rent apartment building is also a regressive tax.

I'll take the inspections.

It's not like states without inspections have an endemic of exploding cars as it is. I don't think the justification for inspections is really there.

Fuel-based cars tend to burn after an extreme adverse event, usually a collision.

Battery fires are more frequently spontaneous, or occur during charging.

How many barbequed children do you find an acceptable number?

Battery fires usually happen after collisions too. Fires while charging are rare but they grab headlines because they're novel.

I think trying to use inspections to solve that is a case of barking up a really stupid tree. In the case of EV charging fires there's not really much a mechanic can inspect that some electronics cobbled onto the pack couldn't. In the case of battery pack damage an annual inspection isn't going to do much good since most of those cases will cause problems before that or not at all.

"Parked Teslas Keep Catching on Fire Randomly, And There's No Recall In Sight"

https://www.thedrive.com/news/28420/parked-teslas-keep-catch...

Article list 9 cases. None involved accidents. Several were during charging, one during transport (on a flatbed truck).

All are of

In Ireland, roughly half of the vehicles going for the NCT fail on the first try, and ultimately about 5% don’t pass at all after retries.

Of that, I’d say half of the initial failures are simple things that don’t require a mechanic, (dead bulbs, bad/low tires) and the rest require a me hanic to do something.

My state has inspections, but does not charge for them.

If it’s a Chrysler product it doesn’t need thoughts prayers or old age to spontaneously combust. A brand new one will sometimes so it all on its own due to bad design

Some countries have mandatory regular inspections for critical vehicle functionality like brakes. We will probably require EV battery checks like this as well, if the BMS / firmware is not enough to keep the battery pack safe.

Safety inspections are close to worthless for safety on a macro level (they are great if you own a BHPH dealer or are a government regulator trying to give shops a reason not to fudge emissions inspections though).

You implement mild inspection laws and they do nothing because people can just pay the fine or whatever.

You implement invasive inspections where people are rich and they do nothing because rich people already don't drive on bald tires and whatnot.

You implement invasive inspections where people are poor and you create incentives to circumvent the law and hardship among those who don't ignore the law.

Mechanical failure is a negligible cause of accidents and injury so applying lots of effort co chase something that's only a source of the minority of problems is kind of a fools errand to throw a ton of societal resources at it.

If inspections really make the roads safer it would be an insurance thing and you'd see differences in premiums that reflect differences in law, insurers setting up their own programs where none exist and lobbying states for inspection programs. You basically never even hear a peep out of them about safety inspections unless it's in the context of getting people to upgrade to a newer car with better safety tech. Contrast with intoxication, distraction and driver training which are issues that insurers and their lobbyists constantly weigh in on.

GP covered that: "(...) and is only on the road because someone paid some mechanic off to look the other way during a state vehicle inspection for the past 5 years".

> Germany is starting to standardize on towing an electric car away to dunk it in a tank to ultimately handle fires.

I suppose if the problem is widespread enough, every city will have a mobile dunk truck at the ready for electric vehicle fires.

And what do you do if those fires cause other things to burn in the vicinity?

Same thing you do when an ICE car sets a building on fire. Apply water and put it out.

Except for an ICE you only need to dump about 300 gallons on it. For an EV, it can take 24 hours to get the thing fully dealt with.

That's only relevant for the EV itself, not for the stuff it lit on fire.

You put out the fire, then dunk the EV in a tank when it's out to keep it from reigniting, while not having to monitor it.

Bring the regular truck filled with water to hose it down.

Not if, when.

This is yet another good reason to decouple the battery from the rest of the vehicle. Hit the emergency release, battery drops out of the car, and push the rest of the vehicle away.

I kind of hope that gets to be an (infrequent) problem.

As it is, I've lately been wondering about what happens to 14 year-old electric cars with dead batteries that cost more than the car is worth.

People like me buy them for $500 and put the motor in a grass kart

I had no idea what a 'grass kart' was, so I looked it up.

Cool stuff! And thanks for repurposing the motors.

Towing the car in a tank seems a sensible solution, but I'm wondering if it wouldn't be simpler to tow the tank near the vehicle, lift it and dunk it there?

It could be hard to get a car up into the tank... connecting a winch might not be possible due to the heat, but I wonder how they get around that to tow it?

Also, needing to plan for larger vehicles like a pickup truck would mean > 4,000 lbs of water to submerge one, base an approximate dimensions of such trucks & the corresponding volume of water.

Than again with batteries generally in the bottom of the car, maybe you'd only need to submerge a few feet?

I can definitely see the need for new emergency response equipment in the EV future.

> It could be hard to get a car up into the tank... connecting a winch might not be possible due to the heat, but I wonder how they get around that to tow it?

Seems like something similar in design to this would do the trick, maybe with sufficiently thick steel plating on the side:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaYN6yC4bnI

> The issue is when we're eventually talking about a 22-year old Model 3 that's had 13 years of deferred maintenance, is totally clapped out, and is only on the road because someone paid some mechanic off to look the other way during a state vehicle inspection for the past 5 years.

Except that the 22 year Model 3 also has a computer inside the battery that should be keeping things in check. Assuming the battery can even hold any charge at that age.

And said computer was likely receiving software updates and sending telemetry for most, if not all, of that time.

Or it have been hacked either to send fake data or no data at all... Knowing the general level of security in industry and even with some high end smartphones, I expect it to happen.

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