Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

I'm not too happy about very large lithium ion batteries as a mass market product in low-end vehicles. Lithium iron phosphate, which doesn't have the thermal runaway problem but stores less energy per kilogram, may be more appropriate there. Both BYD and Tesla are going that route at the low end.

Light electric vehicles (bikes, scooters, skateboards) are now causing a sizable number of fires in NYC.[1] It's mostly a battery quality problem, apparently. FDNY reported 28 battery fires in 2019, 44 in 2020, and 104 in 2021. Bike and scooter shop fires tend to result in multiple batteries cooking off.

One thing would stop much of this: making Amazon criminally responsible for selling power electrical devices which do not have verifiable UL certification.

[1] https://www.firerescue1.com/fdny/articles/fdny-massive-fire-...

View on HN

Can we stop it with this absurd fear mongering already? There's millions of EVs on the road now. I have had my Leaf for 8 years and keep seeing this same tired FUD online. The incidents of fires from electric cars are extremely low.

The scooters and other cheap vehicles you cite are a separate problem from just being Lithium-Ion batteries. They're cheap procucts with bad electronics and poor protection of the battery. Gasoline powered products of such low quality would be similar fire hazards, if not worse.

Lithium-Ion batteries work fantastic for EVs. My 8 year old, 50k+ mile Leaf still has its origial battery and it still has 100% capacity. Something anti-Lithium-Ion FUD pushers told me was literally impossible.

Let me add that such "gasoline powered dangerous cheap products" aren't hypothetical. I remember the era when it was legal to hook a 2 stroke up to a bike or a scooter platform, those things were hideously loud and had plastic exposed bottles full of gas attached to them.

We banned those, we can demand adequate quality control on electric vehicles as well.

>legal to hook a 2 stroke up to a bike

It's rather common where I live, not weird at all. Those are only loud when unmodified and every kit comes with a standard gas tank, perhaps banning them altoghether isn't an answer?

It's impossible to carry on a normal conversation next to a running two stroke regardless of muffling. I support a complete ban on those engines in city and most suburban limits, electric versions of the various tools which run on them are adequate and much, much quieter.

This is fully justifiable not on noise alone, which can be mitigated, but the unacceptable level of hazardous particles released by incomplete oil combustion, which cannot be. Better to write them off like leaded gasoline, the tradeoffs aren't worth it.

I suspect you are only listening to unmuffled 2 strokes. I've owned plenty of 2 stroke vehicles. Not only are they quiet, they are substantially quieter than their four stroke counterpart. Of course, they come with a nice muffler from the factory.

I have not yet seen an electric leaf blower with equivalent specs as a top of the line 2-stroke. I think the minute that happens and 80% charging is under 2 hours, the industry will flip automatically.

The electric leaf blowers I’ve seen (I bought 2, returned one, put the second on “sweeping dust and leaves off concrete” duty, and tried two of my fan-of-electric-anything friend’s battery blowers) are indeed quieter, mostly by virtue of moving less air.

The question isn’t whether they’re comparable in specs. The question is whether the electric version is good enough. (I’ve seen some electric models that can move 650 CFM, which is quite impressive.)

It’s not enough to move wet leaves off new grass, or maple helicopter seeds out of established grass. You know how I know? Because I’ve got one of the top-spec gas blowers and it often takes 4 or more passes to move these items. And I’ve tried 4 different electric ones, none of which came close to working on those two tasks.

Once they work equivalently, I’ll be happy to give up the maintenance and hassle of small gas engines.

If you're ok with a cord, I'll build you one. Otherwise, I can also build you one with a backpack mounted battery. It will be pretty expensive, though.

The corded ones are an utter joke. (12A at 120V is only 2 horsepower before considering losses.) That’s the one I have occasionally dusting the floor on a warehouse type building now. My gas blower is ~6HP and it’s one model down from the largest I think. I won't have an L6-30 handy for you to use as the supply for a corded model...

A backpack battery model would be preferable anyway; I’m already wearing a 79.9 cm^2 engine, fuel tank, and blower on my back now. No one’s going to carry this as a handheld; all the large ones are already wearable for convenience.

Sure, that sounds doable. How long does the runtime need to be?

For me, an hour of runtime would do (once the battery was 4 years old).

For it to be a commercial success, I think you’d have to be able to run 5 hours in a day (but not all at once and battery swapping/charging on the truck from 12V would be okay).

I am unsure where you live, but I have never seen them banned in the southeast US.

It is possible both for a technology to be incredibly safe and yet occasionally have huge risks. I'm typing this on a device with li-ion batteries. Most of us accept the slight risk involved. Yes the parent comment is a bit weirdly skeptical, but calling it FUD isn't accurate either.

> Gasoline powered products of such low quality would be similar fire hazards, if not worse.

And they're heavily regulated so that they cannot reasonably be sold in most countries. Calling for similar regulation for EVs and other electrically powered devices just makes sense in my book.

I didn’t read the above comment as an attack on Li-Ion, but a suggestion that we should hold these products to high safety standards, like your Leaf.

I always thought they should only need to be safer than gas powered products, not a new standard.

Let's directly compare the impact of battery incidents from EVs to the impact of widespread usage of internal combustion engines through the lens of public health policy. The damage that is being done by widespread ICE vehicle usage is very well documented and a problem we need to solve.

You can't simply equate the individual vehicle safety without considering the wider public health impact inherent with ICEs.

A similar argument this reminds me of is drug contraceptives, where male contraceptives are only directly assessed in risk compared to not taking any drug, but female contraceptives are compared to the inherent dangers of a pregnancy as well, so it would be disingenuous to directly compare the risks of male to female contraceptives much the same as EVs to ICEs

It’s not useful to directly compare the two, because they have very different safety concerns.

Just as one example: many gasoline products have zero shipping danger because they’re shipped without gasoline in them.

Furthermore, there is no dilemma between Li-Ion safety regulations and use of fossil fuels. We can use Li-Ions and require them to meet some safety regs.

I hadn't thought about that, but many engines are often shipped completely dry. No coolant, no oil, no gasoline. A ship sinks, worst case is some cast metal sitting on the bottom of the ocean.

I always wonder where this is coming from. I'm sure there are certain well funded industries that would have interest in such FUD.

From what I can see, this technologie is the future to a green world. We could ultimately have a distributed power system where every home has its own battery with solar panels on top. How fucking awesome would that be. Not even an eletrical grid failure would be a problem anymore.

Fire isn’t the hazard we need to be concerned about for Lithium-ion, it’s the destructive mining and the subsequent hazmat disposal that should be worrying everyone. The lithium mining companies are filing claims all over my county and the proposed large scale excavation of extremely sensitive desert dry lake habitats is just disgusting. I’m no fan of oil, but at least there you drill a hole and not remove a few cubic miles of the earth. Seeing the battery lifecycle up close has left me depressed about our options…

The issue I have with this is that if we aren't allowed to mine in the desert where there is one sensitive shrub, like Thacker Pass, then how are we ever supposed to mine anything ever again. It seems like the perfect place to mine with minimal destruction.

The other option is we never mine anything ever again and let countries with less environmental protections do the dirty work which is net worse for the environment.

Oh you can mine lithium, just Not In My BackYard.

The NIMBY question is a legitimate social one to solve. It’s easy to sit and say that, but if you were facing a giant pit, dust problems, and leaking toxic mine tailings in your literal backyard, as I am, you might find yourself with a different point of view on the utility of it. It’s also possible you can truly look past that and accept it, I don’t know, but in my case this is the equivalent of bulldozing a favorite city park because corporate interests in the supply chain need to build batteries. Maybe it needs to happen, I don’t know, but I’ll tell you it’s a bitter pill to swallow and one that doesn’t come with much empathy from the folks calling for bulldozing my backyard for their benefit.

You're right that it's not a simple problem. Individuals face consequences for decisions made by people with no stake. On the whole though, mining done in a well-regulated country with accountability and citizens with a means to environmental justice is better than mining done in countries where you get your lot and die of lead poisoning at 40.

Don't put your backyard in my lithium mine!

Sorry if my comment upset you. I hope you got what you needed from this reply.

I think I would need to write you a book to capture my feelings around this correctly and in an organized manner, so apologies if it’s disjointed or comes off flippant. I’m a scientist by education and I fundamentally recognize your correctness, but it’s difficult to reconcile the experience of what is happening. When we did the tortoise roundup last year, knowing there would be 50% mortality, to put in a new solar farm and when the bulldozers arrived and started clearing the Joshua Trees, it literally hurt to watch. Now there’s the push for lithium mining and hundreds of more acres of solar farms in areas that are socially important to us. The primary benefit from all of these projects first benefits others (we net export everything) and if often feels unappreciated. For example, I think we all have collective groans when the occasional article comes from California lamenting water limitations for lawn watering while we watch Lake Mead drop to the lowest level since it was created. At the same time, I know you’re right about this becoming some other poor schleps problem and I’d never want to wish that on anyone. I realized recently that this area is resource exploited and I never understood the notion of how resource exploitation harms people mentally, but I do now. I also might be getting the most important life lesson in my 40+ years on earth - I’m a high net worth, white, tech leader, that adopted this barren place. I wouldn’t have missed a beat in the past to just call for bulldozing the desert. Man, let me tell you about “shoe on the other foot” feelings when they kick you in the jaw like this. I guess my only ask to you, or anyone that reads this comment: maybe this is the right thing to do, but please have empathy when it happens.

For the most part here in the US, you don't. You outsource it to countries that either have no environmental regulation or look the either way so long as bribes are paid.

It's cheaper and technically "clean" since you aren't actually doing any damage or pollution directly.

You kind of have to choose what sort of destruction you want: either you can have marginally more mining for the minerals required for battery production or you can have ecosystem wide damage due to further global warming. There is no free lunch.

I'll note though that eventually the fossil fuels run out, so the mining will need to be done anyway. It's only a question of now vs later with the later option being "habitat destruction AND massive global temperature rise" and the now option being just "habitat destruction". So habitats are getting destroyed either way.

It's not FUD. Emergency responders and wrecking yards have already had problems with EV fires. An EV wreck with a damaged battery can catch fire days or weeks later. They have be stored with extra room around them just in case. Battery fires are a whole different thing than gas fires. This is a serious issue.

It's anything but FUD, it's just that most vehicles have very well designed battery packs, but not all of them do and when you get out of the car domain to scooters and other personal mobility devices the quality drops like a stone.

The fact that there is some level of risk is not in dispute. What's FUD is hysterical reactions exaggerating the actual level of risk, such as throwing around punitively extreme legal liabilities.

I think that isn't extreme at all. UL certification is a thing and Amazon really has a responsibility for bringing a lot of terribly unsafe junk in circulation.

The 2019 and 2020 fires were mostly because of a 'misunderstanding' between US consumers and Chinese manufacturers.

Manufacturers wrote in the product manual 'do not charge device for more than 4 hours'. US consumers left it charging overnight. The devices reliably caught fire when charging for more than about 15 hours. They just didn't have circuitry to stop charging when full.

The same used to be the case in the 1960's in the USA - many of us remember the instructions on battery chargers how to calculate the number of charging hours required and to set an alarm or timer to stop the charge at the right time. If you screwed that up, they were nicd batteries so they'd just split open and hiss.

That is now resolved for new devices - you can't easily buy a device from China which has a lithium battery and doesn't have a battery overcharge protection circuit.

> The 2019 and 2020 fires were mostly because of a 'misunderstanding' between US consumers and Chinese manufacturers.

Do you have any source articles about that? I can't quite tell your intended level of sarcasm around "misunderstanding".

Because that design, where a device that's left plugged in too long then just ignites, is ridiculously stupid from any side of the equation, especially since over the past 20 years people have been trained with things like cell phones to just plug it in and leave it. I wonder how this "self igniting" design got through any regulatory constraints at all.

I feel nostalgic: Don’t charge for too long takes me back to 1990s RC cars.

in 2020+, if you're designing a charger that doesn't stop charging when full, then you're just a cheap ass bastard that deserves to go out of business. unfortunately, the people buying things are even more cheap and would continue to buy the cheap one to complain later when their home burns down. The only solve is that these cheap chargers are regulated into oblivion

I agree, but after some limited Googling I couldn't find any evidence of these "Chinese battery chargers that don't stop charging when full", which is why I asked the comment I responded to for evidence.

I only have evidence from fire investigations I've done. I found some devices (like quadcopters) that just have a USB 5v input and a diode drop to the lithium battery. Since many USB supplies are 5.5 volts, they'll certainly catch fire pretty quick.

I also found hoverboards that have an 8s battery pack, just hooked straight to a constant voltage power supply, with no balancing circuit or charge current limiting, so some cells will end up overcharged and emit gas. There's also no protection against charging after overdischarge, which will also usually end up with a fire.

I assure you the standard of "plugged in items shouldn't just explode because they were plugged in for too long" predates 2020

I understand that, which is why this is so maddening. It's not like we're in the transition phase to new standards. We've had these rules for a while now, we shouldn't still be having to worry about the item purchased might be a problem.

Source?

Battery quality in consumer electronics is horrible and it's a small miracle that there aren't many more fires. The things I've come across while servicing/disassembling/rebuilding e-bike batteries would set your hair on end. More than one wire that simply evaporated inside the casing and fortunately did not set off some kind of chain reaction. Balance wires crossing and recrossing, having their insulation eaten away by vibration. Single cell fires that miraculously did not spread to the cells around them.

Li-Ion battery behavior is very predictable these days. With a good battery management system (BMS) that includes temperature control, current limiting, charge monitoring, and cell monitoring the things work very well and very safely.

Good news: Most EVs have very good BMSs.

Bad news: Lots of small consumer devices with Li-Ion batteries have lousy BMSs or none at all. Which is why their batteries don't last long and sometimes catch fire. If cheap manufacturers would stop trying to skimp on the BMS the problem would be over.

What is sizable from a fire department that covers 9 million people?

Elon Musk has said that he believes a significant portion of the industry will move to LFP (Lithium iron phosphate) chemistry due to its lower cost, fewer supply constraints, and better safety and stability properties.

It was recently reported that Ford is working on LFP packs for their Mustang and F-150 Lightning EVs.

So they say, but the main gripe of switching to EVs has always been their too small range. Your average Li-ion 21700 cell has a capacity of 4-5Ah, whereas one with an LFP chemistry only gets 2-3Ah. That's almost a 50 % reduction in spatial density, not to mention their abysmal C rating.

Perhaps they would fit for PHEV usage, but for pure EVs they would be rather shite imo.

The standard range Tesla Model 3 says otherwise. They’ve been using LFP for a while now and it actually has longer range than it’s non-LFP predecessor, albeit with somewhat increased weight.

Charge rate on modern, well-managed LFP cells is not abysmal. The LFP Model 3 SR gets excellent charging speeds.

The cycle life is also insanely good which is why I'm so excited about LFPs. Pretty good density (not quiet nickel levels, but close), insane cycle life, and far cheaper materials.

It'll be a great solution for grid energy storage.

I'd be shocked if most short range EVs don't end up with LFPs.

Hmm, so instead of filling the bay with 50% Li-ions, they fill it up to 100% with LFPs? I guess that sort of works but with the added mass you must get even less range than you'd have with the partial capacity setup, not to mention worse handling.

Doesn't seem like too good of an option unless they're really like a quarter of the price, which I'm not exactly seeing. They seem rather on par, with maybe a 10% reduction in price.

> gets excellent charging speeds

Since the battery is larger, yes. But per unit, no.

> with the added mass you must get even less range than you'd have with the partial capacity setup, not to mention worse handling.

This is incorrect. Range increases due to added capacity faster than it decreases due to added weight here. It's approximately the same range, even with all the extra weight.

> Since the battery is larger, yes. But per unit, no.

Not sure I see the problem here? As a (non-Tesla) EV owner, I have never once cared about what my per-unit charging speed is over the charging speed of the battery pack as a whole.

It works well for the Model 3. The standard range version now mostly uses LFP batteries. They have about the same size and weight as the long range batteries. And of course, there is constant progress in battery density. The move to 4680 cells supposedly gives 16% more capacity due to the different geometry. That would make LFP batteries competitive for more configurations.

For LFP they (Tesla) are actually using prismatic cells which have even better density.

An advantage of cylindrical cells is that they allow for more effective cooling, but that’s not so necessary with LFP.

Those modest yearly increases in battery capacity and drops in production costs add up. After a while, a use case that needed the batteries with all the downsides can get by with a safer, more affordable battery that wouldn't have enough juice 20 years before. It's a much slower version of the phenomenon we see in computing power. Eventually, even a slow CPU can do what only a top end desktop CPU could do 20 years ago.

The phrase "range anxiety" has been with us for almost 25 years, so it's about time.

With CPUs the growth was approximately 2x each 2 years which means that in 20 years it was approximately 1024 more powerful.

This is not happening with batteries ;)

The answer is to regulate battery standards and internal input jacks.

The overwhelming majority of people don't need more than 50 miles range the overwhelming majority of the time. The problem would be solved if you could just put your house battery or a rented one in the boot for that rare long trip.

Additionally make all vehicles on the road slower, smaller, and lighter so you can safely drive something that more closely resembles a velomobile than an SUV and safely drive anywhere at 80km/h rather than having 100km/h as the minimum.

1C or 0.5C is completely fine, nothing needs to do 0-100km/h in under 20s, and as long as it can do around 15m/s up a 10% hill it has enough power.

Speaking as someone with 7.5 years daily driving a Nissan LEAF, it is rare that I drive more than 50 miles in a day, but driving 50 miles requires a car with more than 50 miles of range. Right now, I’d take a 50 mile drive in my car (without swapping to my spouse’s ICE car), but I’m not sure I’d do the same for a 60 and definitely not a 70 mile drive. Fully charged, my car guesses it has around 75 miles of range, but that quickly is proven wrong in operation and I can only count on 55 or so. This from a car with a published range of 84 miles on a new battery.

A non-hybrid with an electric range of 50 miles when new would likely be a market flop. I love my LEAF, but I’d not buy a car with that little range again.

But if you knew every service station had a charger that could give you 20 miles of range in 15 minutes, and a supply of charged 30kg batteries you could rent and swap into your boot for the day (returning to any other service station) that gave you another 50 miles plus you knew that every car park had a charger that would give you 30 miles an hour, how would that change?

I still wouldn’t buy a 50-mile electric, especially when 100+ mile electrics are readily available.

I don’t want to be stopping all the time and even less want to be unpacking and repacking my trunk regularly to move a 75 pound battery in and out.

Nissan figured that out and put a 40kWh battery into their base model. Mine is 24kWh. A 50 mile range would be something like a 16kWh battery. Unless that’s a hybrid, I think it would flop in the market.

That's only because LFP isn't usually made in round cells like that, so whoever is making that cell hasn't optimized the process. LFP has the same amount of Ah per volume as li-ion, but at an average voltage of 3.2 instead of 3.7. That is the only forced source of reduced capacity and is about 20%.

LFP is also a more stable chemistry which makes them safer but also it has more than double the cycle life and can be charged to 100% while still keeping that long cycle life. No need to choose to charge to 80-90% for daily use vs 100% for long distance, Tesla recommends charging the LFP to 100% all the time.

LFP's where getting ridiculously cheap recently, you can get 19" rack mount batteries with built in BMS for less than $300 / kWh to your door. I think most UPS are going to move over to LFP, they will be 20 year batteries in controlled environments.

I put some 12v replacements in my RV getting 4X the capacity of my lead acid at half the weight for about 3x the cost but the batteries will last 10+ years.

The main downside is a lower energy density than NMC which seems to be getting better I believe its about 20% less kWh/kg at this point. No nickel or cobalt is another advantage, iron is plentiful.

> No nickel or cobalt is another advantage, iron in plentiful.

Nickel is a problem but you might be surprised to know that cobalt is fairly plentiful. The issue is it doesn't have a whole lot of industry usage outside of batteries. That's why it's a human rights problem. Instead of mining it locally we use small time mining operations with cheap (often child) labor.

In other words, the amounts needed to meet global demand are below the demand needed to setup industrial cobalt mining operations.

This is why iron phosphate are both great key materials. Both are highly plentiful AND highly useful outside of battery production (thus, already have industrial mining/recycling systems setup)

There was recently discussion about opening old cobalt mines in idaho (my home state). [1]

[1] https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/idaho-cobalt-proj...

Nickel is more abundant than cobalt in the earths crust and most cobalt comes as a byproduct of nickel or copper mining:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

https://www.globalenergymetals.com/cobalt/cobalt-supply/

How many fires did it take to learn lessons about dispensing, storing and carrying petrol?

We’re quite happy with ships have huge reserves of flammable liquids (“fuel”) so why are batteries such a concern? Gas (methane, LPG, etc) doesn’t get this level of attention so why do batteries?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com