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Comment by greenthrow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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