Hacker News Reader

Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

As much progress has been made in EVs, I have no interest in sitting atop of a napalm bomb while zipping around town. There's a few problems that keep me from being remotely interested in EVs, this is one of them. The others are range anxiety, energy storage portability and battery replacement costs.

If I run out of gas on the side of the highway, I call AAA and they can deliver me a couple of gallons of gas or I can walk to a gas station. If your EV runs out of juice, you have to have it towed to a charging station.

View on HN

The napalm bomb you're speaking of is made of gasoline. Which is in most cars and vehicles on the road. So you're less afraid of something designed to catch fire and explode (gas) than something that is designed to operate safely at it's core (batteries)? That just doesn't make sense.

Other than being afraid of new technology. And that's totally ok. Its fine to say you don't like change or new technologies. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In everything we've done, there is always someone willing to lead the way, and others that will follow.

And the range anxiety is not really applicable to a bus. In fact you could say this is really the perfect use case for an EV.

Lithium batteries are dangerous in a way gasoline tanks are not: while a punctured tank (say, due to a unlucky collision with a piece of debris or a crash) is dangerous, it does not guarantee a fire or explosion. A punctured lithium cell will almost always burn.

There are also more ways to screw up a battery. Overcharging, manufacturing defects, and so forth. A gas tank is literally a chunk of cast metal with a pump in it.

Additionally, metal fires are severely hard to fight. Gas fires can be extinguished in the usual ways, but a self-oxidizing metal fire require special considerations, and that's if it can be reasonably extinguished at all. That isn't even mentioning the need to de–energize the battery before attempting a rescue.

Primary (non-rechargeable) lithium batteries contain metallic lithium, but all lithium ion batteries in vehicles contain lithium only in ionic form. Building rechargeable lithium batteries with lithium metal anodes is still in the research stage. The problem with fighting lithium ion vehicle fires is heat from battery self-discharge which can cause ignition and re-ignition of the flammable liquid electrolytes inside the batteries. That's one reason researchers are also pursuing solid state lithium ion batteries: to take out the flammable liquid electrolytes that current batteries need.

You're both widely overestimating the fire risk. It shouldn't even be a consideration from the consumer perspective. The color of the car probably matters more.

If this (one of many) example doesn't scare you, well then you're braver than I am: https://youtu.be/sAQlLu5ttOk?t=77

I watch videos and documentaries about plane crashes all the time, and yet I am not afraid of flying because I understand the safety culture and statistics of the industry.

If you are afraid of your car, regardless of motive power source, bursting into flames without warning, then you shouldn't own a car, because tens of thousands of people die in car crashes every year, and for most of them they experienced no warning and could not have forseen their death.

> If you are afraid of your car...

I'm not afraid of MY car. I'm afraid of owning a car where I'm literally sitting on top of the battery. Say what you will about ICE's, but my gas tank is comparatively far away from me in comparison to EVs under-chassis battery designs.

Design a better battery where that removes this risk and I'll consider it, until then I'm sticking to my ICE.

Diesel is generally considered a safer fuel than gasoline, it's a lot less gaseous or flammable.

That said, yeah it's not like ICE vehicles are any safer when it comes to fire hazards. They're probably easier to extinguish though; EV fires are a pain, to the point where fire brigades bring in containers, fill them with water and dump EV car wrecks into them until they've stopped reacting.

When was the last recall of a gasoline fueled car for spontaneous combustion?

Earlier this month: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls?nhtsaId=22V484000#vehicle

> Ford Motor Company (Ford) is recalling certain 2020-2022 Escape, 2021-2022 Lincoln Corsair, and 2022 Maverick vehicles equipped with 2.5L HEV or PHEV engines. In the event of an engine failure, engine oil and fuel vapor may be released into the engine compartment and accumulate near ignition sources such as hot engine or exhaust components, possibly resulting in an engine compartment fire.

Gasoline doesn’t burn. Gas+air mixture burns and the concentration of gas has to be surprisingly low for the reaction to work - 1 part gas for 14.7 parts air.

Batteries provide their own air and will burn submerged underwater, if they want to. The firefighting protocol is “Contain fire and wait, sometimes for days”. That’s why the containment cell is designed to be nigh impervious and fire is unlikely. But once a fire starts, good luck.

When was the last time you heard of a gasoline fire in a modern vehicle? Why is it that EV fires are so common?

> Other than being afraid of new technology.

... but then you resorted to ad hominem. Why would someone have to be "afraid" of new technology in order to have serious and legitimate concerns about it?

To help you out a bit, we also saw very bad lithium battery issues in laptops about ten years ago (just search youtube), to the point where airlines were seriously considering banning laptops and phones from being brought on board (and did ban one version of the Galaxy Note, IIRC). That was resolved, so it stands to reason that as EV improves, the risk of catastrophic fires will improve as well.

(Of course, those batteries were not being violently and physically damaged, so it's unknown whether software will be able to assist with accident-situations with an EV.)

> When was the last time you heard of a gasoline fire in a modern vehicle? Why is it that EV fires are so common?

Recently actually. An accident happened close to my place and one of the car caught fire. The driver died.

> Why is it that EV fires are so common?

How are they more common ? Do you have any statistics about it ?

According to the first statistic I found [1] there are about 180000 highway vehicle fires each year in the US, and in 26% of them the item that first ignited was "flammable or combustible liquid, gas filter or piping". So that's about 45000 gasoline fires a year in the US (if you don't count ones where the fire started somewhere else in the car). You just don't hear about them because they aren't newsworthy (precisely because there are so many).

Sadly the source states that they don't have good numbers on EVs to compare.

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

Some quick googling says tesla is ~70% [1] of the EV market and there is someone who claims to track every telsa fire [2] which has counts 97 fires since 2013. Compare that to 45k ICE vehicles fires every year and it appears that EVs are significantly less likely to catch fire.

I think if you live in one of the top 50 metro areas of the US and listen to local traffic news between June-August you'll probably hear about a traffic problem related to a car fire every few days or weeks. ICE vehicles fires are just so common we accept it and it's not reported unless especially gruesome.

1: https://electrek.co/2022/04/26/tesla-tsla-owns-75-percent-us...

2: https://www.tesla-fire.com/

> Compare that to 45k ICE vehicles fires every year and it appears that EVs are significantly less likely to catch fire.

You haven't provided enough information to make a comparison.

Googling some numbers, Tesla has sold 2MM cars, so taking that 97 number we get 0.00004 fires per Tesla.

US has 275MM cars, and (2022 - 2012) * 45000 = 450000, so we have 0.00163 fires per ICE car.

Conclusion: If those numbers are correct, Teslas are two orders of magnitude less likely to catch fire.

I bet if you control for vehicle age and economic status, EVs combust at the same rate as gasoline vehicles

"In 2017, 70% of the cars to catch fire were more than 10 years old."

https://housegrail.com/car-fire-statistics/#1_There_were_212...

Even if that's true (and your numbers do look to be similar to what I've seen), it's not relevant, because when a Tesla catches fire, it utterly immolates itself and everything around it. That is certainly not true for a gasoline fire once the fire engines roll up, to say nothing of a diesel fire, which are comparatively hard to start and easy to extinguish. It'd be far more informative to compare injuries and damages.

That's very fair. I've been in multiple cars that have caught on fire on the road. In my experience, ICE fires typically start in the engine bay. Hence why there's literally a firewall between you and the engine. A small handheld extinguisher can put them out easily, and I've done this myself as well.

I have no experience with EV fires, or how they start... but if it's under your ass in the battery pack, and no easy way to get an extinguisher in there... then by the time you notice, the fire may already be out of control.

I think that's what the big difference is going to be. EV fires will be less common, but will be way more crazy. That's why people will notice them much more.

> When was the last time you heard of a gasoline fire in a modern vehicle? Why is it that EV fires are so common?

What is their commonality, against ICE car fires? Are you subject to a recency/frequency bias in the news, or do you have some citable facts behind this? I see a LOT of news about EV fires, but few about the car fires I know happen because I drive past them. I suggest there is a reporting bias because of the topicality.

> When was the last time you heard of a gasoline fire in a modern vehicle?

A fire in an ICE car 2 months ago shut down our local motorway for over 50 minutes during rush hour. A month prior to that, someone ran their ICE car off the road into a field; it caught fire and the driver died.

ICE vehicle fires are common. The difference is that EV vehicle fires are more widely reported upon. You see more stories about EV vehicle fires than ICE vehicle fires, so you think they happen more often.

>The difference is that EV vehicle fires are more widely reported upon

A clapped out POS or a crashed vehicle catching fire isn't newsworthy.

A vehicle bursting into flames without a good reason is.

But ICE engines have had over 100 years of continuous testing and deployment on a mass scale. The risks and dangers are fairly well known now. EV's lag far behind that. Perhaps they should be deployed in smaller passenger vehicles before attempting trucks and buses.

They have been deployed in smaller passenger vehicles for well over 10 years now. Nissan Leaf... Tesla... etc.

Pretty much everything you've outlined is an irrational fear.

ICEVs catch fire a lot, it's just not reported because it's not news.

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

> The others are range anxiety, energy storage portability and battery replacement costs.

Unless you frequently take long road trips, range anxiety isn't a thing for 200+ mile EVs. Batteries in EVs are currently warrantied for mileage far beyond the distances that most ICE owners drive their cars during it's usable life.

The horror stories you hear about people having to pay to replace batteries are usually because they failed to do something like have proper insurance.

> If I run out of gas on the side of the highway

Do you often run out of gas on the side of the highway and need AAA to deliver you gas? I have never in my life run out of gas.

> If your EV runs out of juice, you have to have it towed to a charging station.

Maybe that's the situation near you currently, but as EVs get more popular, these services will as well. It's just inevitable.

https://thedriven.io/2022/02/01/melbourne-start-up-launches-...

I'm sure AA vehicles will - if they already aren't - be supplied with a generator to put some juice back into electric vehicles on the roadside. Probably lighter, more compact, and less hassle than carrying around spare batteries.

It's gonna need to be a huge generator, or else they're gonna be sitting there all day. If you watch Long Way Up... take a look at the huge diesel trucks they need to have just to put the generator on the back to charge up the motorcycles.

The AA vehicles will likely be soon be EVs themselves, and allow sharing their own battery charge, just as some existing EV cars do.

(I'm not a driver, but I learned about this in German driving school)

> If I run out of gas on the side of the highway, I call AAA and they can deliver me a couple of gallons of gas or I can walk to a gas station. If your EV runs out of juice, you have to have it towed to a charging station.

AFAICT, if your diesel car runs out of fuel (completely), it also needs to get towed, maybe even to a garage to get serviced.

Fuel injectors, filters, and pumps in unleaded cars can also be damaged when the vehicle runs out of gas. I believe fuel injectors are always damaged when run dry but not necessarily to the point of failure.

AAA has offered mobile charging for electric vehicles for over 10 years.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15346575/placebo-on-wheel...

And they retired the program sometime in 2019.

> I have no interest in sitting atop of a napalm bomb while zipping around town.

This is ironic considering ICE cars have a large reservoir of the primary ingredient in napalm. And with every new technology there is always a ramping phase. Prior to gas stations ICE cars would have the same range anxiety issues. They needed to find a pharmacy to refuel [0].

I've never understood the range anxiety. An EV only needs electricity to recharge. If there is a power outlet available anywhere you have a charge source. It might not be fast or pretty but its far less overhead than standing up a gas station in the middle of nowhere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz

> sitting atop of a napalm bomb while zipping around town.

you do know what napalm is made of right?

petrol is really really nasty flammable shit. crashed cars catch fire, a lot.

> As much progress has been made in EVs, I have no interest in sitting atop of a napalm bomb while zipping around town.

That is literally what you are doing with gasoline car. And fuel being much more energy dense than a battery, it is actually more dangerous. Car burning was a thing way before EVs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com