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Comment by nicechianti | Hacker News Reader

i'm still scared of lithium battery house fires

The spat of news stories about electric car fires tends to be news sensationalism rather than the reality of residential fires.

By far, residential fires are started by cooking, home heating, malfunctioning electric wiring or lighting. Stuff you’ve already been living with for a long time!

Best thing to do is make sure your smoke alarms are working, regularly tested, and have an evacuation plan, practiced with your family.

See: https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Publications-and-medi...

Problem with EV car fires is putting them out!

Once auto and home insurance companies figure out the risks involved, they'll raise auto and home insurance prices accordingly. We'll see:

- EV fire in a condo - destroys entire condo building. Requires 4 hours of fire department coverage.

- ICE fire in a condo - partially burns a single unit. Put out in 20 minutes by fire department.

"destroys entire condo building". Doubt.

I'm pretty paranoid about battery fires. I store all my 18650s in vented metal ammo boxes, generally don't leave devices charging while I'm out of the house, etc, but I would hope (and I assume) something as large as a car battery would have a large safety margin built in.

I had a nightmare where all the lithium batteries in the USA were intentionally booby-trapped in their manufactury so that a preset radio signal would cause them to burst into flames! Something to do with China vs USA conflict over Taiwan. So I had to run around taking out all the batteries.

I think that's paranoid!8-)

me too. :)

Then get a vehicle with LFP batteries. Those ones aren't nearly as combustible as the NMC batteries (though the capacity is a bit lower for the same volume).

The base-model Telsa model3 comes with them, IIRC.

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