Our ancestors will never believe that we were nuts enough to not only allow this, but actually legally manndate it. They will think it's an urban legend and no ancient people could have been so short-sighted and egotistical.
And ICEs are powered by many thousands of mini explosions per minute with a side effect of producing an odorless gas that can kill us silently.
Everything can be scaremongered.
And personal transportation, as much as I wish wasn't the case, is a fact of life since 1910.
Technically 1908, but we can round.
The first automobiles were practically toys for the rich. Cars didn't really become a "mass market" thing until ~1910.
Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Electric tech is marginally less crazy, and also a step forward.
I assume that my neighbors 30 year old gas guzzler is more likely to catch fire than my 1 year old PHEV for example (or maybe I’m more likely since I have both a lithium battery and a gas tank).
And there's another 10-20 gallons of various oils in the engine and transmission. While they aren't nearly as volatile as the gasoline, they're still quite flammable. Really, it's a wonder these things were ever allowed. :)
1. Off by an order of magnitude: ~4-6 quarts of oil in the motor, about the same for the transmission yielding for a large motor about 2 gallons total.
2. duskwuff says >"they're still quite flammable."< Nonsense. Engine oil is so hard to burn that it is not classified as flammable by OSHA:
https://firefighterinsider.com/is-motor-oil-flammable-you-ma...
Furthermore these oils are encased in heavy metal (the engine block, the transmission block and the differential casing).
Starting batteries (the 6- and 12-volt kind) cause more fires than do engine and/or transmission oils.
To paraphrase Charlton Heston: "I'll give you my gasoline car when you can pry it from my cold, greasy, dead hands."
Although weirdly enough the video demonstration doesn't seem to be of a battery fire. :facepalm
Erm. I don't think that's true.
Maybe cut back on the hyperbole a bit. Two tons is the entire car. The lithium content of the battery is 15-20 pounds. And it's not straight lithium metal that becomes flammable in the presence of water. It's the electrolytes that are flammable. And most EVs in the world use LFP, which doesn't have that flammability problem.
(I'd be curious what the real-life vehicle fire statistics actually are so far for regular lithium ion versus LFP. LFP is promoted as being safer, but at this point there should be enough vehicle fire statistics to be able to quantify how much safer they are. The Tesla Model 3 might be a good model to compare because it's available in both versions, though maybe there just aren't enough model 3 fires to be statistically significant.)
EV fires are already significantly less common than ICEV fires. Factor in LFP, and maybe we should start kicking ICEVs out of garages because they're unsafe. And lest you think ICEVs don't spontaneously combust -- that's very much incorrect, there have been recent recalls of millions of ICEVs for exactly that.
I look forward to kicking fossil fuel based cars out of everywhere for reasons unrelated to safety. Or you could say reasons that have to do with the collective safety of all life on Earth rather than individual safety.
Also, remember that lithium is also a fossil fuel. Electicity is not magic, you're just replacing one fossil fuel with another.
What about the large-scale strip-mining, fossil-fuel-burning, and other absolutely nasty environmental efforts of continuing to use oil? And how much of that oil pulled from the ground is actually recyclable and reusable?
> lithium is also a fossil fuel
Lithium is by definition not a fossil fuel, as it isn't from the remains of long dead living organisms. Fossil fuels are all organic chemistry! Lithium is inorganic!
> you're just replacing one fossil fuel with another.
A significant percentage of the electricity from my wall socket does not come from fossil fuels. And even then, the EV is massively more efficient per mile than an equivalent gas car and the natural gas power plant supplying the non-renewable part is also massively more efficient and less emission producing per watt of power than a car's motor. The break even, even if 100% of the electricity was natural gas, is still like 30,000mi.