Korea EV explosion prompts charging rethink, sparks safety fears | Hacker News Reader

Korea EV explosion prompts charging rethink, sparks safety fears

japantimes.co.jp

25 pointsPaulHoule22 comments

So afaik, Hyundai/Kia first recalled around 90k cars over fire risk due to accessory tow hitch, then ~100k over faulty-start-stop AND THEN ~450k SUVs over fire-risk due to seats... but an EV fire gets all the politicians to "rethink"?

EV/lithium fires are worse, but afair ICE vehicles are much more likely to catch fire. Not sure if eg [1] was caused by ICE or EV but that was another bad garage fire incident afaict from English sources. I really don't understand how this reaction jibes with the statistics, seems panicy to me.

According to the NTSB 3.5k/100k hybrids seem to catch fire (3.5%!!), 1.6k/100k ICE and only 25/100k EVs (0.025%) [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/world/asia/south-korea-fi... [2] https://www.autoinsuranceez.com/gas-vs-electric-car-fires/

EV battery fires are currently significantly harder to deal with than ICE. The concerns are warranted and require fire departments to develop new tactics to deal with them.

Effectively, the batteries hit a point where they thermally runaway, catch fire, and won't go out until their temperature is reduced to below the thermal runaway threshold.

This currently requires a massive amount of water, like on the scale of dumping the burning vehicle into a lake or pool.

However, solid-state batteries ought to eliminate a lot of this concern.

No no.

It's perfectly simple to put out a lithium battery fire: you spray enough water on it just like any other fire.

What the water dumping is for is making sure it doesn't re-ignite on its own, it's not needed for the immediate firefighting at all.

People imagine firefighters picking up a flaming EV with a crane and dumping it into a container of water - it doesn't work like that :D

"What the water dumping is for is making sure it doesn't re-ignite on its own"

Yes, hence why I said it requires lowering the temperature to below the threshold for it to re-ignite.

Here's one submersion system:

https://www.garrisonflood.com/ev-fire-fighting-water-submers...

It requires a significant more water to put them out. Hence it's more efficient to just submerge them in water than it is just dumping water on top of them.

No no no, you can't compare the ICE risk. an ICE car sitting in my garage has basically zero chance of catching fire and burning my house down while my family sleeps.

What this incident shows is that with an EV, charging in the garage as its supposed to do overnight, that chance is >0.

That is an enormously BIG DEAL, and will matter to a huge number of consumers and lawmakers alike.

> No no no, you can't compare the ICE risk. an ICE car sitting in my garage has basically zero chance of catching fire and burning my house down while my family sleeps.

Wrong. Really easy to find lots of examples, here’s a couple to get you started.

https://www.carpro.com/blog/weekly-recalls-lincoln-park-outs...

> The risk of fire exists even when the vehicle is parked and turned off. This month, the company will notify affected owners of the fire risk, advising them to park outside until they can have their vehicles fixed.

https://eu.delawareonline.com/story/news/local/2024/02/19/nh...

> Water may enter the starter solenoid and cause an electrical short which can result in an engine fire while the car is parked or driving, according to the NHTSA.

Wow. Well, I'll take the correction. I've never heard of anything like that. However, while this is also scary, I still think its unfair to say the evidence of a potential problem type in a new technology like EVs is not concerning, and to say that the likelihood of fire is greater in ICE (because I don't think its fair to add in the comparison of fire risk while turned on to that of fire risk when turned off)

At this point all we know is that EVs catch fire much less than ICE vehicles:

https://thedriven.io/2023/05/16/petrol-and-diesel-cars-20-ti...

> Only 23 fires were reported in electric vehicles in 2022 making up just 0.004% of Sweden’s fleet of 611,000 EVs.

> In contrast, over the same period, some 3,400 fires we reported in 2022 from Sweden’s 4.4 million petrol and diesel cars representing 0.08% of the fossil car fleet.

> This means that in 2022 a petrol or diesel car in Sweden was around 20 times more likely to catch fire than an electric vehicle.

> Furthermore, fires in electric cars are declining. The MSB says the number of fires in electric cars has been around 20 a year over the last three years, although the number of electric cars over that tie has almost doubled. Presumably, this is due to EV makers improving fire suppressing designs in newer models.

I’ve not seen any stats about parked vs driving. Given that ICE car fires are exceedingly rare it’s probably worth worrying about other things.

EVs are unknown and thus scary. They're the nuclear power plants of the vehicle industry.

The media also makes a big headline every time a Tesla catches fire in Finland, Minnesota and the thousands of ICE vehicles on fire don't warrant even a minor note.

A bloomberg article identified the manufacturer of the battery in question:

> Farasis was ranked 15th among the global battery makers, according to a BloombergNEF estimate of manufacturing capacity between 2023-2025. It began supplying batteries to Mercedes-Benz in 2018 as part of an eight-year contract with the German carmaker becoming a strategic investor in the company in 2020, some of the reports said. Farasis didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The reason these fires are more concerning to consumers is that people would prefer their car to catch on fire when they are operating it as opposed to being left alone in a car park.

I suppose technically it’s safer to have a larger chance of combustion when you aren’t operating the car, but it also adds to a sense of “this thing is a bomb that could go off any time”.

There is nothing wrong with wanting lots of range but most trips are short range. If the battery can be easily swapped storage can be matched with the current need. If [today] you need very short range the lighter battery has much better performance. If the swappable module could improve structural strength the difference can be even larger.

You do get the problem of many batteries stored in one location but there are many maintenance opportunities and you can have a crane that can lift a burning battery long enough to drop it in a bath.

It would also give access to future battery technology, perhaps a fuel cell module or combustion engine, who knows? nuclear, mr fusion?

Looks like the title is "Seoul EV explosion sparks safety fears, prompting charging rethink". I think this doesn't need to be editorialized?

Agreed, current title reads like anti-EV FUD.

The title I posted is what I got out of the RSS feed. I did not touch it manually and neither did my agent but I would consent to the change.

It does remind though that I’d better get rid of a swollen laptop battery I have in my wood shed. Might be fun to hit it with a few round balls which will liberate any energy left in it.

I could have sworn though that an earlier version of this articles had some photos of the damage.

> Management teams in office buildings and apartment complexes across South Korea are mulling measures to address the risk of fire after an electric vehicle (EV) explosion led to the evacuation of more than 200 families.

What are the probabilities going to be?

If I buy a condo in a new 5-story building, built over a garage with EV chargers, will I have a good chance of being displaced by EV fire within 10 years?

One thing not mentioned in the article is that apparently someone manually switched the sprinkler off shortly after the automatic system detected sign of fire. Of course it's hard to know if a functioning sprinkler system would have prevented the disaster, but it's likely that it would have reduced the damage.

It's apparently a thorny issue because residents lost a lot of money (I heard some people can't even get back to their homes because we don't know if the building is structurally safe after the fire), and if it turns out the manual intervention fanned the fire, it affects who is legally liable.

Considering Korea's safety culture, I wouldn't be surprised if some low-level maintenance guy pressed the shut-down button without thinking, because otherwise he would get yelled for making the parking lot wet.

dozens of ICE cars catch on fire every day, nobody cares. 1 EV catches fire and everyone loses their minds.

The fires are different, way harder to control and are happening on different situations with vehicles that are mostly new, under warranty and without a clear cause.

This is a problem to be solved, and that with careful application of research WILL be solved.

Simply pretending it doesn't exist doesn't help at all.

> way harder to control

I always question how easy it is to control an ICE car fire. Everyone always says this like it’s a piece of cake, yet here is a diesel (!) car on fire that couldn’t be put out with two fire extinguishers and ended up burning down the whole car park.

https://youtu.be/ccF4xOk5ruY?si=jLjXNSZzr5HvGp2a

> way harder to control

How about ICE cars that start to burn DUE to water?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gdgWcw0d4J8

Statistics say gasoline vehicle burn a bit more frequent than EV, but that's not much the matter, the people psychosis is the ruling class psychosis when they have realized that the green new deal is only possible re-building the society at a whole, a small step at a time eventually, but de-facto creating a new society where there is no room for monsters needed by financial capitalism, that's the reason of the backpedal with PR campaigns that have created a certain psychosis.

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