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Comment by sottol | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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