Electric vehicle battery fires–what to know and how to react

Yes lets

Yeah, a fire that occurs when the car is being driven is a lot different than a fire that happens in the middle of the night when the car is parked in an attached garage. I'm sure the latter sometimes happens with gas cars but the relative rates seem relevant.

I searched around and did find some interesting statistics; most car fires resulting in fatalities occurred due to crashes. 80% of car fire fatalities are men. This strongly suggests that reckless behavior is by far the greatest risk factor.

https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-re...

> An analysis of car fire reports from 2012 to 2022 revealed that a passenger EV battery has a 0.0012% of catching fire, while the same sample indicates that ICE cars have a 0.1% chance of catching fire.

"EVs were involved in approximately 25 fires for every 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline-powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in fires for every 100,000 sold."

https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/environment-energy-coordinatio...

20 times less likely compare to an ICE vehicles of similar model and age.

The amount of EVs on the road in Norway is fairly close to the number of ICE vehicles. So the statistics coming from those areas are very robust.

Not really. If there’s thermal runaway you may have to douse them with water for a few hours. But there’s equipment now that can help with this, letting the firefighters walk away while the car battery safely dissipates its heat.

That's why every car has a first responder chart. It is fairly normal and nothing new.

Why imagine?

If you’re genuinely curious then ask the firefighters in Norway. In urban areas around the third of the cars on the road are EVs. And there’s probably a wider range of models than anywhere in the world.

When asked firefighters say that EVs are an improvement. Even if it’s a bit trickier to deal with a fire when there is one, there are significantly less fires than with ICE, and it takes longer for the fires to reach their peak intensity.

There was also a big fire in an airport parking garage recently. Started by a parked ICE car. Not a single battery pack ignited in that fire. Imagine if they were all EVs. No fuel poured on the fire at all (except the plastics and such of course)

There’s no reason why the car should become a superheated slag with the right equipment. All you need to do is to apply water to keep it cool, and that will generally keep the battery from getting too hot and igniting the combustible materials. There’s a lot of development in making good equipment for this. There’s was a study showing that a garden-hose like device that sprays water evenly on the battery from the underside can keep the battery cool with fairly little water use. Another study showed that you can use even less water by drilling a hole in the battery pack and injecting water directly into it. I imagine firefighters will eventually get some kind of remote controlled rover that can safely do that operation at a distance.

So there’s lots of room for improvement but EVs are already a step in towards safer cars.

There's logic to disable the HV source automatically in a collision (well, to open the contactors anyway), the cut loop is a redundant safety to ensure that the HV controller gets the message to cut power.

Well... It's seems... Childish, to be polite... In case of fire, typically after a powerful crash since EVs are not catching fire for no reasons every now and then, of course fireman's have easy access to open the appropriate small opening INSIDE the vehicle to extinguish it, also given the typical pressure of their water gun and the fact they can't perfectly fit the hole and there seems no easy air passages to avoid squirt water everywhere, and of course, they have easy access to a plastic Qr code in a specific small place of the vehicle to see the relevant instruction remaining nearby with a smartphone, perhaps under bat weather conditions, other vehicles burning and so on...

This seems to be what I call manager's driven design or dumb biped design.

Oh, I go further: most modern vehicles, not only EVs, are designed by people with very NO DAMN CLUE about roads and safety. Let's observe the very common mania of a big front tunnel to offer large arm rests, can holders, ... and also to impede a passenger pushing quickly the fainted driver foot out of the accelerator, easily access the break pedal while being able to steer and see the road, internal volumes not designed to move from one seat to another if the car is even only parked in tight spots, not even counting an emergency exit from the tailgate. This is the classic design of students at a desktop with no imagination of the real world outside.

And I say this as a relatively happy EV owner, who have already noticed an immense slice of missing and badly done things simply because of lack of real world, eagle eye view.

If having an electric car in a garage is a worry then keep it outside...

Also, if that worries you, you should probably worry about anything battery powered. That means phones, RC toys, laptops, external battery packs, power tools...

Lastly, if your gas car spontaneously starts burning in a garage, it's probably not a good idea to rush to an enclosed garage, opening door/window might cause a blow up...

What utter nonsense. EVs are already extremely wide spread in many parts of the world, and the statistics clearly show that they’re far safer than ICE when it comes to fires. Even when people routinely charge their car at home overnight. The density of EVs in my area is insanely high (30%ish) and I haven’t even heard of a single case of an EV catching fire in a garage. The cases I’ve seen have either been on the road or during fast charge.

An EV fire takes significantly longer to reach its peak than a gasoline fire. Yeah it’s possible that the electrolyte combusts in a somewhat spectacular fire at the start. That could ignite some things around the car. But electrolytes are very light and volatile. Not like gasoline that sticks around and burns for a long time.

If you have a fire extinguisher you can deal with the fires that might have been started in the garage. EVs are designed to vent burning electrolyte away from the vehicle so the car itself is not likely to start burning yet.

Then if you have a garden hose nearby and maybe a sprinkler, you can douse the battery pack with water. That should prevent the thermal runaway from triggering another fire until the fire department arrives.

But I can not stress enough what kind of unlikely freak accident we’re talking about here. You should probably worry more about your house getting hit by lightning.

How do you store it in the car?

On the other hand, you are throwing away between half and two thirds of the energy used to refuel. (Edit: considering the energy expenditure from H2 production and the energy actually delivered to the car wheels.)

And the infra to refuel my hydrogen car definitely does not exist today, anywhere in my first-world country. But I do have a wall socket.

Using H2 to power cars is objectively "Uncompetitive": https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-ladder-version-50-mi...

H2 cars also have batteries, fuel cells don't generate enough power for decent acceleration.

> No, H2 is.

I have driven around a good deal of the world (Alaska to Argentina, around Africa, around Australia and Europe now)

EVERY town or village I have ever seen has some kind of electricity, even if just a solar panel or two for charging phones. I’ve never seen a single one with H2 infrastructure. There is no way the world is going to adopt something so specific and non-existent.

The danger from H2 in vehicles by far eclipses the danger from lithium battery fires, so hydrogen vehicles are more likely to be banned than thrive.

Hydrogen, in practice, is almost always made from natural gas, because that's the cheapest way to make it. Whenever you hear somebody say "hydrogen vehicle", think "highly-refined natural gas vehicle".

Give it up. It’s over. HFCVs and BEVs got the same benefits and incentives in Norway. We even had several hydrogen furling stations around Oslo. (Though one blew up in a spectacular explosion)

BEVs won. Hydrogen stations are closing down.

What’s the breakthrough that’s going to save the hydrogen car? And do you really think that - if that breakthrough gets to market - BEV battery technology will stand completely still in that time? BEVs are already close to matching hydrogen on charging/fueling speed and range.. and will probably have a negligible weight impact in the end.

There’s absolutely no way you’re going to convince anyone who has gotten an EV charger installed in their garage to switch to a hydrogen car. What.. would you switch to a phone that you had to go to a phone fueling station to keep it running? Ridiculous.

Hydrogen doesn’t stand a chance now because BEVs is reducing its potential niche to such a small size that hydrogen gas stations don’t really have a chance to reach a critical market size. They won’t ever be profitable.

And no, don’t get started about those without a garage. There are already a whole bunch of solution for curb side charging. I know the US is a bit behind on this. But it’s far easier to build out that kind of infrastructure than hydrogen stations. In one case you just need an electrician. In the other you need highly trained installers that know how to tighten every single bolt to the exact correct torque so no hydrogen gas escapes. (Yes that’s a real example, it was the solution found after investigating the hydrogen gas station explosion near Oslo.. just a bolt that was eeeever so slightly loose… hydrogen will escape through the tiniest of cracks)

Hydrogen for long range trucks, ships and planes could be a different matter. Specialised fixed routes with gas stations set up for those routes specifically, with a well known demand in advance.