Renault Is Giving Away Its Proprietary Tech to Stop EV Fires Quickly | Hacker News Reader

Renault Is Giving Away Its Proprietary Tech to Stop EV Fires Quickly

thedrive.com

95 pointsPaulHoule19 comments

There's been a couple other companies who have done stuff like this. There's a recent example I'm blanking on, but Volvo also gave away a bunch of passenger safety features around IIRC seatbelt design. Even free nobody wanted them.

I recall my dad telling me, while talking about my grandmother's antique car, with bench seats, lap belts and no head rest (!!) that there were a bunch of years where the auto industry put the mount point for shoulder straps onto the B pillars of vehicles but then buried them behind the upholstery while they fought Congress over vehicle safety standards. He was reasonably sure if you popped off the trim you'd find a hardpoint for 3-point seatbelts. Since he had previously worked for an OEM supplier I have no reason to doubt that story.

Tesla made their patents available to increase EV adoption.

Tesla's offer comes with substantial strings attached:

https://www.vennershipley.com/insights-events/does-teslas-op...

> Tesla’s patents are only free to use if: you do not enforce any right against Tesla, you do not enforce any patent right against another party, you do not oppose Tesla’s patents or copy Tesla’s designs.

Such strategic maneuvering is not in the spirit avoid Volvo did for the betterment of all human's safety. > Using Tesla’s technology would essentially make any other company’s own intellectual property rights redundant. On the other hand, Tesla benefits from the arrangement because it appears that Tesla is free to use any improvements made to its technology by another party.

This kind of maneuvering is not aligned or even close in any way to what Volvo did with releasing claims of ownership over seatbelts. Tesla is abusing the term "Open Source". More apt might be "Source Available".

It appears to me that the positioning of that port is only useful when the battery pan has been removed from the vehicle.

There is no way I’m crawling under an EV that’s already on fire while wearing breathing apparatus and wrestling a charged line to get a branch up and under a chassis rail to puncture that weather seal. You’ll find me in the cab of the truck aiming there remote control monitor while on the radio calling for every bulk water appliance in the district.

As you can see from the media attached to the press release[1], the port is exposed through an opening below the rear seats it looks like. Based on the wording in the press release, seems like they assume the battery wouldn't start burning on its own and so any fire that got the battery burning already consumed the interior.

So this is not so much for saving your car, but rather not binding firefighters up for hours.

[1]: https://media.renaultgroup.com/fireman-access-an-exclusive-i...

Right, I see the quick shot in the video now. Looks like it would be inaccessible until the rear seat frames are removed. Also, it appears the only way to get the angle required to penetrate the adhesive disc is to clamber inside the vehicle, directly above the battery pack that is on fire and/or in thermal runaway.

That is once again a big no-thankyou from this hose dragger.

I came across someone in a Renault Picasso the other week stopped in the middle of an intersection late at night. I blocked oncoming traffic and went to see what was wrong. Turned out their alternator was faulty and the battery had run down to the point where the car shut down, fair enough.

First option, push the vehicle to a safer location then sort it out. The fine people at Renault, however, had equipped the vehicle with a button-operated handbrake and a by-wire automatic gearbox. No overrides obvious, none listed in the ACAP first responder guide entry for the vehicle, and no mention of anything in the vehicle manual. No way of pushing it. Great.

Next plan, jump-start the vehicle where it is. Did that, engine started, battery had enough voltage to run everything even without being charged from the alternator, no problems. However, the Renault flatly refused to disengage the park brake or go into gear because of the fault code being thrown by the alternator. Even though the engine was running and all systems were powered, it refused to permit the driver to operate it. After a few cycles of shutting off and jump starting it we managed to get it to agree to if not drive under it's own power, at least permit the wheels to be turned so it could be pushed.

Once we finally got it out of the intersection, I learned the driver was only a few hundred metres from home. I suggested they might want to remove the battery from the vehicle, take it home, and stick it on a battery tender overnight so that they had a shot at driving it to a mechanic the next day. Unfortunately, the fine engineers at Renault had decided that the battery should be mounted lengthways in the engine compartment with 90% of it buried (had to ground the negative lead to the chassis when jumping it). Removal of the battery apparently required disassembly of half the radiator shroud and general engine plastics which took at least 30 minutes.

I made an offer to fetch a drip torch in order to burn the bloody thing to the ground, which was politely declined. We all went home.

"Fireman Access" is a port emergency crews can access to flood the battery compartment and extinguish an EV fire in minutes

Seems like pretty good idea. The graphic makes look like it could be hard to access though.

Yeah, is it on the bottom? Seems like there should be a pipe somewhere more accessible or something.

Wherever it is, firefighters need to be informed of it so that they can make a decision to do the right thing quickly when they are under pressure. I think about various signs like these

https://my.firefighternation.com/forum/topics/889755:Topic:3...

that exist to help firefighters quickly understand what they are up against.

It's not intended for manual access. The goal would be to sit back, douse the car with a firehouse, and leave enough of an open path so that the water pressure alone breaks the seal and floods the battery. This is what firefighters are already doing, so this design simply makes the default action more effective. I'm a big fan!

> When attacking the vehicle fire, understanding that once the contents of the fire are extinguished, sustained suppression on the battery pack may be necessary. Use a large volume of water such as multiple 1 3/4-inch hand-lines to suppress and cool the fire and the battery. Put water on the burning surfaces.

https://www.iafc.org/topics-and-tools/resources/resource/iaf...

Flood the battery with water? Isn't the whole issue with lithium that it is very reactive with oxygen and water? Wouldn't you want to flood it with foam or CO2?

I guess cooling is more important than keeping away oxidizers in this case and it's hard to beat water in that regard.

Lithium metal reacts violently with water to produce LiOH and H2. Lithium ions embedded in something else (a polymer electrolyte for LiPo cells) produce the same products, but at a significantly reduced rate so the reaction can be cooled below its critical temperature. We don't use lithium metal in EV cells (they also tend not to be rechargeable).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_metal_battery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery

I don't believe lithium-ion cells have lithium metal in them.

Yeah it reacts with water, but if it is damaged it also reacts with itself and the air around it anyways. Adding water still cools it which slows the reaction rate and reduces overall fire temperature. Once a lithium battery lights on fire there really isn't much you can do to actually stop it, you just want to suppress it and keep it from damaging or lighting other things nearby on fire.

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