August 24, 2021 | Gregory Wrightstone
Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
Joe Biden’s plan to convert 50% of the U.S. vehicle fleet from internal combustion engines to electricity by 2050 to fight climate change ignores a serious danger in doing so. Recent events around the world reveal that fire catastrophes from electric vehicles (EVs) are not only possible, but increasingly likely. The fire risk of the lithium-ion batteries that these EVs rely on for power is well documented, as they have been known to spontaneously combust in the most inopportune times and places.
Just this week, General Motors announced a second recall of Chevrolet Bolt EVs and EUVs manufactured from 2019 to 2022 model years in order to fix a defect in two of the lithium-ion battery modules that have led to fires. This follows on the heels of a previous recall of 69,000 older vehicles that will replace all five of the battery modules. 0:48 / 48:375 seconds…
The GM announcement is just the latest in a string of recalls by EV manufacturers to attempt to fix defects that can lead to catastrophic fires related to lithium-ion batteries. Last year, Ford was forced to recall 20,000 hybrids and soon thereafter, BMW recalled 26,700 vehicles due to battery defects that could lead to fires.
Internal combustion engine vehicles can also catch fire, but those tend to be during accidents or while driving, not sitting passively in a home or parking garage, as can occur with EVs. In addition, fire crews can extinguish a gasoline or diesel-powered vehicle fire, but not so for EVs. EVs are nearly impossible to extinguish with water and need to normally be allowed to just burn out, which may take many hours.
Last year, a California couple awoke to a blaring car alarm and a burning house. The blaze had started in one of the two Tesla S vehicles in their garage and spread to the other. “If we had lived upstairs in this house, we’d be dead,” said Yogi Vindum, a retired mechanical engineer. According to Mr. Vindum, “Gasoline driven cars don’t catch fire in the garage when they’re sitting there. And that’s the difference,” he said.
The culprit in nearly all EV fire cases is the lithium-ion batteries that power them, and which burn with extraordinary ferocity. Adding to the fire and heat danger posed by these events is the extreme toxicity of the fumes generated. According to one study, these fumes may in some circumstances be a larger threat, especially in confined environments where people are presentAds by
Battery fires are not limited to passenger cars. A fire at a bus depot housing electric vehicles in Hanover, Germany, caused millions of euros in damage. Five e-buses and four other vehicles were destroyed, along with the building and charging station. In the Chinese city of Baise, four electric buseswent up in flames after one had ignited.
Large lithium batteries used as backup power supplies to wind turbines and solar panels have combusted as well. Fire crews took more than three days to extinguish a blaze at the 13-ton Tesla Big Battery in Victoria, Australia. Because ordinary fire suppression methods could not be used on the 300-megawatt power source, crews had to let the blaze burn itself out as authorities monitored air quality in the vicinity.
A truly nightmare scenario is one in which an EV fire occurs in an underground parking garage beneath an apartment complex or a crowded office building. With the toxic fumes generated, how would the local fire department be able to respond to a fire that could not be extinguished even if they could get to it?
We should be forward-thinking in the prevention of a looming tragedy and consider doing what two towns in Bavaria did after the horrific German bus station inferno: completely ban all-electric vehicles from parking in underground garages. Electric vehicles may one day be safe enough to assume no fire risk in vulnerable garages, but that day has yet to arrive.
Gregory Wrightstone is executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and author of “Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know.”
The green blob does not care. As the immediate goal is virtue signaling, not a practical engineering solution, this will make no change in their attitudes towards BEVs.
it is not only just normal electric ‘vehicles’ but also even tiny ones as a small electric scooters, now to be seen all over London.
Recently I mentioned a case where a youngster left his scooter in hallway after having a street ride. Without obvious warning its battery burst into flames, but as fortune will have it, boy’s father was nearby and threw out scooter at some speed through the front door. If it happened at night results could have been catastrophic for both the lives and the property.
EV fire less known risk:
During an electric vehicle fire, over 100 organic chemicals are generated, including some incredibly toxic gases such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide – both of which are fatal to humans.
The UK Government as a part of the Road safety guide, has published details of what you need to know:
Fires in Electric vehicles
https://www.bedsfire.gov.uk/Community-safety/Road-safety/Fire-in-Electric-Vehicles.aspx
Probably the best solution BANNING banning EVs is to remove the rechargeable batteries and either generate the electricity Onboard or transfer it from the road to the motors by other means
Better still, do not ban internal combustion engine vehicles and let free market capitalism work as it has done so well, let consumers pick the winners and losers.
“Free enterprise” please. If you would, do not use the Marxist derogatory word “capitalism” unless attached to crony, as in the politicians favorite type of economic activity, “Crony Capitalism”.
Thank you.
Don’t even flavor it with the word “capitalism” Call it what it is– just “cronyism”. The worst cronyism in the world has been crony socialism and economic fascism.
Fires in ordinary vehicles are not uncommon and normally the causes can be traced-often the electric wiring.
Do we know why lithium batteries spontaneously combust? Are they inherently unstable or is it a temperature thing perhaps-they get very hot during use or recharging?
Inherent AFAIK.
In the past I beleive that hydraulic fluids were likely to combust on contact with hot exhaust manifolds if the system was damaged in a collision. I’m not sure if that is still an issue with mordern fluids and designs
Many of us who ride motorcycles are familiar with the “kusshh” that you hear when you spill gasoline and it drips onto the exhaust manifold. I haven’t heard of it starting fires, but it leads to some very clenched teeth.
They do but the fluid often run out and burn the difference is foam can kill the fluid fire with the batteries foam makes no difference.
Hi Tony
As far as I understand problem is with the inherit rapid flammability of Lithium due to it being the third most reactive element (after potassium and sodium) when combined with either of two electric failures:
– Over-charging (fault in the charging circuitry), possibly cause of two large fires in Germany’s bus depots.
– Short circuit in just one cell (poor quality or impact pressure) overheating spreads with rapid chain reaction through the rest as it might happen in a road accident. A typical EV can have about 5,000 battery cells, while the early Tesla cars had about 7,000.
You could imagine a bank of 5,000 cells at the bottom of an EV. You drive to the shops in your freshly charged EV. You like the kick it gives you when you floor it and it accelerates like a rocket. You give it a work out, you deserve it!
You arrive at the shop, park on the road outside (black top).
Its a sunny day. 1400 hrs, the ground is radiating lots and lots of heat – peak UHI from the road surface.
You adequate battery management and cooling system, normally keeping your cells in order and safe, just can’t quite copy with parking on a very hot surface.
Your centre cell, right in the middle of the battery pack, already hot from the charge and recent work out, now overheats, plates buckle, shorts, mass current, fire, smoke, fumes.
Fire service arrive, cordon off the area, spray the shop fron to stop it catching fire and everyone just waits for it to burn out.
Three days later, the fire service deem it safe to be transported to a breakers yard and follow the remains of the car in case it reigntes.
A day in the life of an EV owner.
This what Joe Biden calls “Building Back Better.”
And $60,000 or more go up in flames! I wonder, will the insurance pay for that? It wasn’t an accident OR vandalism!
If they will now, don’t expect that to last. And not just for insurance on the car. When you go to renew your house insurance, soon there will be a new clause stating that fires due to EVs in the garage will no longer be covered.
Fires in unattended ICE vehicles are extremely uncommon The vast majority of car electrical circuits are fused so if there’s a short to ground on a particular circuit the fuse or fusible link opens up, averting fire.
The vast majority of ICE vehicle fires occur when they’re involved in an accident or while refueling. The difference is, refueling an ICE vehicle takes five minutes and is always attended by a human, a human who has almost instant access to a main dispenser emergency shut off switch. EV refueling on the other typically takes anywhere from a half an hour to more than eight hours and much of the time the refueling is unattended by a human. So an EV refueling fire could go unnoticed for minutes or even hours, resulting in deadly consequences for building occupants when that recharging is taking place underneath or adjacent to occupied residences or office buildings.
My guess is that property insurance companies will soon attach riders to commercial and residential policies disallowing EV charging damage claims on property insurance and general liability insurance policies.
Lithium ion cells do spontaneously ignite, although you are correct that many of the fire incidents are related to recharging or accidents. Some EV manufacturers process their cells to reduce the ignition problem. No manufacturer has totally solved the problem.
You obviously talking about classic fires, the lithium fire is something all together different proposition. There is no switch of any kind that will save vehicle when one out of its 5000 cells is either shorted or over heated. It is a rapid chain reaction that can’t be stopped by any known means ! !
In my 60+ years, I doubt I’ve seen more than about a dozen car fires.
Given the 10’s of millions of cars on the road, many of them many years old. Car fires in ICE cars are extremely rare.
I read that the lithium salts in the batteries grow chemical ‘spikes’ which can form an electrical short between the ‘plates’ of the battery. Electrical short = fire. So, it seems to be inherent in the use of lithium in high-power batteries. We seem to be lucky that it doesn’t often happen in cellphone batteries! (“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” could end up being too true!)
They are called trolley buses, I remember them in Derby when I was a small child. The overhead cables cris crossed over the city centre.
State Governments in Australia have introduced blue stickers that must be attached to registration plates to alert authorities to vehicles that are pure electric or hybrid electric battery carriers.
In the U.K. new all-electric vehicles have a green sticker on their number plate. This is to show their exemption from areas that have emission charges, also they serve as a virtue signalling device and look at me I can afford an expensive car.
An expensive car made a little less expensive courtesy of a subsidy funded by the rest of us.
I’ve been binge watching BattleBots for the last couple of days. One thing I’ve noticed is that the first man into the battle box after the fight, is wearing a full face mask with an independent air supply. He then sets up ducts to exhaust the air. Only after the air has been cleared, does the rest of the clean up crew come in.
I’ve been in the Battle Bots audience for a couple of seasons and the precautions are significant and never shown. The arena itself is completely air tight and sometimes the arena is shut down for an hour while battery fires burn out and the arena vented. These are smaller batteries. Though they have to generate a lot of power it’s only for a maximum of the 3 minute match and the battery weight is included in the 300 lb weight limit.
Interesting link but it’s a bit sad they way the brigade parrots the global warming nonsense.
Yes. Although, I think (and hope!) it was just an oversight, here, given the author’s having published the book he has.
“… to fight [a non-issue,] “climate change” …. .”
Fixed. 🙂
Funny I don’t ever remember seeing a Trolley bus burst into flames, with no worries for heating at -20C and no big deal on ice or snow.
They used to be common in many towns, and are still in many places in Eastern Europe!
We took a ride on one in Jaroslavl 2 weeks ago, and another in St Petersburg Russia.
On top of that they seem to last nigh on for ever.
Even Reading Berks used to have them….and they got rid of them, cos they were considered too old fashioned and unreliable!.
GO FIGURE!
San Francisco runs 15 trolleybus lines with around 300 trolleybuses powered by overhead electrical lines. They carry about 1/3 of that city’s public transportation riders.
Go figure? These are not EV fires but battery fires. EV’s powered by ovethead trolleys or third rails don’t use batteries.
pigs_in_space, Hi
pigs_in_space indeed !
Over the last few years, there has been a craze for electric scooters in Salt Lake City, and a few companies have popped up that let people rent the scooters (using a credit card), and then gather them to a few central locations for recharging at night.
Lots of people seem to take joyrides on scooters up into the hills north and east of the city, then just abandon them in random locations, sometimes in grassy areas or under trees. Summers are extremely dry in Salt Lake City (frequently two or three weeks with no rain whatsoever), and a battery fire on a scooter left in dry grass could quickly spread into a wildfire, which can threaten nearby homes.
There are frequently electronic signs along freeways warning drivers not to let security chains for trailers drag because they could spark fires, but IMHO abandoned scooters present a much greater danger of fires.
Scooter riders coming down from the hills also can reach speeds of 30 mph or more, and their stopping distance going downhill is unclear, even with the motor off. It’s fairly common for a scooter rider going downhill (even at night) to run a stop sign or red light, possibly causing collisions with cars having the right of way. If the scooter battery catches fire in the collision, it could destroy a car and/or injure its driver and passengers.
Yeah plenty of People are willing to buy cheap Chinese junk with poor quality control so it’s never wise to charge an electric bike or scooter unless in a fireproof location, though electric bikes and scooters with batteries assembled in the E.U or U.S are much more likely to have much higher standards of quality and quality control but should still not be charged unattended without proper precautions.
Same goes for cell phones and laptops, keep smoke alarms in the area where batteries are charged, basic stuff but People are oblivious to the dangers of Chinese imports with poor quality control.
Tom,
There are some naive, but sincere and virtuous people, regarding “saving the world”, but they “liberal-arts-type” folks, and have not the slightest idea how to do that.
They demonstrate, make noise and repeat whatever slogan sounds good. PR people LOVE those folks, as does the US Media, because those folks get “interviewed”, to keep pumping the RE hype.
Also, there are “virtue-signaling” people. Those folks usually know better, but purposely speak with “forked” tongue, because,
1) They want to get re-elected, plus get “campaign contributions” which they pocket for their own and family and friends use in various “allowed” ways. Pelosi’s husband is a successful “business investor”.
2) They want to have long-term “careers” in RE, whether in government or not
3) They have financial interests to get as much subsidies as possible for their financial UNVIABLE projects that would not even exist without those subsidies.
Here is my article regarding wind, solar and batteries
HIGH COSTS OF WIND, SOLAR, AND BATTERY SYSTEMS IN NEW ENGLAND
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/high-costs-of-wind-solar-and-battery-systems
Apply the same “precautionary principle” used to justify trillions spent supposedly countering “climate change” to Li-ion batteries, and all other “green” agenda items. What’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the “green” gooses.
Yes, if the Germans are so risk averse as to close down their nuclear generators in case a tsunami comes and overwhelmes them, then they should certainly ban EVs from parking under cover, especially in underground and multi-storey car parks as well as domestic garages attached to a house.
(Maybe they could also mandate a form of steel parking skip to make easier the removal and disposal of the remains after a fire. /s )
The smoke from the increasing lithium battery fires will help planetary cooling , a definite positive.
Why do you want glaciation? 😇
What a hot topic! Thanks for the helpful report.
The Ford Pinto ICE passenger car was terminated because of an exploding gas tank when hit in the rear end. These E vehicles have some significant problems, too.
Tesla autopilot has an affinity for police cars and emergency vehicles.
https://twitter.com/FHPOrlando/status/1431565185899171840
That was a setup by Ralph Nader rather than a real issue.
When rammed from behind by a bigger vehicle going 60mph, most cars would have their gas tanks ruptured. Ford discontinued the Pinto because bad publicity killed sales. The bad publicity was based on a media campaign that took a single incident and tried to use it to condemn an entire industry.
The Federal Government bought large numbers of Ford Pintos to help Ford.
The LPG equipped Pintos drove as if they had half the horsepower of the ICE engines equipped Pintos.
All of them were darn awkward to deliver mail from.
When the ICE Pintos failed to work, the vehicle manager often was able to get them to start and return under their own power.
When the LPG powered Pintos failed to work, they all had to be towed to the service station.
Both Pinto types died frequently.
I can’t speak for ALL Of the Pintos, obviously, but I rented a few in the early 70’s and had to drive one for awhile when my car was in the shop, and they ALL performed quite well! There was one that had a much larger engine which performed so well that I had to pull over and pop the hood, thinking that it HAD have a V8 engine. Nope, it was a very impressive looking four cylinder that RAN like a V8! . They all had impressive MPG figures, too! Small, tight fitting, but serviceable!
Imagine the L.A. 405 freeway bumper-to-bumper with EVs during commute hour. A single crash could start off a true disaster.
Imagine a Tesla fire in one of the New York Hudson RIver tunnels. That, I think, would be a mass casualty event.
“That, I think, would be a mass casualty event”
Sadly, the sooner it happens the better …
because that’s now the only way this madness will be stopped; science, logic & common sense is now totally ignored as the lemmings leap of the cliff with increasing religious fervor.
We seem to be locked into a self-destruct mode.
As an ex-Liverpudlian, used to using the underwater Mersey tunnels, I know what a foul-up in such tunnels is like with NORMAL traffic. An old friend of mine was a Tunnel policeman, and was killed when a truck drove into his emergency vehicle while he was clearing up some metal on the road. With a fatality, the Tunnel was blocked for hours (he was the first fatal casualty since the tunnel opened). And I hate to think what would happen with an un-extinguishable e-vehicle fire!
Modern tunnels in Australia are fitted with fire sprinklers. These are effective for most vehicle fires. BEVs probably the exception and should be banned from tunnels like any dangerous goods transporters (so-named “placard” goods) such as gas a fuel tankers.
In fact BEVs in Australia are required to display a tag that notifies emergency services of the danger. Arguably the tag is the same as a placard.
Ban BEVs from tunnels – where is the petition?
If you drive a vehicle with a LPG tank through a tunnel, you are supposed t shut the valve. There are limits to the size of container allowed.
Both reasonable requirements. Why no discussion of reasonable requirements for lithium battery operated vehicles?
It will take a catastrophe to begin the discussion. In Las Vegas,
the MGM Grand fire started the discussion for retrofitting all nigh rise buildings with fire sprinklers, but the legislature did not act. Then the Hilton fire happened, and the retrofit requirements were enacted by the legislature.
First disaster starts the discussion, second disaster gets something done.
In a road tunnel!!!
Many progressives in the heart of large metro areas, living in expensive mid or high-rise condo complexes, would love to buy an EV. But where will the park it? There goes a large slice of the potential buyers for EVs.
In the UK, and i suspect most countries, the vast majority of cars are parked on a street. The infrastructure required to charge all of these would dwarf the existing electrical infrastructure.
In addition, every household that can charge an EV would require significant additional power into the house.
The overall cost would be staggering. I hope they figure this out sooner rather than later, but I suspect that they won’t until it’s way too late.
Extension power cord futures are UP!
😜
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Really, ZigZag. Where will all the chargers go?
There are a few high-rise condos already that have banned EV in the underground parking area. Not too many EV fires from now, no building with underground parking will allow EVs.
So EVs get parked on the street to limit damages. Now the infrastructure needed is nutso crazy, the virtue signalers are too important to park on the street, and high amp extension cords will be cut and stolen for their scrap value by all the plebes who aren’t getting a piece of the Global Warming $$$action.
There is more to conversion to an all EV fleet than meets the eye.
Politicians do not consider the big picture, political agenda is all they focus on knowing that if something fails they will have moved on pension in hand.
Yup, Dennis. It’s all about the next election and blaming someone or something else.
Yep, as the Biden admin is trying to do now. The whole Democrat Party has taken to blaming whichever Republican was in office last for everything nasty that happens or that THEY have done! Also, what ever GOOD thing happens, they will take credit for, even AFTER they are in office.
I think you are misunderstanding the aim of all of this. It isn’t to move you into an EV, it is to get you out of privately owned vehicles and into mass transit.
Only the ‘elite’ will have their own vehicles. Plebs are controlled.
And their private planes, a la Kerry, who speaks with forked tongue, only when, as usual, his asshole is doing the talking
Which is why they will fail in the US. Can you imagine trying to evacuate New Orleans and southern Louisiana using mass transit?
Consider holiday traffic periods on highways and demand for EV charging plus waiting time (ignoring that a fast charge will not deliver 100 per cent recharge), it was estimated that areas the dimension of outdoor movie sites would be needed with parking spaces and recharge points at each one.
As compared to the existing liquid fuel service stations with fast turnover of vehicles in for refuelling on much smaller blocks of land.
I don’t have to imagine it, I get that every time I cross Europe by car (when I was allowed to). Every service station with EV charging is jam packed with EVs circling waiting for a free charger.
Now I use Google maps to search for services with charging stations just so that I can avoid them.
This is why I come here, brilliant idea ZZ, simply BRILLIANT!
“How I Spent My European Vacation”
And if one had a common design in California, the so-called snorkel house, with a second story living space over the garage area which is closest to the street, parking or recharging a BEV inside that garage would be folly.
With the only way out, either through the garage, or a stairwell running next to it.
“In addition, every household that can charge an EV would require significant additional power into the house.
The overall cost would be staggering. I hope they figure this out sooner rather than later, but I suspect that they won’t until it’s way too late.”
The “answer” will be that the plebs won’t own a car.
Here in London, the Mayor has essentially banned spaces for parking in new housing developments.
Recent article in Forbes
“Fires, probes, recalls: The shift to electric vehicles is costing automakers billions
GM missed Wall Street’s earnings expectations last week largely due to an $800 million recall of its Chevrolet Bolt EV following several reported fires.”
In Melbourne, Victoria, Australia there was a request to install EV charging points in an underground carpark of a high rise commercial and residential building near the Port, contractors advised that the installation cost would be prohibitively expensive including upgrading of the local electricity grid and sub-stations to supply the estimated demand from potential multiple EV charging taking place.
It will NOT be the first time that Democrat President edicts have proved totally disastrous for private enterprise. The subprime loan bubble was not greed from the banks, but a name and shame ruse from government. It was pressure from government that caused this problem.
Fire disasters from lithium batteries and expensive recalls (what will replace the batteries-another defective battery?) will totally destroy the manufacturers. They will be bankrupted several times over.
There just will not be enough money to compensate people who have had their homes and businesses burned down. Will it be the hapless taxpayer who has to foot the bill for fake puppet President Biden’s edict? Car makers should stall such orders for as long as they possibly can to avoid being caught out big time by fake orders. They must stall as long as possible until Biden is found out and his treasonous orders discarded.
Meanwhile, here in Australia, our puppet government is deliberately destroying the entire economy and TAKING our freedoms by the day. Every day, another freedom confiscated- held to ransom to essentially force us to be lab rats. This is in flagrant violation of Section 51 xxiiiA of the Constitution as well as the Nuremberg Code.
As of tomorrow, we need to show our papers to enter “areas of concern” as arbitrarily determined on a map. People that live in an “area of concern” and work outside the area MUST take the vaccination! I am not kidding. We are being FORCED to partake in a flawed medical trial (adverse effects being suppressed-deliberately inaccurate data being collected) or just LOSE the ability to derive an income.
As for the dangerous electric vehicles-burn baby, burn.
Well you woke up a little ray of sunshine.
Yes Simon, sunshine, the universal disinfectant. He shined the light on multiple truths.
Did you learn anything?
Of course he didn’t. Learn requires a desire and ability to learn which the simple one has shown time and again that he does not possess.
Your boi Biden is sure doing a GREAT job ruining everything, CCC-Simon.
ISN’T he, though? And he is MIGHTY PROUD of his achievements, too! We are all waiting for him to get his comeuppance, and SOON!
It is like watching a bad movie, except that its reality.
Mitt The Rat Romney came to Biden’s rescue today and blamed everything on DJT, another total moron who’s only claim to fame and power is the size of his bank account:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/mitt-romney-blames-trump-joe-bidens-afghanistan-crisis-led-death-13-us-service-members-video/
A diesel Vauxhall Zafira sitting passively in the parking garage of a shopping center near me caught fire and burned down half the center, causing about 35 million dollars of damage. Luckily, nobody was killed or injured. And gas and diesel vehicles burn more often than Evs.
Compare the numbers of the first with the numbers of the latter.
Calculate the number of fires and the damage they cause divided by the number of vehicles for both classes of autos. Your insurance company is doing so and will raise your premiums based on the risk of a battery fire in your garage. The difference between a gasoline fire and a battery is that the gasoline fire can be extinguished by normal methods (I saw one today, being put out by firefighters). The battery is more like a solid-fuel rocket engine because once it is going, it can’t be put out again.
Yup, Loren. I see ICE vehicle fires off to the side of the road now and then. Call the fire department and Zip! Zam! Zowie! the fire is out and a flatbed tow is carting off the remains.
It’s just not so for ICE vehicles. Zip, Zam…….. wait, wait, wait, wait……wait…
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BTW, I don’t have the numbers, but it would be interesting to compare the ratios of fires-to-EVs vs fires-to-ICEs. I have no idea how that would shake out.
oopsie! “It’s just not so for EVs.”
Sorry ’bout that.
Insurance is a systemic business – like banking.
Insurance is ultra regulated – like banking.
Insurance is ultra political – like banking.
Try getting along WITHOUT it!
And the Hindenburg finished off hydrogen.We thought. Imagine a hydrogen fuelled
Car in an accident with an EV.
Being an old aerial firefighter, I can see an electric battery fire setting off a wildfire. Foam or Retardant will do little good.
A flaming hydrogen-filled dirigible, an EV, and a flaming redwood walk into a bar…
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I thought you were setting up a joke, 4E Douglas. Sadly… no.
The Hindenburg was FILLED with hydrogen! The car would NOT be filled with it, but have it in a tank of some form. The type of tank has yet to be worked out.
Um – I would seriously think about that statement. From what I read, in order to get any range from hydrogen, the tank would have to be pressurized to about 700 bar. Also, hydrogen is being proposed for solution to heavy vehicle battery/payload problem. So, very large, highly pressurized tanks of gas, that are highly explosive at air/fuel mixes of 5% to 85%, running around urban streets, by the millions. What could possibly go wrong!
Reference?
I find that very hard to believe. Diesel doesn’t spontaneously ignite. You can’t start a fire with diesel and a match, for example. It requires quite a lot of additional heat before it starts, and even then it starts very slowly.
Exactly.
Try throwing a bucket of diesel on a campfire and it will just douse it.
Like throwing water on a sodium fire
For an ICE car to just ignite usually requires something like foreign material caught in the exhaust system (plastic or dry grass, etc) or something like an electrical fault.
Electrical fires usually don’t ignite the fuel, at least not at first.
They ignite insulation, or something in the interior of the car, and only when the fire gets hot enough is the fuel ignited.
With EV’s, an electrical short could either ignite the battery directly by causing it to over heat, or the short could ignite insulation or something in the interior of the car, then when the battery gets hot enough, the battery ignites.
Correct.
IMO we’re not setup at all for using EV’s, and won’t be for a long time.
But what we definitely are setup for and have been setup for, for a very long time, is hybrid-electric vehicles.
The idea of using the base load grid to fast charge Li car batteries is absolutely bonkers, and quite impractical. It’s really a useless fantasy being pushed along constantly by really ignorant people.
The new snake oil.
What is practical though, is using very fuel-efficient small ICE engines (gasoline or LNG) within cars to charge Li battery within same car.
As for Li batteries being an innate risk, I don’t buy that at all, Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries can be made to not burn. And you don’t see Prius’s bursting into flames all over the place do you? IIRC the Prius started using Li batteries in 2011. So that’s ten years of constant use and they don’t have a reputation for catching on fire. And there is no problem parking or storing them in existing building structures. They are safe and ultra-reliable vehicles with large Li batteries in them, and electric engines.
And the notion that Li batteries will always burst into flames is complete nonsense, it has been for a long time now, but people still keep trotting it out as an out-of-date hobgoblin to push the fear.
The fact is the fire spreading in that line of buses is hydro carbons catching alight from radiant heat as the buses were parked too close together.
The only Li fire spreading there was from the first bus. In all the others their battery would have burned last, it’s the plastics and flammable light metals which are burning first. All buses and cars are full of such plastics now. Light and thin flammable metals are used, because they are far lighter than the steel sub-frames and panels in older less efficient ICE vehicles.
Using lighter metals adds to efficiency, the battery charge will last longer.
But if the light metals also burn …
Only the plug-in versions of the Prius use Li. Non-plug-in models (the vast majority) use NiMH, as do Toyota’s other hybrid models.
That’s not correct.
Non-plugin Prius are produced in both NiMH and Li battery versions.
Plus Japanese and European Prius have Li batteries.
According to Toyota the Prius-ECO, Prius 3, Prius 3-Touring, Prius 4 and Prius 4-Touring all utilize a lithium battery.
These models were designed to use NiMH and Li batteries interchangeably.
The only Prius models that uses NiMH solely is Prius-1 and Prius-2.
The plug-in models were the most popular models for several years. And none of the Li Prius battery versions have a reputation for bursting into flames.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_Plug-in_Hybrid
I can imagine that happening with a petrol car, but not so likely with a diesel. Fumes do not spontaneously ignite, and need to get quite hot to start burning.
Actually – that is true. Vauxhall Zafira B’s (2005-14 models without electronic climate control) started being recalled after 2014 when it was realised that, due to bad design, a fuse in the heating and ventilation system could cause a fire. All affected models were recalled, the problem was sorted by the manufacturer after about 300 fires out of 234,938 potentially at risk cars. That’s what, about 1 in 780 Vauxhall Zafira B’s? Right, we need to call for all EV’s to be treated exactly the same – recalled by the manufacturer to sort the problem out.
It was likely an electrical short that caused the fire.
Yes, it’s a well known electrical problem.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/root-cause-found-vauxhall-zafira-fires
Since retirement I have averaged 50,000 kilometres a year and when I was working I averaged 30,000 kilometres a year, and not including driving in foreign countries many times.
I have not observed your claim that gas and diesel vehicles burn often.
Of course they can catch fire in a collision, or from an electrical system fault and heavy transport brake fires etc., but these are not regular events.
On the other hand spontaneous combustion, exothermic reaction from Lithium ion batteries has taken place too after when the very small percentage of total vehicle fleet numbers they represent are considered.
Collisions, electrical system faults and over heating brakes can all cause fires in EVs as well.
In addition to having the battery self ignite just because it wanted to.
So did the parking garage have special cladding like the London High Rises?
Did they NOT have sprinklers? Any such parking structure in the US with a shopping center above would be required to be fire sprinklered.
Did they not have a fire standpipe system to allow the fire fighters to gain sufficient water supply to put out the fire?
Did the local fire department walk to the fire without any equipment? ANY ICE fire can be extinguished in short order if the apparatus and equipment are in place, and properly manned. NOT SO WITH LITHIUM BATTERIE VEHICLES!
Were there no fire walls, fire barriers, fire doors, etc. between the garage and the retail spaces that would be required in the US? If there were fire doors, did they fail to close? If there were fire barriers or walls, had they been damaged during remodels etc. after the building was commissioned?
One car fire DOES NOT cause 35 million in damage unless there are MULTIPLE OTHER issues with the buildings. Sort of like a high rise condo collapsing because of some rust or salt water intrusion: Either it was of substandard design, substandard construction of substandard maintenance. Sort of like the China Virus. People almost always die due to comorbidity and/or failure to act.
“And gas and diesel vehicles burn more often than Evs.”
1) There’s magnitudes more of them, so of course they’ll “burn more often”. The questions is do they burn more often per capita? And the answer is no, they do not.
2) What was the cause of the fires? was it something that could just as easily happen in an EVs (such as a short in the electrical system) or was it something that is unique to them (the fuel spontaneously combusting). In the vast majority of ICE fires, it’s not the later. Whereas the EVs have the former and more of the later to contend with as well.
Something to be said for the energy density and ability to control it of fossil fuels.
wait till the hydrogen vehicles come along
Hydrogen vehicles will not burn, at least not for long.
*** K A – B O O M ***
Pro Tip: Stay out of the blast radius.
Hydrogen does not have the energy density of gasoline or diesel.
Hydrogen fuel-cell cars are now operating here in Southern California. I have yet to hear of a fire, let alone an explosion, involving one. But it just may be early days.
All this derailment of civilization because of some mythical nonsense about CO2 and thermometers.
How many are on the road?
The advertisements are becoming more and more disruptive. In particular, the ones that slide across the text make it virtually impossible to read the articles.
You might just want to investigate what the $#!&! is wrong with your adblocker, John.
Make a donation to the site, then go find a good adblocker.
Could you include some more pictures so griff has a chance of understanding this? Thanks.
…pictures would not help him. He is beyond help, as are other RE mavens, who thrive on subsidies
“Five e-buses and four other vehicles were destroyed, along with the building and charging station.”
As the old joke goes: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
What the engineer likes:
Better, Faster, Cheaper.
What the environmentalist demands:
Shoddy, Expensive, Deadly.
There is really nothing new here. How does it end? Wait for a few more very expensive fires with large property losses. Before long, the insurance companies will step up with loss prevention programs. Then you will see insurance bans on EVs for private homes, shopping malls, small businesses, you name it. That will put a stop to it.
Ah, better, faster (sooner), cheaper. Chose any two of the three and we can maybe do it. All three—NOPE.
Being somewhat an SME on energy storage materials and devices (batteries, supercaps) there are solutions to the Li Battery fire problem, but inordinately expensive. Basically, put a thermistor, a voltage regulator, and a cut of diode on each and every cell connection. A cell heats outside parameters, the diode cuts off that cell charging. The voltage regulator prevents adjacent cells from overcharging. Now your newly safe $15k (Chevy Bolt) battery ‘only’ costs 30k…and is bigger and a heavier because of the extra electronics and extra wiring.
we actually did that in the early days of LiIon cell phone batteries. Unfortunately, most early laptop battery makers did not.
That will not work. The cells fail internally. It is just the rapid release of the stored energy.
There may be some ability to limit the intensity by protection circuits preventing energy from other cells contributing. However the cells are usually tightly packed and one going kaboom will likely lead to others being involved.
There is a whole lot of information on the web on safe storage of lithium batteries. No BEV would meet those storage requirements as the storage boxes rely on volume and gas release to contain the initial failure then regulate the burn.
GM are working on an anode system that does not fail internally to inevitably produce a fire. But anything made from combustible materials with high energy density is challenging to prevent fire. Aluminium burns well once the right temperature is reached so Tesla chassis are a fire hazard as well. Difficult to sustain temperature high enough to burn steel even in an enclosed space.
“Difficult to sustain temperature high enough to burn steel even in an enclosed space”.
Wait for Hydrogen.
Nick B, ahem. The ‘reaction’ you consider requires Oxygen. You stipulate an “enclosed space”, this will limit the amount of heat (fire) produced.
Isn’t one of the main issues with lithium cells that their failure mode produces an internal short circuit within the cell caused by the growth of lithium metal tendrils across the terminals? Once this occurs any remaining charge in the cell is conducted through the internal short and if enough heat is produced to start a fire it’s pretty much game over. The single cell fire will inevitably ignite adjacent cells and cause a cascade of failure. Could the added electronics cut out such a defective cell before this catastrophic failure?
To alleviate this issue you’d need to be able to either automatically eject a shorting cell (safely?) or completely thermally isolate each cell or small cluster such that a catastrophic failure of a cell wouldn’t result in the loss of the entire system. The first approach would be complicated and would add much weight and cost to a battery pack while reducing reliability (due to added systems that may themselves fail). The second approach would be technically difficult, especially in automotive applications. This is basically the approach used in large grid scale batteries. Separating groups of cells with a thermal gap (typically air).
In order to get the high voltages needed for automobile batteries, you have to wire a whole bunch of individual cells in series. If one cell fails, even if it doesn’t resort in a fire, then that chain fails.
Because you need so many cells in each chain, there isn’t room in a battery pack for a lot of chains. So the loss of a single cell would result in a significant loss in total battery storage.
A solution that adds about 10,000 new points of possible failure in a car…
Ristvan, RickWill is correct below about the internal failures. Your mind is still stuck on NiMH cell tech. I’ve had Li-Ion cells for no good reason, _not_ mistreated, but old (IOW not new), begin to self-heat/self-discharge after reaching terminal (end point) charging voltage … a phenom I never, ever, saw in many years of working with with Ni-Cd and then NiMH in the past as used in portable 2-way radio equipment and in the earlier (AMPS, DAMPS) cell phones as well.
BTW, Rathke made a sign error in the paper you cite ‘debunking’ the Hydrino. Mills then called him out on that error. Also, 22 unique analytical techniques identify/confirm the production of Hydrinos, including gas chromatography and most recently EPR (Electron Paramagnetic Resonance) … how many of those 22 different techniques have you checked out, examined or looked at in the last five years? Any, or (I’ll bet) none?
“Fire disasters from lithium batteries and expensive recalls… will totally destroy the manufacturers. They will be bankrupted several times over.”
Another non-bug feature.
“We should be forward-thinking in the prevention of a looming tragedy”
Iam I will not buy one 😄
Maybe BEVs should be sold with their own charging safety box. Just a bigger version of the Bat-Safe box seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv_3vwSZmzA
Standards Australia do not permit installing any battery storage system under living spaces. I doubt Tesla buyers in Australia are advised of this Standard. There are many household garages on the lower level of a two or three storey residential home.
The real question to ask is, what is the risk? Not is there any? Of course there are risks all transportation has it’s problems. To do that we need to know what the chances are an EV will burn. To find that out we need to know how many are on the road and what number of those catch fire. Finally we need to know what that ratio is compared to ICE cars. Till then articles like this are just saying EV’s (like ICE cars) have their risks.
And I think it a little naive to assume these problems wont get sorted. Every time there is an issue, vehicles get recalled and the problem learnt from. Implying these problems are “forever” is just plain silly. And it is also a big leap to assume lithium iron will be the only battery around. LFP (Lithium iron phosphate) are the batteries used in the latest Tesla 3 and they (while not perfect ) have a some big advantages. They are much safer (harder to ignite). They don’t degrade to the same extent and you can charge them to full capacity without damage.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
So you are admiting the technology is not ready – to this I agree. Why is something with so many problems being promoted by governments who should be product neutral, long before the products are ready?
“So you are admiting the technology is not ready”
How did you get that from what I wrote?
“Why is something with so many problems being promoted by governments…”
My point is how do you know there are “so many problems?”
“long before the products are ready?”
You been in a better electric vehicle? Maybe actually try something before knocking it.
Here is an excellent review/comparison by a guy of his EV against his ICE car.
The EVs will turn out like the curly vacuum fluorescent bulbs the Govt tried to force us to use which quickly died when the LED was perfected.
Perfect example of command and control from the center getting it 100% wrong
”
The EVs will turn out like the curly vacuum fluorescent bulbs the Govt tried to force us to use which quickly died when the LED was perfected.”
Another way to look at that is the curly bulbs were a stepping stone to a better technology.
Two fundamentally different technologies. The curly fluorescent tubes were a dead end.
No one remmebers the Circline (trade name) series of florescent lamps that preceded the curly “compact” florescent bulbs … I was an early adopter of those and away from 100W incandescent bulbs. I still have one or two of the ‘CircLine’ bulbs installed in lamps, too.
The only thing the two technologies have in common is that they are both powered by electricity.
So what will replace the Tesla stepping stones, CCP-Simon?
UFOs with alien technology?
Idiot.
“So what will replace the Tesla stepping stones, CCP-Simon?
”
Nothing. They are there. I bet you have never even been in one. Typical knuckle dragger thinks the past is always the way forward. I’m thinking it was beyond you to even watch the Youtube clip. I wonder how many of those who down voted what was a very fair reasoned explanation watched it?
How typical of a socialist. Anyone who disagrees with it is stupid.
Data, not needed.
Logic, not wanted.
Did you watch the movie Mark?
Again with the knuckles, Simon? There’s your hypocrisy showing.
Did you watch the movie before you commented? Seems the knuckles is right then.
And again Simon misses the point. For someone who complains about name-calling you have no problem doing it yourself. Holding others to standards you don’t follow yourself makes you a hypocrite. You have demonstrated that quite plainly now, and you have an example as you previously had demanded. Own it.
And again you have missed the point. My level of name calling has a sense of humour attached but still makes the point that people here like Carlo Monte are living in the past and at the same time trying to sell it as the future. They are little more than cavemen. Calling someone an idiot on the other hand is just a puerile adolescent putdown that says more about him than anyone else. You may not get it, but there it is.
YES! Top and only entry on the list of hate!
Well done, CCP-Simon, here’s a biscuit.
So “It’s different when I do it” is your excuse? That’s actually exactly what I expected from you. Thanks for living down to my expectations!
Different, smarter, more grown up, more informative.
Idiot. They are the end-all-be-all transportation solution?
re: “Another way to look at that is the curly bulbs were a stepping stone to a better technology. ”
Yes … remarkable progress in reaction dynamics (from previous simple catalytic cells) has been made with the Hydrino ‘process’ in the (inaptly named) SunCell from BrLP … one Liter of water (with the Hydrogen ‘linked’ within) provides enough energy via the Hydrino process (even involving electrolysis) to power a passenger car 2,000 miles …
How was compact fluorescent a stepping stone to LED technology?
Sounds like you have gotten so desperate to say something in defense of government, that you forgot to actually make sense.
“How was compact fluorescent a stepping stone to LED technology?”
I would have thought it obvious but…. both were on a path to finding more efficient lighting. Older bulbs(a bit like ICE cars) wasted a lot of energy through heat.
Idiot. The first LEDs were grown in the 1960s.
“The first LEDs were grown in the 1960s.”
I wonder how these LED light bulbs were “Grown” you speak of. Is it in your garden or maybe from the slime in your hair?
And by the way I know they are grown, I just can’t get past the image of you sprouting one.
In London 2019 there were over 54 EV fires out of a total of 20,000 EV cars, buses and taxis. There were about 3.2 million ICE vehicles (cars, buses and taxis) in London in 2019, with 1,898 fires. Do you want to do the maths? Well, I think you’re 4.5 times as likely to have a fire in an EV as opposed to an ICE vehicle.
The EV’s are much, much younger than the ICE cars. There are very few EV’s that are more than 2 or 3 years old on the road.
The older the car, the more likely it is to have problems. So despite being much younger on average, EV’s still have many more problems.
That was before the development of Lithium iron phosphate batteries so clearly old data. But thanks for producing it. Top marks.
The data is only 2 years old – the batteries used then are the majority of the batteries used now, despite new developments entering the market. The data is still relevant despite your lame attempts to handwave it away. I wish I could give you a better mark but it wasn’t very convincing.
Simon; C-, “could do better.”
Richard I wonder if you have a reference for those numbers? Be good to do some reading and get as clever as you.
Go for it. YOU put YOUR money down on one of these beasts, and don’t rely on the Feds to subsidize your experiment.
Socialists believe they have a right to force the knuckle draggers to buy them free stuff.
After all they are a superior breed of citizen, and they have the participation trophies to prove it.
After turning his back on Americans in danger, your boi Dementia Joe Biden got caught taking his nap a bit too early:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/joe-biden-fall-asleep-oval-office-meeting-israeli-prime-minister-naftali-bennett-video/
Mr. Simon: Your risk assessment is, at best, 50% correct. “The chance it happens” is only half of elementary risk assessment. Would you like to know the other half? Would you take a chance on being more-than-half-right? It might mean 50% more thinking, are you game?
Speaking of naive, not sure if “naive” rightly describes your evident willful ignorance of the “sorting” already “learnt.”
“And I think it a little naive to assume these problems wont get sorted.”
And it is more than a little naive to assume they will “get sorted.” But sorting the spontaneously-burst-into-unquenchable-flames problem will still leave the skunk in the living room: The subsidies are a bald-faced admission that these vehicles don’t make economic sense, and never will.
Like most socialists, Simon believes that law of government trumps law of physics.
If congress passes a law requiring the problems to be sorted out, the problems will be sorted out.
Note that he has carefully avoiding anything about Dementia Joe, even though his name was at the beginning of the first sentence of the article.
“Note that he has carefully avoiding anything about Dementia Joe”
Because this thread is not about Biden. But… I do blame Biden and Trump for the mess which is Afghanistan. Together they screwed it up.
More idiocy, divorced from reality. Your TDS is terminal.
No just facing the reality that Americans don’t generally give a shite about the countries they occupy once they have finished with them. Why should a Trump Biden pullout be any different?
And the subsidies the oil industry has received for years. What is that proof of?
Find out the price of insurance with ice car perked in garage and EV parked in a garage.
The difference is the increased risk.
No guesswork is required.
Just get three quotes for comparison
During the past week on the main highway not far from where I live two heavy transport vehicles collided and both drivers died at the scene, why the collision is still under investigation however there was a major fire and explosions apparently from liquid petroleum gas cylinders being carried on one of the vehicles.
I immediately thought about what the result might have been if one or both were electric vehicles with massive battery packs that would be needed for interstate trucking in Australia.
With all of the lithium-ion battery catastrophes most people don’t know about other solutions. The second or third iteration of the Toyota Prius used Lithium-metal hydride batteries. They are much less likely to fail and when they do they short out internally and destroy the cell but not the battery. It doesn’t burst into flames. Li-mH batteries last longer. I’ve read about a large fraction of the Prius’s using them have had the battery still performing like new after 8 years. There have been very few replacements.
They do work fine in a hybrid vehicle since they share the load with the engine. But Toyota switched to Li-ion cells for higher performance- i.e. more miles per kWh. They have had very few fires or other battery related problems because they partnered with one of the most sophisticated Li-ion manufacturers in Japan for batteries.It costs more, but it is way safer than Li-ion batteries produced in low tech factories.
Can they tolerate the much deeper charge-discharge cycles?
Good points, and few seem to be aware of them.
Just finished reading your book. Great to have so much proof in one place.
Novel way to put out a EV fire, but how to get rid of the toxic water after it’s out. https://www.drivespark.com/off-beat/bmw-i8-catches-fire-gets-dropped-into-water-tank-to-douse-flames-completely-027881.html . Never mind the Geelong fire mishap. Since it took longer to put out the fire than the “Battery” was supplying power to the grid.
People who know about Australian road transport Road Trains, a prime mover or tractor towing up to four trailers heavily loaded for thousands of kilometres each trip, rough road and gravel road conditions, high summer temperatures, long stretches of empty country before reaching a road house service centre (and they all generate electricity with diesel generators and even desalinate bore water with diesel generators) would laugh if told that Electric Trucks would be introduced here.
Weight of batteries even to travel 500 kilometres would just about wipe out the profit in a payload carried by removing that weight from the payload. And if a battery trailer was towed the financial position would worsen.
And then the downtime waiting for such a large battery pack to be fully recharged, no 80 per cent fast charge acceptable for road transport.
What exactly is the probability? More likely than lightning strike? Is an electric vehicle fire more probable than dying from Corona?
People are dying from drinking Mexican Beer? (Corona) Now this *IS* an emergency!
(See what happens when you leave out context?)
The Queen of Corona could not be reached for comment. She was a seeing a guy named Julio down by the schoolyard.
It will require mass deaths before any politician has the guts to stand up to EVs. My best guess is an accident inside a long tunnel that traps toxic fumes will occur resulting in multiple fatalities. An underground parking garage is another good guess made by the writer.
Placing massive battery farms near roads in corn or wheat fields is another disaster waiting to happen. Eventually a large grass (includes corn and wheat) fire will occur. The fumes will cause traffic jams on the road making ingress of emergency vehicles futile.
People just have to learn the hard way.
Most modern tunnels have ventilation systems designed to remove the smoke from fires.
It doesn’t matter what kind of fire it is, the smoke kills in confined areas.
And then emit that smoke removed from the tunnel into the surface environment (are we talking about tunnels under cities?).
There is the tunnel under the Continental Divide on Interstate 70 in Colorado, about 2 miles long. Trucks with hazardous load are required to use the old highway over Loveland Pass (over 12,000 feet elevation with dozens of switchbacks). Forcing the Teslas over the top to get to Aspen/Vail won’t be popular.
I was looking at the pictures again and it occurred to me – at least we have solved how to recycle electric vehicles – just scrap up the slag on the road.
Even just modest shunts and wrecks on any UK motorway these days results in the entire section of road being closed for 4 or 5 hours.
Both directions as ‘rubber neckers’ on the opposite side invariably set off a bigger pile-up than the original
Any main-road or motorway wreck involving chemicals or a fire will close the road for 12 hours minimum as they dance around the ‘chemical’, fiddle with the fire and then repair the road surface.
Many people are greatly inconvenienced and angrified by just those trivial events – while A Government accountant gleefully tells us all what it cost.
Gleeful because in these Modern Times, spending money is how you make money
If just one Lithium motor took light on any main road in the south-east of England and it took 4 days to put the fire out, make/keep the neighbours safe and rebuild the the road to get it open again, there would be riots and heads on spikes.
Probably add another 24 hours to that so as to clear any EVs that were caught in the multi-mile jams and flattened their batteries powering heating, cooling and mobile phones for their self important muppet drivers.
Amazingly, there actually are occasions where possessing infinite amounts of Virtue and a Big Willy – count for nothing.
Not least as the UK is currently desperately short of truck drivers and UK supermarkets never have more than 3 days of stock on their premises.
Similar in Really Important Places like McDonald’s, KFC, Nando and Starbucks
In a wicked evil way, I hope it does happen, quite some number of folks here in the UK need their asses given A Real Good Kicking
These buses are constructed of flammable materials, apparently lots of plastic and light-weight aluminium and magnesium speeding the fire along the row of buses. It’s not batteries spreading this fire, they’ve probably burned last in all but the initial bus.
Magnesium—another great idea for saving weight in vehicles.
Magnesium is good for race cars. Oh. Wait . . .
We live on an island and have a one hour and fifteen minute ride to the mainland. Cars are mostly in enclosed decks, packed together. An electric car fire would be utterly catastrophic.
Carry inflatable vests on every trip.
Lithium ion batteries have been undergoing engineering development for submarines for many years. One solution appears to be a battery management system that reacts to thermal runaway by cutting the failed cell out of the battery. Each cell of the battery is housed in a honeycomb arrangement that acts as a heat sink to dissipate the heat from the exothermic reaction. This may be a solution for cars but it will do nothing to reduce the cost of the EV.
The US lost it’s one and only lithium ion powered submarine to a battery fire. They never even tried to build another. And they scrapped the hull. It was in the 2000’s . It was a small scale submarine that I believe was supposed to be a technology demonstrator.
I don’t know what started it. I think a welding spark started the battery on fire. The hull was de-tempered. The fire burned
for days. Edit. This was a Navy project.
The USN certainly have a set against Lithium-ion batteries. I thought it was due to an accident o a special forces surface craft. The Japanese have pushed on with Lithium batteries in submarines. A German experiment “Planet Solar”successfully circumnavigated the world with a replicaa lithium ion submarine battery without any incidents.Tûranor PlanetSolar – Wikipedia
And WUWT picks another cherry. I note the article does not record the number of fires per 1,000 kilometers. Why, you may ask? Because by that criteria, electric vehicles are eleven times LESS likely to have a fire. Not too surprising if you think about what an ICE engine does- i.e. explode a highly volatile and flammable liquid inside a cylinder, lubricated by another flammable liquid to move.
“citing data from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation.”
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1133254_fires-are-less-frequent-in-teslas-and-other-evs-vs-gas-vehicles
Would you sleep well with a charging EV in an attached garage?
Have a look upthread at the figures I quoted for London 2019 (mainly because those were the latest easily obtainable figures I could find) – you are at least 4.5 times more likely to have a fire in an EV as in an ICE vehicle, and the figures don’t show the deliberate arson of ICE vehicles (which is, apparently, significant with ICE vehicles but negligible to non-existent with EV’s).
Its worse than that. I don’t have the figures for London, but in the US an EV is driven an average of 5,000 miles a year, and an ICE averages 15,000 miles per year. Assuming it’s the same for London, (and maybe it isn’t), add that to your data, and the EV is 13.5 times as likely to have a fire.
Don’t forget to average in the fact that on average, EV’s are much younger than ICE vehicles.
Given the fact that electrics are all short trip vehicles, I find it hard to believe this claim.
Do you want to build your opinion on anecdotes and myths, or on statistical facts?
The facts show that for for combustion cars there is one fire per 19 million miles travelled.
For Tesla there is one per 205 million miles travelled. That is 11 times less.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1133254_fires-are-less-frequent-in-teslas-and-other-evs-vs-gas-vehicles
That is a meaningless number when you consider that there are only several million EVs at the most on the road. That is versus around 290 million total vehicles in the US. Also of some importance is that EVs are not going to drive as many miles on average versus ICE vehicles.
The data are per mile driven.
Which is the wrong metric. The relevant metric is fires per hours parked and/or fires per minutes refueling.
Seriousely, nobody have data for those metrics.
And why would anybody need it. It is a far more dramatic situation if the car catches fire when you drive, than when it is parked.
The bottom line from the statistics is that fires in electric cars are rare, and when they burn it is usually fire in the ordinary interior, just like in other cars. Battery fires are very rare.
I’m waiting for a report from a reputable agency.
A group dedicated to pushing EV’s is not credible.
Outdated.
he Chinese have significantly improved the battery technology.
The Lithium Iron-Phospahate blade batteries produced by BYD are safe and do not catch fire
https://www.automotiveworld.com/news-releases/byd-blade-battery-set-to-revolutionise-ev-market/
If this takes off, and if the other posters about fire incidence are right, this invalidates one of my arguments. If these posts are right, we are moving to a low fire risk battery.
But the other two remain intact. There is the length of time to refuel, and there is the cost. Even if they are equal as regards fire risks, you still have these problems, and they do mean that moving to EV even with LIP batteries will require dramatically reducing the number of cars, and thus will require the collateral changes, and these will be huge.
Everyone knows that data from China are always 100% accurate.
“… lithium iron phosphate cathodes [ ] are less prone to catching fire, but are not able to store as much energy as standard cells that use nickel cobalt manganese cathodes.
Others including GM are testing different chemistries … .”
(Source: liability insurance industry publication:
https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2021/08/24/305598.htm )
2. I found one manufacturer (which, like all the solar and wind and other “green” scammers, relies on taxpayers to break even on its costs of production/maintenance) who might (not yet committed) use it in its “lower end” vehicle(s) — vehicles for people who don’t care about having much range.
This is the state of the industry as of 5 days ago. Not outdated.
Bottom line: fire risk (i.e., anomalously difficult to extinguish) in EV’s is still high.
Yes, the problem is energy density. Even though lithium batteries are considerably less dense in energy than gasoline, they are still containing a huge amount in a limited space, so safety and stability are bound to be issues. And because there are at the moment so many ICE vehicles on the roads, just replacing them with vehicles which have a higher spontaneous combustion rate, whether its in storage or when being refuelled, has the potential to lead to a very large number of accidents.
It looks like no-one has done any serious analysis of the project to replace all ICE cars with EVs. At the very least it will have to lead to considerable changes in how we use them – how we park, how we store, how we refuel.
Then the cost factor will also affect takeup. A large proportion of current car owners will just not be able to afford EVs.
There are two ways of handling this. The first way is by approval standards. It would be possible to only license cars for sale if, for instance, their spontaneous combustion rate is the same as that of ICE vehicles, and that they must have similar rapid extinguishing when they occur, by whatever means. This would reduce the number of EVs to a small fraction of the current base of ICE cars.
The second way is to come clean about it. Just admit that the objective implies reducing the number of cars on the road by 80% or so. Then take the associated measures, road closures to make space for walking, bikes and public transport, bike parking places at destinations, movement of the facilities people are travelling to, so that shopping and working becomes local. Probably moving huge numbers of people into high density housing in cities.
In this scenario cars would be fairly rare, and they would be short range medium distance luxuries. Most of the time people would take public transport. Think how life used to be in about 1930 or even earlier, maybe pre-WWI.
What its clearly impossible to do is pretend that everything can carry on as normal, just with EVs substituting for ICE. The fire risk is completely different, the refuelling time is hugely longer, the range is less, the performance in winter is far worse. It is not going to work.
Given this, the move to EVs, or rather, away from ICE, is impossible without making lots of other changes to social life. Governments need to start being honest about this. The Greens too….
Born in the 1950’s in central England, only one family owned a car in the whole street where I lived. It was normal to go by bus, walk or cycle. My father was a firefighter or a fireman as we said in those days.
All jobs to be had, had to be reached by the above methods. It was normal.
Today, we live where we want and work where we want. For many, that involves a long commute.
To try to recreate a no car society would cause such upheaval that there would be fighting on the streets, once the public understands the implications.
Yes, and in those neighborhoods, destinations were within walking distance. Today, gigantic box stores have put neighborhood store out-of-business, and the distances are much greater.
Yes. There was a commuter belt served by suburban railways, around London especially, and people took the trains into the City. But for most people it was get a job within reach, and do your shopping locally. Walk or bike to school, also.
A lot of class rigidity. You had a lot less choice of work.
This is the real implication of the Green agenda, though no-one is honest enough to admit it.
How come I am getting moronic Greenpeace ads nonstop on WUWT….Promoting Some idiot that thinks he is going to get on the board of AGL a major Australian energy company and stop how they run the company….
I have an adblocker, and I only have one non-invasive ad, for the 14TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE with the Heartland Institute, which I don’t mind at all. Oh, and the request to donate to WUWT. Might want to try that route.
Did safety regulatory agencies just turn a blind eye? Or?
For every 1kwh of electricity stored, it is equivalent to storing 1kG of TNT.
Excerpt from my article
UNDERSTATING CO2 EMISSIONS PER KILOWATT-HOUR TO HYPE EVs AND HEAT PUMPS
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/some-ne-state-governments-play-deceptive-games-with-co2-emissions
THETFORD; July 2, 2021 — A fire destroyed a 2019 Chevy Bolt, 66 kWh battery, EPA range 238 miles, owned by state Rep. Tim Briglin, D-Thetford, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Technology.
He had been driving back and forth from Thetford, VT, to Montpelier, VT, with his EV, about 100 miles via I-89
He had parked his 2019 Chevy Bolt on the driveway, throughout the winter, per GM recall of Chevy Bolts
He had plugged his EV into a 240-volt charger.
The battery was at about 10% charge at start of charging, at 8 PM, and he had charged it to 100% charge at 4 AM; 8 hours of charging. See Note
Li-ions (pos.) would plate out on the cathode (neg) each time when charging from 80 to 100%.
Li-ions would plate out on the anode (pos) each time when charging from 10% to 20%, especially when such charging occurred at battery temperatures of 32F or less.
Fire: Firefighters were called to Briglin’s Tucker Hill Road home around 9 AM Thursday.
Investigators from the Vermont Department of Public Safety Fire and Explosion Investigation Unit determined:
1) The fire started in a compartment in the back of the passenger’s side of the vehicle
2) It was likely due to an “electrical failure”.
https://www.vnews.com/Firefighters-put-out-blaze-in-car-of-Vt-State-Representative-41272606
https://www.engadget.com/gm-chevy-bolt-fire-warning-215322969.html
https://electrek.co/2020/11/13/gm-recall-chevy-bolt-evs-potential-fire-risk/
GM Recall of Chevy Bolts: In 2020, GM issued a worldwide recall of 68,667 Chevy Bolts, all 2017, 2018 and 2019 models, plus, in 2021, a recall for another 73,000 Bolts, all 2020, 2021, and 2022 models.
GM set aside $1.8 BILLION to replace battery modules, or 1.8 BILLION/(68,667 + 73,000) = $12,706/EV.
https://insideevs.com/news/524712/chevrolet-bolt-battery-recall-cost/
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/568817-gm-expands-bolt-ev-recall-to-include-73000-more-vehicles
Owners were advised not to charge them in a garage, and not to leave them unattended while charging, which may take up to 8 hours; what a nuisance!
Rep. Briglin heeded the GM recall by not charging in his garage.
NOTE:
– Cost of replacing the battery packs of 80,000 Hyundai Konas was estimated at $900 million, about $11,000 per vehicle
https://insideevs.com/news/492167/reports-lg-chem-cost-hyundai-battery-recall/
– EV batteries should be charged from 20 to 80%, to achieve minimal degradation and long life, plus the charging loss is minimal in that range
– Charging EVs from 0 to 20% charge, and from 80 to 100% charge, 1) uses more kWh AC from the wall outlet per kWh DC charged into the battery, and 2) is detrimental to the battery. Also, it requires additional kWh for cooling the battery while charging.
– EV batteries must never be charged, when the battery temperature is less than 32F; if charged anyway, the plating out of Li-ions on the anode would permanently damage the battery.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/how-does-lithium-ion-battery-work
See section Charging Electric Vehicles During Freezing Conditions in URL
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/some-ne-state-governments-play-deceptive-games-with-co2-emissions
There is a 60,000 foot battery recycle plant being built in the center of my small town that is projected to have a 100,000 ton yearly throughput. It is less than three football fields from a popular playground and skatepark. Over a hundred mobile homes, restaurants, churches, etc., are even closer. We’ll see how that goes.
more….
https://e-catworld.com/2021/08/29/synopsis-of-rossis-zero-point-energy-theory/
Rossi reports use of AI stabilized electrical production…
Next year?
And exactly how many EVs catch fire? This is just alarmism!
Same as ‘burning wind turbines’… a handful of the tens – hundreds – of thousands installed
Go look at the figures I posted earlier in the thread Griffy. I noticed you never bothered to bring figures that refute that? Is it because your position is based on insubstantial delusions and completely unsupportable by fact or truth?
Oh, and according to research done by Imperial College London, Edinburgh University and SP Technical Research Institute Sweden, wind turbine fires are THE major cause of failures. They noted, in the 200,000 turbines surveyed, an average of 117 fires annually. That is simply not a ‘handful’ Griffy – unless you’ve got some massive great mitts, that is. Once again, your position is shown to be based on delusions, easily refuted by facts.
And just to hammer that point home, Griffy – if we assume a lifetime of, say, 20 years and all the wind turbine fires are evenly distributed, then more than 1 in every 100 (86ish) wind turbines will catch fire at some point during its installed life. Are these facts too alarming for you?
Sit! Good boy, here’s a sausage.
/pats head/
inquiring minds want to know: I often do a quick search for Griff or Loydo to find out what the lower subspecies are thinking. Then I wondered, maybe WUWT are Griff and Loydo, and you use them as foils to, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, highlighting with ignorance. Keep up the good work.
Considering the level of ignorance shown, that’s some very high highlighting!
The air bag recalls have been going on since 2013 and they are still are not fixed.
You can not ship a coin size lithium ion battery (or larger) in a package that will go by air. And they still are not fixed. Years as a volunteer fireman and never went to a home fire that was started by the gasoline in the vehicle in the car in a garage.
Lithium Ion batteries are dangerous. Why would anyone want several hundred pounds of Lithium Ion batteries in there home, on a charger? while they sleep? Drive through a tunnel in one or behind one? All a fireman can do is watch and try to protect the structure which is a hopeless effort.
INSANE.
American Airlines had to do an emergency exit (sliders) this week due to a cell phone catching fire. No, the plane didn’t catch fire, but the cabin filled with (probably) toxic fumes, and the FAs decided to get everyone out immediately. But that plane was already on the tarmac. Imagine that happening mid flight. Again, just a little cell phone….
Lithium ion batteries have been combusting since they first came into use in laptops and cell phones. Apple computers burned down several homes as a result of their LiIon batteries burning. These problems have been greatly reduced, but there are still issues. Spare LiIon batteries are banned from checked baggage on commercial flights.
Lead acid batteries produce H2 when charging. Ventilation can handle the H2. This is an issue when recharging multiple lead acid batteries inside a building.
I do not understand why people choose LiIon batteries for large stationary battery installations. Lead acid batteries would be a more cost effective solution and the H2 produced during charging is easily solved. Lead acid batteries do not spontaneously combust.
Tesla fire had nothing to do with the battery. Photos after the fire showed front end burned battery pack undamaged.
Which Tesla fire? There have been several dozens.
I have been thinking about the implications if there is an electric vehicle fire on a ferry … my conclusion is that the ferry will inevitably burn.
The culprit in nearly all EV fire cases is the lithium-ion batteries that power them, and which burn with extraordinary ferocity. Adding to the fire and heat danger posed by these events is the extreme toxicity of the fumes generated. According to one study, these fumes may in some circumstances be a larger threat, especially in confined environments where people are present.
Since lithium-ion fires are a chemical reaction they can only be cooled not extinguished. They end up burning for several days in some cases. In Germany, damage to a parking structure was extensive. So, for this German parking structure, it has chosen to ban all electrified vehicles from parking underground. That includes hybrids, PHEV, and EVs, whether they contain lithium-ion or nickel-metal hydride batteries.
Another lithium battery fire-
Lithium battery on scooter starts house fire in Perth’s north (msn.com)
Maybe another edict to park them outside and away from the home?
That’s nonsense, plenty of ICE cars catch fire, 2019 Ireland. and I’m sure many thousands of cases like it throughout the world.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/up-to-60-cars-scorched-in-accidental-cork-car-park-blaze-1.4004015
That’s not the first instance of non accident related ICE fires.
I’ve also been driving EV since 2015 and have not had a single issue, while I don’t buy this climate change bullshit I don’t drive EV for environmental reasons, I drive EV because they save me a huge amount of money over ICE given the extortionate tax on liquid fuels here and because I like the way they drive.