Essay by Eric Worrall
Public awareness is growing of the apparent tendency of electric vehicles to spontaneously combust, and burn with a blazing hot, difficult to extinguish fire.
The video above discusses how normal fire extinguishers failed to put out the blaze, and also mentions the risk of thermal runaway, a new kind of vehicle fire hazard in which even an extinguished EV battery fire can spontaneously re-ignite, due to chemical processes in the damaged batteries.
But one thing really caught my eye – in this case the vehicle was burning near some trees. Urban trees in a carpark, so no harm done. But what if such a vehicle fire occurred in a less urban setting, in dry woodland?
Obviously fossil fuel powered vehicles can also catch fire. My vehicle once caught fire, the full fuel tank ruptured and produced an impressive blaze – I had just filled up 20 minutes before the fire.
But the fire didn’t spread – a few flames licked up around the sides of the vehicle, but the fire mostly stayed on the ground, under the trunk. And the blaze was controllable – when the fire truck arrived 20 minutes after the blaze started, the fire was extinguished within 5 minutes. If I had thought to carry a vehicle fire extinguisher, I could have probably put the fire out myself.
Electric vehicle fires seem much fiercer than the gasoline fire I experienced. They seem to burn hot, much hotter than the gasoline fire which scorched the rear of my vehicle. Worse, EV fires seem to be very difficult to extinguish, and damaged EV batteries remain dangerous even when you think the fire risk is over.
Are EV mobile fire hazards really the kind of vehicles we want to have driving around in sensitive, high bushfire risk areas like Australia and California?
I guess time will tell, whether the apparent enhanced fire starting potential of defective electric vehicles has a noticeable impact on large scale forest fire risk.
In Queensland recently walking through a shopping centre I noticed a display of MG EV and petrol engine models, a salesman was talking to a small group of people about the display.
I was amused when a question was asked about the suitability of the EV model for a country husband and wife, the salesman wisely replied that EV technology is best suited for suburban driving and as for long distances: “they are not quite there yet”.
On average there are 600 car fires per day. So, the other 599 cars that burned were not electric. https://housegrail.com/car-fire-statistics/
Because there are magnitudes more ICE cars on the road.
And according to your link most of those fires occur after collisions, which will happen to battery cars as well.
But ICE fires can easily be put out, that is the point.
And ICE cars generally don’t spontaneously ignite sitting around, that is also the point.
Cell phones and laptops that have lithium ion batteries don’t catch fire when they are dropped.
Count and compare the number of battery cells inside a Tesla versus inside an Android.
Cell phones and lap tops have batteries with usually just one cell, the batteries are also much smaller which makes heat dissipation easier.
Car batteries have hundreds of cells with completely different manufacturing requirements. They are also much thicker.
BTW, a lot of cell phones and laptops have spontaneously combusted.
If there’s no problem with cell phone and laptop batteries catching fire, then why have there been massive recalls (hundreds of thousands of batteries) for Dell, Hp, Toshiba and other laptop batteries (not to mention samsung and lg phone battery recalls), over the past decade due to being a fire hazard?
When EV fans are explaining the lower running costs remind them that it is only a matter of time before governments replace liquid fuel tax lost to EVs a road tax will be imposed.
And that the battery pack is a longer term replacement item, warranty typically 8 years or 160,000 kms, but in between times trade-in devaluation based on battery capacity and condition.
And as in Australia most motor vehicles are kept for an average of 10 years the EV replacement battery, remove and replace, cost will shock most people, a recent interview on Sky News with a motoring journalist revealed that out of ten EV suppliers approached only one would quote the replacement price and that was A$47K.
After I had alerted the Directors of a retirement village in Auckland, they sensibly decided that charging of Electric Vehicles would not be permitted in any of their underground car parks. Very wise, but did not go as far as it should When will local authorities start making similar rulings?
In the UK, many new houses have integral garages with bedrooms above.
Imagine an EV fire when everyone is sleeping.
Yes, the smoke detectors will sound but I don’t think anyone would notice
Glad to see that Australians call the bonnet of their cars a bonnet. Do they also call petrol, petrol?
Yes
Campsie: I wanted you to know that this American (who calls them “hood” and “gas” 🙂) gave you + 1. Why 2 people downvoted you is a mystery.
Just writing in case being downvoted for apparently no reason is mildly troubling to you as it is when it happens to me.
I strongly dislike up/down votes on sites like this, Janice. Especially downvotes. It’s far too easy to simply click the [-] because you don’t like what someone says, instead of having to take the time to articulate your reasons.
I avoid using them at all, with the only exception being when I see a significantly undeserved downvote.
It’s another advantage of green technology. The creation of hundreds of new highly-skilled firefighting jobs….
Storage of large amounts of energy in ANY easily accessible form is inherently dangerous. That is the fundamental reason why green intermittent power sources will not be a safe undertaking.
R&D on extinguishers for Lithium Batteries is not looking very good. They will not do much to put out a battery from lawn equipment, or the like. From what I’ve seen you need a far larger capacity than you would for an ICE fire. Also, you need to get rather close to get best coverage.
Lithium fires combustion gases are highly toxic.
Trees near fires often lose their leaves, killed by the heat. With lithium’s combustion producing toxic smoke, those trees might perish, anyway.
EV batteries spontaneously combust.
Vehicular gasoline fires require exposed fuel, i.e. leak to the atmosphere; plus a spark or contact with exposed flame!
No spontaneous gasoline fires!
Without a spark/flame to ignite the gasoline, it is likely that there would not have been a fire.
Eric adds in another condition often required for vehicular gasoline fires; the gasoline’s container was physically ruptured. Some kind of impact caused the rupture?
https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2022-09-26/electric-bike-caused-fatal-bristol-tower-block-fire
seeing zero vid in this article
One thing all insured car owners need to understand in Oz is if your car is flooded to wet the floor carpets it will be an insurance writeoff. Then they’re off to the dismantlers-
Florida official: EVs starting fires in hurricane aftermath (msn.com)
Too much electrical/electronics low down for the insurers to waive that policy whether it be fresh or salt water inundation. If say it was fresh water and you don’t want a write-off then you can dry it out yourself and take your chances with an ICE car but seeya EV.
The important number should be the rate of EV battery fires — number of fires divided by the number of EV cars in use — compared to the rate of gasoline-fed car fires.
https://www.renolon.com/electric-car-fire-statistics/
My simple conclusion from the above is that there are so many gasoline-car fires that they aren’t news. I’ll leave it to someone else to write and post on the relative frequencies.
Several things to note.
1) The older the vehicle, the more likely such fires are as the cars systems wear out from age and use. The vast majority of non-accident or arson related car fires happen in older cars. The EV fleet is much, much younger than the ICE fleet.
2) Most ICE fires happen in the system components that are common to both ICE and EVs. As such, those fires can occur in an EVs of a similar age as well.
3) All ICE fires, when they occur, are relatively easy to extinguish, EV fires that involve the lithium battery are extremely hard to extinguish. The time for an ICE fire to be extinguished can be measured in minutes, EV fires can burn for days.
4) there are 286 million ICE cars in the US, 213k is significantly less than a tenth of 1% of the total.
Given the difficulty some will have heating their homes this coming winter, maybe a hybrid or electric vehicle can serve another purpose if we could just find a way to channel that unstoppable heat. Or on the other hand maybe we can give up on these green hallucinations and go back to basics in energy systems following the rules of physics and economics. Then everyone can afford to heat, eat and travel the way centuries of discovery have taught us.
My question with these fires is, ” How do you get out when the doors automatically lock when you back out of your drive and there is no power to open them or the windows when the fire starts?
Have one of those car escape tools that can cut the seat belts and break the glass from the inside.
An internal combustion engine car fire is to a EV battery fire as a campfire is to a solid-fuel booster burning. One can be extinguished by removing one of the three (or four nowadays) legs of the fire triangle – heat, fuel, or oxygen. One already has its own supply of chemical reactants and can’t be put out by smothering it or removing the fuel. Based on how well these fires burn, we aren’t any good at cooling them down to the point the reaction slows down.
Reminiscent of the Ford Pinto days. https://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-matteson/module-1-why-does-business-need-ethics/case-the-ford-pinto/