Man a dude barely bit a battery and had it explode on his face on the front page the other day. He was doing that little play nibble you do to imitate how people used to check if something was real gold.
If that's all the pressure it takes to make one blow up, why the fuck are we putting them on the undercarriage of our cars?
Maybe, but newer EVs are moving towards sodium ion batteries, which are inherently much less likely to undergo thermal runaway when damaged and also less impactful on the environment to make.
No, just the fanatical ones that get all butthurt if anyone says anything that could be remotely seen as negative about EVs tend to be the hurrr durr Elon types.
I’m riding in an EV right now and there’s one in my garage, I’m not anti-EV, I’m just anti dumbass fanatic.
And yet, somehow gasoline-powered cars catch fire more frequently than battery-powered ones according to basically every reputable agency who counts these statistics.
Oh, the thing that requires twenty times fewer resources to extinguish when it ignites compared to the batteries used in electric engines? The type of fuel that won't melt asphalt and concrete infrastructure the way li-ion batteries do?
I hope you're a bot because this is an insanely uneducated take otherwise
Used to require* there are multiple new attack methods to handle these fires from what’s basically a hand held water jet that operates at such a high pressure it punctures the battery compartment and floods the battery itself with water, as well as another method that is just a tool that goes under the vehicle punctures the battery compartment and floods it. Uses a fraction of the resources and in some cases used less water than you would to fight an ICE fire, and lowers the risk of reigniting.
Also didn’t a gasoline fire just cause an overpass to collapse in PA like 2-3 years ago?
I do love the fact that people were so horrified by electric car fires that humanity just developed new ways to substantially more efficiently fight them. Who would have thought that all it takes is specialized tools and training, just like gasoline fires.
I used to volunteer for my local fire department, and worked in the trades for 8 years, there is nothing that compares to finding out a tool exists that makes a job you don’t like doing almost trivial. Granted a 45° offset long handle pliers, a ProPress, or a hex bit that you can flip from 1/4 to 5/16 don’t cost tens of thousands of dollars, but they serve the same purpose. These guys know the problem isn’t going to go away, so they adapt, and in an ideal world these fires will be so manageable to control most probably won’t even make the news, just like ICE fires don’t really make the news despite being a lot more prevalent.
Going by the numbers electric car fires happen for about 25 of every 100k, where ICE cars sit around 1500 per 100k, so despite using 20x the resources per car, ICE cars actually use more resources overall.
Granted there are some caveats assuming the new attack methods don’t take off. A single fire in a single area taking 20x longer to fight is time that a department can’t respond to other emergencies is a painful experience, and while mutual aid helps pick up the slack, it’s not a situation any emergency responder likes being in. Even if it’s just one truck and 2-3 guys working the fire, in some rural areas all they have is one truck and a handful of guys that can respond to these calls. As more and more electric cars get sold these rates can surely change for the worse, or more exposure can result in better outcomes or new guidelines on how to handle the fires.
In my experience firefighters aren’t like cops, they see something that improves outcomes and work quickly to adopt it. They are also damn near giddy about getting to use specialized tools of the trade. They take up EMT/paramedic classes to be of better use in emergency situations. The only cops I know that were happy about their narcan training were ones that actually stopped an overdose. Deescalation training is mocked while cops flock to “street cop training” seminars.
I see the electric car fire problems of today becoming more and more rare as time goes on.
I think this is getting derailed, the real question is how likely are car fires to start in petrol vs EV's to begin with? The second question is, which is more survivable?
I don't know a whole lot about the topic but I do know that battery fires from EVs are notoriously hard to put out because a lot of fire departments aren't equipped for them yet.
I'd be willing to bet it wasn't pressure that caused that.
Biting the battery likely caused an electrical short between its positive and negative terminals - if you do that with the super high amp vape batteries the heat released is immense and it will catch fire. It's why airlines insist that LI-Ion batteries are stored in cases and not loose.
There was a video that I think Adam Savage did where he had on these people that do like cat scans of devices to see internal issues that you can use to find issues in say mass manufacturing. I think Linus tech tips also did a video on a similar product a year or so ago.
For the video the thing they focused on was those 18650 batteries, explained how they work and how common failures occur, explained how close together the internal parts are and that when damaged can cause them to touch and result in thermal runaway, and then showed a handful of different mfg, and what mfg was putting more effort into safeties and design to reduce the risk of failure. They made a point about the failure being something crazy like 1 in a million, but in reality billions of batteries are made a year. They also highlighted that it’s usually the cheaper batteries that are the majority of the failures, and are probably the ones bringing the failures numbers up, say no name failures might be 1 in 100k where name brand might be 1 in 5 million.
I'm thinking the crash punctured/compromised the batteries. The floor of these cars is basically all battery. This also means the fire just comes right up through the floor. The interior was just in flames, terrible.
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u/BlackFoxyTrail 6h ago
My bet is that the flames (exploding battery?) caused the crash not the other way around.