10 ms·

Volkswagen ID.3 Bursts into Flames in the Netherlands

69 points by hheikinh 5y ago

Santosh83 5y ago
Several years back this happened here in India, with the first mass produced, battery-operated car, the Tata Nano. Many of them caught fire and later for political reasons more than anything else, the entire line became a failure. But now electric vehicles are making a comeback thanks to ever-rising fossil fuel prices.
- keewee7 5y ago
  It's interesting that India has some of the highest fossil fuel taxes in the world despite being a developing 3rd world country.
  - Santosh83 5y ago
    Well it is the current party which has been in power since 2014. They are not in favour of any kind of subsidy, though as you note the majority of the population heavily depends on various subsidies to make ends meet. It is a case of squeezing the public wallet to the absolute extent so govt coffers can be built up.
jsiepkes 5y ago
I wanted to translate the Dutch text under the source Video for my fellow-HN'ers but Google translate can actually do a pretty decent job! So for your convenience here is the text as translated by Google (and proof read by a native Dutch speaker): ---- GRONINGEN - An electric car, a Volkswagen ID 3, caught fire at the Helper Brink in Groningen at the end of the morning on Saturday. The driver had just put her child in the car and wanted to get behind the wheel herself. She took the charging plug out of the car for a moment. Then the car started smoking. She quickly got her child out of the car and brought herself to safety. The flames quickly spread from the car and 911 was called. The fire brigade rushed to the rescue but was unable to save the vehicle. The car burned out completely and there was little left of the car that was towed by a recovery company. A car parked next to this car was also damaged by the fire. The cause of the car fire is not yet known, but it is believed to have a technical cause.
- helloguillecl 5y ago
  Proofreading from natives is sometimes all we need. It is sad how much amazing content we miss because of being only available in Russian, Deutsch, German, Spanish, etc.
  - sc11 5y ago
    DeepL has been a blessing for this. While at least for German it tends to use rather formal language sometimes, it's far better than Google translate and generally reliable enough to not require a native to check it.
    - arp242 5y ago
      I've translated quite a few things I've written in Dutch to English with both DeepL and Google Translate as a matter of experiment, and didn't really find either of them better. Sometimes DeepL gets it better, but other times Google Translate gets it better; this can differ per sentence. I couldn't really determine one was significantly better than the other.
    - jeroenhd 5y ago
      Ha, I used DeepL for translating to French once and it translated "best regards" to something like "I hope the president of the EU will find this all in accordance" or something similar to that. I presume it was because most European language models were trained on UN and EU documents that are made available in tons of languages. I've learned to throw the output of any machine translated text into a reverse machine translator and see if the text still makes sense. For non-European languages, I just assume the translated text is flawed but will hopefully get the message across well enough.
  - valparaiso 5y ago
    Russian? You mean articles stating the Latin alphabet was founded by Russians or how Russians created nearly everything (radio, electricity etc.)?
- marto1 5y ago
yawaworht1978 5y ago
Is Volkswagen poaching Tesla employees?
- brianwawok 5y ago
  Do you mean Chevy employees? For how many Teslas are on the road, there have been very few fires.
  - tapoxi 5y ago
    I think Chevy and VW are both using batteries made by LG Chem.
antattack 5y ago
ID.3 did not spontaneously 'burst' into flames. Driver reported malfunction (probably a short) after charging. Fire might have started outside of battery, perhaps within charging module that caused battery thermal runaway.
- zeeZ 5y ago
  Did the battery catch fire, though? From how fast they were able to put it out, it could also have been the charging port setting everything but the battery on fire.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    It's not reported. Through I have heard that VW isolates cells a bit more then some older EVs which could mean you might be able to cool down the "battery pack" enough to prevent the fire from "jumping" over to other cells.
tekstar 5y ago
In my ~20 years of driving I've seen many ICE vehicles catch fire. The first time I remember driving home late one night, had to pull off the road and wait for firefighters to douse an SUV that had caught fire behind the dash and eventually engulfed the whole car. The owner had pulled their golf clubs out of the trunk and was watching it burn. Anecdotal news articles are not that useful, is there any reports on rates compared between ICE and electric cars?
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > ICE vehicles catch fire. It seems like this happened spontaneously. Do ICE vehicles ever spontaneously combust? Disconnecting it from a charge isn't really abnormal use.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Hyundai recently recalled a ton of ICE cars because they could catch fire. They had the possibility of catching fire when parked. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-santa-fe-sport-recalled-for-fire-risk-again/ https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-... GM recalled over 1.4 million vehicles due to fire risks from oil leaks which could happen while the engine was hot and parked. https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/ https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/ > About 85% of the fires took place when the car was shut off and there was no one around the car, GM spokesman Alan Adler said.
    - itsoktocry 5y ago
      Pre-emptively recalling vehicles for potential problems is a lot different than those problems actually occurring. I'm glad the people who need to know these things (ie actuaries) will be making the decisions, not the "yeah, but!" crowd. Are people ignoring that Tesla's battery pack in Australia has already burst into flames and they had trouble putting it out?
      - vel0city 5y ago
hollander 5y ago
What amazes me is that they put out the fire. I thought that when these batteries catch fire, they can burn for days and it's impossible to stop it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ZuLuuuuuu 5y ago
  That was also what I was thinking, and apparently it was freshly charged too. So I guess there are some EV fire types you can put out and some you can't?
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The danger of EV fires is that it’s a thermal runaway situation - one cell catches fire and heats up the (perfectly good) cell next to it until it catches fire and so on and so on. I guess if you have enough water to keep the nearby cells cool while the faulty one burns out you can stop the reaction early.
    - dathinab 5y ago
      > you have enough water to keep the nearby cells cool Or if all cells burn roughly at the same time ;=) Through from what I remember (I might be wrong) the ID.3 packed there battery cells into what you could describe as "grid of metal cells/walls" so that might have helped, I guess.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    Does anyone know if: > apparently it was freshly charged too makes a difference wrt. how long, hot and likely a battery burns (through not how likely full charging causes it to burn, that is a different statistic).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
baybal2 5y ago
I checked a number of ID.3 in depth reviews. The vehicle looks so anachronistic by today's standards on the inside. It's best to say is a first gen mass market EV coming out to market in 2021. For example, it has a 12V lead acid battery, and equally anachronistic 12V electric system. https://insideevs.com/news/464773/how-0783-update-avoids-id3 https://insideevs.com/news/464773/how-0783-update-avoids-id3... ID.3 is a botched, very hastily engineered car WV put onto market as a placeholder to have just anything in the EV category before they can engineer something proper. Tesla famously has a lead acid secondary battery too, but we can take that Model S is the first mass market EV. None EVs I've seen in China had a lead acid 12V battery. Even hybrids used lithium pack as the main battery for everything.
- ben-schaaf 5y ago
  Tesla Model 3 has a 12V Lead Acid Battery: https://blog.tesbros.com/replace-12-volt-battery-in-tesla/ https://blog.tesbros.com/replace-12-volt-battery-in-tesla/ Nissan Leaf NE1 has a 12V: https://youtu.be/me2_hC5j5gQ https://youtu.be/me2_hC5j5gQ MG ZS EV: https://www.whatcar.com/news/mg-zs-ev-long-term-test-review-report-4/n21602 https://www.whatcar.com/news/mg-zs-ev-long-term-test-review-... BYD e6: https://youtu.be/T-HTF_jiNzY https://youtu.be/T-HTF_jiNzY (at 6:55 you can clearly see a 12V battery) These are all 2nd/3rd generation EVs. Seems more like VW is following an industry standard than anything else.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    Putting in a 12V classical car battery makes a lot of sense. Sadly I don't remember all the details but: - You want a 12V circuit to be able to use "standard car components". - You want to be able to power some components of the car separate from main battery in a way which can be powered from the outside (e.g. by replacing the 12V battery or attaching cables to it). - Just because a batter is well suited to drive a car motor doesn't mean it's also well suited to power a AC, entertainment system etc. Especially it might not be good at only powering such a system (i.e. it might not be good at such outputting some comparatively small load without to much peaks, loss or similar). I'm pretty sure you can find some resources on the internet which explain this is more detail with more technical knowledge :=) But just the fact that it allows you to "have a electric system like every other car" when it's not driving or charging makes it probably worth it for the manufacturer. And I would not be surprised that even if 12V Acid batteries go away EV still would have a secondary battery replacing it.
bit_logic 5y ago
Those comparing this to ICE car fire statistics are missing the point. The problem with EV fires is that they're often related to charging. And charging is an active process that happens during the most vulnerable time in a home (for about 10 hours while sleeping). This is a legitimate reason for having fear about EVs. ICE cars are completely off during the same time. It was bad enough with the Bolt EV that GM was recommending overnight charging the car outside the home garage. If this fear is not addressed in a strong way by the car manufacturers, it could sink the entire EV movement since overnight charging at home is the foundation of it.
- wkearney99 5y ago
  And yet many ICE cars have caught fire in unattended "off" condition. did that 'sink' their movement? the car makers ARE taking big steps to address these things, much more so than in the past for ICE vehicles.
amelius 5y ago
Imagine this happening in a parking garage packed with EVs.
belter 5y ago
"A Review of Battery Fires in Electric Vehicles" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338542510_A_Review_of_Battery_Fires_in_Electric_Vehicles https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338542510_A_Review_... PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Xinyan-Huang-3/publication/338542510_A_Review_of_Battery_Fires_in_Electric_Vehicles/links/5ebdfe5592851c11a867d551/A-Review-of-Battery-Fires-in-Electric-Vehicles.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Xinyan-Huang-3/publicat...
eunos 5y ago
What's the battery chemistry? I assume it uses NMC.

69 points by hheikinh 5y ago

Several years back this happened here in India, with the first mass produced, battery-operated car, the Tata Nano. Many of them caught fire and later for political reasons more than anything else, the entire line became a failure. But now electric vehicles are making a comeback thanks to ever-rising fossil fuel prices.

keewee7 5y ago
It's interesting that India has some of the highest fossil fuel taxes in the world despite being a developing 3rd world country.
- Santosh83 5y ago
  Well it is the current party which has been in power since 2014. They are not in favour of any kind of subsidy, though as you note the majority of the population heavily depends on various subsidies to make ends meet. It is a case of squeezing the public wallet to the absolute extent so govt coffers can be built up.

jsiepkes 5y ago

I wanted to translate the Dutch text under the source Video for my fellow-HN'ers but Google translate can actually do a pretty decent job! So for your convenience here is the text as translated by Google (and proof read by a native Dutch speaker): ---- GRONINGEN - An electric car, a Volkswagen ID 3, caught fire at the Helper Brink in Groningen at the end of the morning on Saturday. The driver had just put her child in the car and wanted to get behind the wheel herself. She took the charging plug out of the car for a moment. Then the car started smoking. She quickly got her child out of the car and brought herself to safety. The flames quickly spread from the car and 911 was called. The fire brigade rushed to the rescue but was unable to save the vehicle. The car burned out completely and there was little left of the car that was towed by a recovery company. A car parked next to this car was also damaged by the fire. The cause of the car fire is not yet known, but it is believed to have a technical cause.

helloguillecl 5y ago
Proofreading from natives is sometimes all we need. It is sad how much amazing content we miss because of being only available in Russian, Deutsch, German, Spanish, etc.
- sc11 5y ago
  DeepL has been a blessing for this. While at least for German it tends to use rather formal language sometimes, it's far better than Google translate and generally reliable enough to not require a native to check it.
  - arp242 5y ago
    I've translated quite a few things I've written in Dutch to English with both DeepL and Google Translate as a matter of experiment, and didn't really find either of them better. Sometimes DeepL gets it better, but other times Google Translate gets it better; this can differ per sentence. I couldn't really determine one was significantly better than the other.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    Ha, I used DeepL for translating to French once and it translated "best regards" to something like "I hope the president of the EU will find this all in accordance" or something similar to that. I presume it was because most European language models were trained on UN and EU documents that are made available in tons of languages. I've learned to throw the output of any machine translated text into a reverse machine translator and see if the text still makes sense. For non-European languages, I just assume the translated text is flawed but will hopefully get the message across well enough.
- valparaiso 5y ago
  Russian? You mean articles stating the Latin alphabet was founded by Russians or how Russians created nearly everything (radio, electricity etc.)?
marto1 5y ago

yawaworht1978 5y ago

Is Volkswagen poaching Tesla employees?

brianwawok 5y ago
Do you mean Chevy employees? For how many Teslas are on the road, there have been very few fires.
- tapoxi 5y ago
  I think Chevy and VW are both using batteries made by LG Chem.

antattack 5y ago

ID.3 did not spontaneously 'burst' into flames. Driver reported malfunction (probably a short) after charging. Fire might have started outside of battery, perhaps within charging module that caused battery thermal runaway.

zeeZ 5y ago
Did the battery catch fire, though? From how fast they were able to put it out, it could also have been the charging port setting everything but the battery on fire.
- dathinab 5y ago
  It's not reported. Through I have heard that VW isolates cells a bit more then some older EVs which could mean you might be able to cool down the "battery pack" enough to prevent the fire from "jumping" over to other cells.

tekstar 5y ago

In my ~20 years of driving I've seen many ICE vehicles catch fire. The first time I remember driving home late one night, had to pull off the road and wait for firefighters to douse an SUV that had caught fire behind the dash and eventually engulfed the whole car. The owner had pulled their golf clubs out of the trunk and was watching it burn. Anecdotal news articles are not that useful, is there any reports on rates compared between ICE and electric cars?

guerrilla 5y ago
> ICE vehicles catch fire. It seems like this happened spontaneously. Do ICE vehicles ever spontaneously combust? Disconnecting it from a charge isn't really abnormal use.
- vel0city 5y ago
  Hyundai recently recalled a ton of ICE cars because they could catch fire. They had the possibility of catching fire when parked. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-santa-fe-sport-recalled-for-fire-risk-again/ https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-... GM recalled over 1.4 million vehicles due to fire risks from oil leaks which could happen while the engine was hot and parked. https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/ https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/ > About 85% of the fires took place when the car was shut off and there was no one around the car, GM spokesman Alan Adler said.
  - itsoktocry 5y ago
    Pre-emptively recalling vehicles for potential problems is a lot different than those problems actually occurring. I'm glad the people who need to know these things (ie actuaries) will be making the decisions, not the "yeah, but!" crowd. Are people ignoring that Tesla's battery pack in Australia has already burst into flames and they had trouble putting it out?
    - vel0city 5y ago

hollander 5y ago

What amazes me is that they put out the fire. I thought that when these batteries catch fire, they can burn for days and it's impossible to stop it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ZuLuuuuuu 5y ago
That was also what I was thinking, and apparently it was freshly charged too. So I guess there are some EV fire types you can put out and some you can't?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The danger of EV fires is that it’s a thermal runaway situation - one cell catches fire and heats up the (perfectly good) cell next to it until it catches fire and so on and so on. I guess if you have enough water to keep the nearby cells cool while the faulty one burns out you can stop the reaction early.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    > you have enough water to keep the nearby cells cool Or if all cells burn roughly at the same time ;=) Through from what I remember (I might be wrong) the ID.3 packed there battery cells into what you could describe as "grid of metal cells/walls" so that might have helped, I guess.
- dathinab 5y ago
  Does anyone know if: > apparently it was freshly charged too makes a difference wrt. how long, hot and likely a battery burns (through not how likely full charging causes it to burn, that is a different statistic).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

baybal2 5y ago

I checked a number of ID.3 in depth reviews. The vehicle looks so anachronistic by today's standards on the inside. It's best to say is a first gen mass market EV coming out to market in 2021. For example, it has a 12V lead acid battery, and equally anachronistic 12V electric system. https://insideevs.com/news/464773/how-0783-update-avoids-id3 https://insideevs.com/news/464773/how-0783-update-avoids-id3... ID.3 is a botched, very hastily engineered car WV put onto market as a placeholder to have just anything in the EV category before they can engineer something proper. Tesla famously has a lead acid secondary battery too, but we can take that Model S is the first mass market EV. None EVs I've seen in China had a lead acid 12V battery. Even hybrids used lithium pack as the main battery for everything.

ben-schaaf 5y ago
Tesla Model 3 has a 12V Lead Acid Battery: https://blog.tesbros.com/replace-12-volt-battery-in-tesla/ https://blog.tesbros.com/replace-12-volt-battery-in-tesla/ Nissan Leaf NE1 has a 12V: https://youtu.be/me2_hC5j5gQ https://youtu.be/me2_hC5j5gQ MG ZS EV: https://www.whatcar.com/news/mg-zs-ev-long-term-test-review-report-4/n21602 https://www.whatcar.com/news/mg-zs-ev-long-term-test-review-... BYD e6: https://youtu.be/T-HTF_jiNzY https://youtu.be/T-HTF_jiNzY (at 6:55 you can clearly see a 12V battery) These are all 2nd/3rd generation EVs. Seems more like VW is following an industry standard than anything else.
- dathinab 5y ago
  Putting in a 12V classical car battery makes a lot of sense. Sadly I don't remember all the details but: - You want a 12V circuit to be able to use "standard car components". - You want to be able to power some components of the car separate from main battery in a way which can be powered from the outside (e.g. by replacing the 12V battery or attaching cables to it). - Just because a batter is well suited to drive a car motor doesn't mean it's also well suited to power a AC, entertainment system etc. Especially it might not be good at only powering such a system (i.e. it might not be good at such outputting some comparatively small load without to much peaks, loss or similar). I'm pretty sure you can find some resources on the internet which explain this is more detail with more technical knowledge :=) But just the fact that it allows you to "have a electric system like every other car" when it's not driving or charging makes it probably worth it for the manufacturer. And I would not be surprised that even if 12V Acid batteries go away EV still would have a secondary battery replacing it.

bit_logic 5y ago

Those comparing this to ICE car fire statistics are missing the point. The problem with EV fires is that they're often related to charging. And charging is an active process that happens during the most vulnerable time in a home (for about 10 hours while sleeping). This is a legitimate reason for having fear about EVs. ICE cars are completely off during the same time. It was bad enough with the Bolt EV that GM was recommending overnight charging the car outside the home garage. If this fear is not addressed in a strong way by the car manufacturers, it could sink the entire EV movement since overnight charging at home is the foundation of it.

wkearney99 5y ago
And yet many ICE cars have caught fire in unattended "off" condition. did that 'sink' their movement? the car makers ARE taking big steps to address these things, much more so than in the past for ICE vehicles.

amelius 5y ago

Imagine this happening in a parking garage packed with EVs.

belter 5y ago

"A Review of Battery Fires in Electric Vehicles" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338542510_A_Review_of_Battery_Fires_in_Electric_Vehicles https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338542510_A_Review_... PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Xinyan-Huang-3/publication/338542510_A_Review_of_Battery_Fires_in_Electric_Vehicles/links/5ebdfe5592851c11a867d551/A-Review-of-Battery-Fires-in-Electric-Vehicles.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Xinyan-Huang-3/publicat...

eunos 5y ago

What's the battery chemistry? I assume it uses NMC.