13 ms·

Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype

56 points by flgb 3y ago

itsoktocry 3y ago
Does this article extinguish anything? What does "per 100,000 sold" mean? Is that simply per 100,000 cars? This metric makes no sense unless you age-adjust vehicles; most EVs are <5 years old. Meanwhile, people drive 20, 30 even 50+ year old ICE vehicles all the time. And dismissing firefighters lack of knowledge and training and equipment to put out these fires is strange. It will be overcome, but it's a legitimate issue.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Have you seen the gear US firefighters use vs their European counterparts? Their stuff is ancient, so much so that they need to have "smoke drills" to put their very complicated kit on when they enter a smoke diving situation. This is all because the US helmet is the same shape it was in the 1800s, because tradition or something. They just refused to modernise. The EU version? four clips attach to the helmet, tighten, done in under 5 seconds. https://www.firehouse.com/safety-health/ppe/helmets/article/21080087/traditional-vs-european-helmets https://www.firehouse.com/safety-health/ppe/helmets/article/...
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yeah absolutely. I think a different accurate headline for the same evidence could be "It will require significant time and effort in training firefighters to bring EV batteries to an acceptable level of safety". The timeline of social adjustment to a technology is just as important as the technology itself.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    The same issue is with car mechanics. Some just refuse to change. Meanwhile there are shops over here where people ship their EVs from around the country because they know their shit. They have the know-how and tools to fix EVs for a fraction of the cost the Official Solution (replace whole $thing with brand new part). TBH if you're in your 60's and a car mechanic, there's no point in learning EVs unless you're personally interested. There's gonna be enough work for the next 20 years easily just with ICEs
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Same thing with electricians and home electrification. In general, decarbonization technologies are significantly front-running the trades and training necessary to scale them. But that's totally normal (if unfortunate). There's a chicken and egg problem with these things, but viable technologies must come first, and adaptation to them come later. But recognizing that this is normal doesn't mean it isn't going to require work and investment to make it all pencil out. People - like me - who want to see these technologies succeed need to be just as attuned to this and not downplay it or take it for granted that people will come along for the ride if they don't yet see the benefit to themselves.
- froh 3y ago
  ICE vehicles have an average ge of about 11 years most (80%) of the cars are younger than 20years. older than that is the exception, not "all the time" https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/123niq7/age_distribution_of_passenger_cars_in_europe_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/123niq7/ag...
fortran77 3y ago
I think the scooter fires are a real issue. See: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lithium-ion-battery-fires https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lit... Those batteries are handled, charged, and manufactured/repaired with much less care....
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Yea, there's a ton of YOLO -level batteries in e-bikes and e-scooters. Car manufacturers actually care about reliability, because they're usually bigger corporations with deep pockets. Pretty much anyone with a contact in China can start "manufacturing" white-label e-scooters from the cheapest bidder. Then just shut down the corporation and disappear if any issues arise.
- lnsru 3y ago
  Scooter batteries barely undergo any testing -> typical consumer product. I wish, that from oversees imported products would get safety and environmental labels. The consumers should somehow be educated. That one week after buying landfills filling cheap plastic thrash is no good for anything. Meanwhile car battery is safety related part covered by dozens of regulations. Some YouTube channel was showing them under direct fire for minutes and they didn’t ignite. Maybe Rimac batteries, I don’t remember.
NooneAtAll3 3y ago
When statistics are presented on fires per car sold, does it account for car age? I'd assume that average ICE car catching on fire is older that average EV just by EV not existing when ICE was made
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  https://thedriven.io/2023/05/16/petrol-and-diesel-cars-20-times-more-likely-to-catch-fire-than-evs/amp/ https://thedriven.io/2023/05/16/petrol-and-diesel-cars-20-ti... > Furthermore, fires in electric cars are declining. The MSB says the number of fires in electric cars has been around 20 a year over the last three years The number of fires should increase if age was a linear factor. Could be non linear of course.
  - NooneAtAll3 3y ago
    > Furthermore, fires in electric cars are declining. The MSB says the number of fires in electric cars has been around 20 a year over the last three years, although the number of electric cars over that tie has almost doubled. Presumably, this is due to EV makers improving fire suppressing designs in newer models. article directly says that there's an exploding growth of new vehicles, thus "average car" hasn't aged yet I'm not arguing against EVs being more safe, I'm arguing against awful statistics of comparing "new EVs against aging ICE" while only saying "EV vs ICE"
    - thebruce87m 3y ago
      Every year the existing cars age by a year, and the number of cars has only grown, never declined. So you would think that the “20 a year” would increase with that if age was a linear factor, not stay stationary.
- audunw 3y ago
  I’ve heard comments from a department in Norway that the lower risk exists even when comparing similar models of similar age. But I haven’t seen the raw statistics on that anywhere yet. The difference is so large that it’d be incredible if age would close the gap. New vehicles have some risk as well: I think defects in battery cell manufacturing can be a significant risk in the early years of EVs.
dpedu 3y ago
> [Firefighters have] had 100 years to train and to understand how to deal with internal combustion engine fires,” the NFPA’s Andrew Klock told Vox. “With electric vehicles, they don’t have as much training and knowledge.” > But MSB’s Per-Ola Malmqvist has developed webinars that explain how to safely put out battery fires. In a 2022 webinar, he described the tools and techniques that were used to put out a raging EV battery fire in 10 minutes using only 750 liters of water. In another webinar about EV fire suppression best practices, Malmqvist interviewed a firefighter from Vestfold Fire Service in Norway, where the extinguishing method Malmqvist recommends was tried for the first time in battling an electric-vehicle blaze. Not surprising. However, I would have liked to have heard a better explanation of the problem about EV fires self-reigniting, which can happen hours or days later. They touched on it, but passed it off as lack of firefighter training. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/29/electric-vehicle-fires-are-rare-but-hard-to-fight-heres-why.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/29/electric-vehicle-fires-are-r... Simply dousing the fire with water as mentioned in the article is not sufficient.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  Sure, but that seems like mostly a question of getting them to a place where that can safely happen. Once it is isolated, let it burn out if it reignites. Putting it out the first time so that it can be safely moved is important.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    > Once it is isolated, let it burn out if it reignites. Mere words do not quite convey the issue. How does one "isolate" a car? Does one take it somewhere? Where? Are fire engines able to undertake this task? It's there a concern en route to the somewhere?
    - Tagbert 3y ago
      The same tow trucks that would tow away vehicles after a crash would tow an EV to an impoundment yard where it could be monitored.
derbOac 3y ago
My impression is that the concern with EV and battery fires is that they can occur in the home or while otherwise stationary, unexpectedly causing much more catastrophic damage. ICE fires, in contrast, seem to be mostly associated with collisions, or somewhat less so with driving; it seems uncommon for ICEs to suddenly catch fire in an enclosed building. e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649 I'm not an expert on this though, and these are just my general impressions, which is maybe the point of the article. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to address the nature of EV fires in a scientific, public-health kind of way. I think the thing most people are concerned about is a question like "how likely is my car to cause my house to burn down just sitting in the garage, while I'm sleeping?" Maybe the answer to that is the same with ICEs and EVs but that's the question that needs to be addressed.
- vel0city 3y ago
  ICE fires aren't often related to collisions. I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting. I've had multiple ICE cars recalled for catching fire when stopped. In the examples in the articles they mentioned vehicles in parking garages and on cargo ships, those weren't moving. Your general impressions don't reflect reality. Out of all the cars I've owned my ICE ones have been way more likely to burn down my house while sleeping than my EV. Your own article even starts off with "most occur in motor vehicles not involved in collisions."
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    My PHEV vehicle (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid) had a recall that caused fires while parked. It turned out to be related to part of the 12v system.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    > I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting The ICE car combusted while the engine wasn't running? Like, it was parked, they'd turned off the car as usual, and hours later it randomly combusted? Do you have any information on what the likely cause may have been? (e.g., hot weather? unexpected sparks?)
bob1029 3y ago
You'll never catch me with a lithium ion battery larger than ~150wH inside my home. I don't care how aggressively the statistics are massaged. I've personally experienced laptop and cellphone batteries catching on fire and can see how something with 100x+ the capacity could cause some serious fucking trouble. Anyone who has one of those 1kWh+ emergency power backup things sitting inside their house right now really needs to think twice about contingencies. Extend this thinking to an EV with 2 orders of magnitude more storage. Can a gasoline car set itself on fire inside your garage entirely unattended? Sure. But I think it is much less likely to occur and the failure modes are more acceptable to me - I.e. I can inspect and anticipate if my gasoline car might be unsafe with more clues than around an EV car. You can smell gasoline. You can't smell a manufacturing defect in a battery pack.
- k8sToGo 3y ago
  I wonder if, back in the days, you would have allowed your house to be connected to the electrical grid or the gas grid.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  > But I think it is much less likely to occur You think. The point of gathering data and studying it is to attempt to replace our animal-brain intuitions with real evidence. I honestly haven't looked into the evidence on this enough either way, since I haven't yet seriously researched purchasing an electric vehicle. But I know that I have a big tank of gasoline sitting directly underneath a portion of my childrens' rooms, and a big pipe of methane running into my basement running to a couple little tiny flames that are always lit and sometimes turned into a big blue flame to heat the household's air, or a slightly smaller fire to heat its water. I trust these clearly dangerous things to be safe enough, but I haven't ever researched the evidence on the safety of these either. The only difference is that I've always lived with these dangers without ever really thinking about them; they're just part of the water I swim in. One day EV batteries will be no different. It's rational for novel dangers to receive more scrutiny than old ones, but new things become old before long.
  - fragmede 3y ago
hijinks 3y ago
it's almost like 5 years ago the old guard car companies might have been paying reporters to hype up all the EV fires.
magicalhippo 3y ago
Here in Norway we have a relatively high ratio of EVs on the road, and has had so for many years now. As such there's some decent statistics showing that it's much more likely for an ICE car to start burning than an EV[1][2], up to 4-5x. Our EVs are on average newer, for the last few years the majority of sales have been EVs. As such our ICEs are on average older. Interestingly the number of cars catching fire[3] hasn't increased substantially since 2016. The number of EVs catching fire has doubled since then, but the number of EVs on the road has gone up 5x[4]. Here in Norway new EVs no longer come with the "emergency charger" that hooks up to a regular 220V socket, as charging using regular sockets has been identified as a potential fire hazard. [1]: https://www.motor.no/aktuelt/elbiler-brenner-langt-sjeldnere-enn-diesel--og-bensinkjoretoy-viser-tall-fra-landets-brannvesen/199867 https://www.motor.no/aktuelt/elbiler-brenner-langt-sjeldnere... [2]: https://www.elbil24.no/nyheter/myten-som-nekter-a-do/78217048 https://www.elbil24.no/nyheter/myten-som-nekter-a-do/7821704... [3]: https://www.brannstatistikk.no/brus-ui/search?searchId=9B13517C-F1CD-490F-82A1-57B9CA38ACA5&type=SEARCH_DEFINITION https://www.brannstatistikk.no/brus-ui/search?searchId=9B135... [4]: https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10090893 https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10090893
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > As such there's some decent statistics showing that it's much more likely for an ICE car to start burning than an EV[1][2], up to 4-5x. > Our EVs are on average newer, for the last few years the majority of sales have been EVs. As such our ICEs are on average older. So wait, do the stats show that ICE cars are more likely to burn, or are they just older on average?
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    The age distribution of our cars hasn't changed significantly[1] between 2016 and 2022. However back in 2016, only about 4% of our cars were EVs[2]. So the 2016 car fire statistics is essentially just ICEs, which would include young ICE cars as well. In 2022, around 20% of our cars were EVs. Given that the age of our cars has remained roughly the same, if EVs were as likely to catch fire as an average ICE in 2016, you'd expect[3] around 140-145 EV fires in 2022. Yet there were only 29. Of course, that's assuming I did the math right. [1]: https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/sq/10090898 https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/sq/10090898 [2]: https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/sq/10090899 https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/sq/10090899 [3]: 661 fires per 2.4M ICE cars in 2016 vs 564k EVs in 2022
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I think the article is grossly misrepresenting the dangers from lithium battery fires in other places than cars. Especially about escooters and bikes as well as air travel. There is statistically one fire a week on passenger aircrafts in the US now. ⁽¹⁾⁽² ⁾ New York City is trying to deal with a large number of fires started by ebikes og escooters. ⁽³⁾⁽⁴⁾ To dismiss this problem by finding a fire that happened in Vietnam that was incorrectly attributed seems quite biased. When it comes to the stats for cars, they are probably correct but somewhat misguided. Most electric cars are pretty new, a large percentage are nearly brand news. To compare them to the entire fleet of fossile fueled car fires is a bit unfair. I think if you compare all new and brand new combustion engine fires the stats would look different. May well be much higher for combustion engines, I dont know, but the comparisons used in the article are in my opinion biased. ¹ https://explore.dot.gov/t/FAA/views/LithiumBatteries/IncidentDetails?%3Aembed=y&%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y https://explore.dot.gov/t/FAA/views/LithiumBatteries/Inciden... ² https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/03/03/faa-lithium-battery-fire-smoke-airplane/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/03/03... ³ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/nyregion/e-bike-lithium-battery-fires-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/nyregion/e-bike-lithium-b... ⁴ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/ebike-battery-fire-new-york-gig-workers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/ebike-batter...
zelon88 3y ago
How can you have an article about battery combustion without talking about the chemistry? A gasoline fire is a well understood event. Gas ignites and burns until there is no more fuel, or no more air. We know to extinguish this type of fire, we need to remove the air. Once the reaction has stopped, it would need another fresh ignition source to reignite. A lithium fire is, on the other hand, is almost completely misunderstood by most people. It is a chemical chain reaction. It it an uncontrollable state in which the lithium becomes so hot that it perpetuates it's own combustion. You can remove the oxygen, but that's not the chemical that's keeping this reaction going. So the reaction will not stop. The lithium will keep heating itself, which will cause that heated lithium to heat more lithium, which heats more lithium, until there is no more lithium remaining. It is disingenuous to compare apples to oranges like what is being done by comparing ICE car fires to EV car fires.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Aren't most fires, especially big ones, extinguished by cooling them down?
- ben-schaaf 3y ago
  A lithium-ion battery fire is not a lithium fire; the lithium hexafluorophosphate electrolyte is non-flammable. You're mostly right about the rest, but it's really important to note that it's not a lithium fire. Lithium combusts in the presence of water, so fighting a lithium(not-ion) battery fire requires special care.
audunw 3y ago
It’s kind of absurd seeing some of the FUD around EVs from the perspective of li img in Norway now. We’re getting up to 20-30% of the cars ON THE ROAD being EVs now in some areas. I’d guess a quarter of my close neighbours have EVs. According to some, our neighbourhood should be a EV-fire hellscape and we should have blackouts every week. The roads should have to be replaced every month from increased wear. Nobody can go on road trips anymore. Yet everything is fine. Better than fine. As the statistics are pretty clear on: there’s fewer car fires when you have more EVs. Also air pollution is down When commenting on this topic online it feels like we’re living in the future, trying to argue with people from the past. If you’re wondering what a future with lots of EVs look like, you don’t have to speculate. All you have to do is come to Oslo or Bergen and take a look around. Yet people talk with absolutely certainty about how everything will go to hell when there’s too many EVs. (Yes, Norway has some qualities that makes the transition easier. Like a strong grid to start with, low speed limits and a strong economy. But then the technology was much more primitive and expensive when Norway got started. Also, Norway has a winter that is brutal on the range of EVs, and an insanely high share of Norwegians will drive hours to their cabins high in the mountains every other weekend in winter.. not the most ideal market for EVs)
- vel0city 3y ago
  I fully agree with this "feels like we're living in the future, trying to argue with people from the past" idea. My neighborhood isn't exactly new, it was mostly built in the 70s to very early 80s. There are several households on my street which I know have EVs. Given how many argue about the load on the grid you'd assume the power company would have had to massively upgrade the infrastructure here to support it. But in the end our actual peak power usage largely hasn't changed; we're just pulling a bit more power in the very late evenings and super early morning hours. Time when the grid around us has plenty of capacity.
DoktorL 3y ago
Electric scooters and such do create a new danger that didn't exist before: they let (indeed, encourage) you to take the hazardous part (the battery) inside an apartment to "refuel". An equivalent would be bringing a gas-driven moped into your place which is against the rules in many places, and why would you do it anyway. As such, it's important to take all possible reasonable steps to mitigate the risk. Those vehicles are still great overall, if only because, between air quality problems and exacerbated extreme weather events, fossil fuels cause deaths, injuries and property damage just through their normal usage. But the danger is there, and needs to be considered.

56 points by flgb 3y ago

Does this article extinguish anything? What does "per 100,000 sold" mean? Is that simply per 100,000 cars? This metric makes no sense unless you age-adjust vehicles; most EVs are <5 years old. Meanwhile, people drive 20, 30 even 50+ year old ICE vehicles all the time. And dismissing firefighters lack of knowledge and training and equipment to put out these fires is strange. It will be overcome, but it's a legitimate issue.

theshrike79 3y ago
Have you seen the gear US firefighters use vs their European counterparts? Their stuff is ancient, so much so that they need to have "smoke drills" to put their very complicated kit on when they enter a smoke diving situation. This is all because the US helmet is the same shape it was in the 1800s, because tradition or something. They just refused to modernise. The EU version? four clips attach to the helmet, tighten, done in under 5 seconds. https://www.firehouse.com/safety-health/ppe/helmets/article/21080087/traditional-vs-european-helmets https://www.firehouse.com/safety-health/ppe/helmets/article/...
sanderjd 3y ago
Yeah absolutely. I think a different accurate headline for the same evidence could be "It will require significant time and effort in training firefighters to bring EV batteries to an acceptable level of safety". The timeline of social adjustment to a technology is just as important as the technology itself.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  The same issue is with car mechanics. Some just refuse to change. Meanwhile there are shops over here where people ship their EVs from around the country because they know their shit. They have the know-how and tools to fix EVs for a fraction of the cost the Official Solution (replace whole $thing with brand new part). TBH if you're in your 60's and a car mechanic, there's no point in learning EVs unless you're personally interested. There's gonna be enough work for the next 20 years easily just with ICEs
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Same thing with electricians and home electrification. In general, decarbonization technologies are significantly front-running the trades and training necessary to scale them. But that's totally normal (if unfortunate). There's a chicken and egg problem with these things, but viable technologies must come first, and adaptation to them come later. But recognizing that this is normal doesn't mean it isn't going to require work and investment to make it all pencil out. People - like me - who want to see these technologies succeed need to be just as attuned to this and not downplay it or take it for granted that people will come along for the ride if they don't yet see the benefit to themselves.
froh 3y ago
ICE vehicles have an average ge of about 11 years most (80%) of the cars are younger than 20years. older than that is the exception, not "all the time" https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/123niq7/age_distribution_of_passenger_cars_in_europe_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/123niq7/ag...

fortran77 3y ago

I think the scooter fires are a real issue. See: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lithium-ion-battery-fires https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lit... Those batteries are handled, charged, and manufactured/repaired with much less care....

theshrike79 3y ago
Yea, there's a ton of YOLO -level batteries in e-bikes and e-scooters. Car manufacturers actually care about reliability, because they're usually bigger corporations with deep pockets. Pretty much anyone with a contact in China can start "manufacturing" white-label e-scooters from the cheapest bidder. Then just shut down the corporation and disappear if any issues arise.
lnsru 3y ago
Scooter batteries barely undergo any testing -> typical consumer product. I wish, that from oversees imported products would get safety and environmental labels. The consumers should somehow be educated. That one week after buying landfills filling cheap plastic thrash is no good for anything. Meanwhile car battery is safety related part covered by dozens of regulations. Some YouTube channel was showing them under direct fire for minutes and they didn’t ignite. Maybe Rimac batteries, I don’t remember.

NooneAtAll3 3y ago

When statistics are presented on fires per car sold, does it account for car age? I'd assume that average ICE car catching on fire is older that average EV just by EV not existing when ICE was made

thebruce87m 3y ago
https://thedriven.io/2023/05/16/petrol-and-diesel-cars-20-times-more-likely-to-catch-fire-than-evs/amp/ https://thedriven.io/2023/05/16/petrol-and-diesel-cars-20-ti... > Furthermore, fires in electric cars are declining. The MSB says the number of fires in electric cars has been around 20 a year over the last three years The number of fires should increase if age was a linear factor. Could be non linear of course.
- NooneAtAll3 3y ago
  > Furthermore, fires in electric cars are declining. The MSB says the number of fires in electric cars has been around 20 a year over the last three years, although the number of electric cars over that tie has almost doubled. Presumably, this is due to EV makers improving fire suppressing designs in newer models. article directly says that there's an exploding growth of new vehicles, thus "average car" hasn't aged yet I'm not arguing against EVs being more safe, I'm arguing against awful statistics of comparing "new EVs against aging ICE" while only saying "EV vs ICE"
  - thebruce87m 3y ago
    Every year the existing cars age by a year, and the number of cars has only grown, never declined. So you would think that the “20 a year” would increase with that if age was a linear factor, not stay stationary.
audunw 3y ago
I’ve heard comments from a department in Norway that the lower risk exists even when comparing similar models of similar age. But I haven’t seen the raw statistics on that anywhere yet. The difference is so large that it’d be incredible if age would close the gap. New vehicles have some risk as well: I think defects in battery cell manufacturing can be a significant risk in the early years of EVs.

dpedu 3y ago

> [Firefighters have] had 100 years to train and to understand how to deal with internal combustion engine fires,” the NFPA’s Andrew Klock told Vox. “With electric vehicles, they don’t have as much training and knowledge.” > But MSB’s Per-Ola Malmqvist has developed webinars that explain how to safely put out battery fires. In a 2022 webinar, he described the tools and techniques that were used to put out a raging EV battery fire in 10 minutes using only 750 liters of water. In another webinar about EV fire suppression best practices, Malmqvist interviewed a firefighter from Vestfold Fire Service in Norway, where the extinguishing method Malmqvist recommends was tried for the first time in battling an electric-vehicle blaze. Not surprising. However, I would have liked to have heard a better explanation of the problem about EV fires self-reigniting, which can happen hours or days later. They touched on it, but passed it off as lack of firefighter training. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/29/electric-vehicle-fires-are-rare-but-hard-to-fight-heres-why.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/29/electric-vehicle-fires-are-r... Simply dousing the fire with water as mentioned in the article is not sufficient.

_ea1k 3y ago
Sure, but that seems like mostly a question of getting them to a place where that can safely happen. Once it is isolated, let it burn out if it reignites. Putting it out the first time so that it can be safely moved is important.
- verisimi 3y ago
  > Once it is isolated, let it burn out if it reignites. Mere words do not quite convey the issue. How does one "isolate" a car? Does one take it somewhere? Where? Are fire engines able to undertake this task? It's there a concern en route to the somewhere?
  - Tagbert 3y ago
    The same tow trucks that would tow away vehicles after a crash would tow an EV to an impoundment yard where it could be monitored.

derbOac 3y ago

My impression is that the concern with EV and battery fires is that they can occur in the home or while otherwise stationary, unexpectedly causing much more catastrophic damage. ICE fires, in contrast, seem to be mostly associated with collisions, or somewhat less so with driving; it seems uncommon for ICEs to suddenly catch fire in an enclosed building. e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44631649 I'm not an expert on this though, and these are just my general impressions, which is maybe the point of the article. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to address the nature of EV fires in a scientific, public-health kind of way. I think the thing most people are concerned about is a question like "how likely is my car to cause my house to burn down just sitting in the garage, while I'm sleeping?" Maybe the answer to that is the same with ICEs and EVs but that's the question that needs to be addressed.

vel0city 3y ago
ICE fires aren't often related to collisions. I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting. I've had multiple ICE cars recalled for catching fire when stopped. In the examples in the articles they mentioned vehicles in parking garages and on cargo ships, those weren't moving. Your general impressions don't reflect reality. Out of all the cars I've owned my ICE ones have been way more likely to burn down my house while sleeping than my EV. Your own article even starts off with "most occur in motor vehicles not involved in collisions."
- organsnyder 3y ago
  My PHEV vehicle (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid) had a recall that caused fires while parked. It turned out to be related to part of the 12v system.
- dataflow 3y ago
  > I've seen a neighbor's house burn down due to a car that had been parked in their garage for hours combusting The ICE car combusted while the engine wasn't running? Like, it was parked, they'd turned off the car as usual, and hours later it randomly combusted? Do you have any information on what the likely cause may have been? (e.g., hot weather? unexpected sparks?)

bob1029 3y ago

You'll never catch me with a lithium ion battery larger than ~150wH inside my home. I don't care how aggressively the statistics are massaged. I've personally experienced laptop and cellphone batteries catching on fire and can see how something with 100x+ the capacity could cause some serious fucking trouble. Anyone who has one of those 1kWh+ emergency power backup things sitting inside their house right now really needs to think twice about contingencies. Extend this thinking to an EV with 2 orders of magnitude more storage. Can a gasoline car set itself on fire inside your garage entirely unattended? Sure. But I think it is much less likely to occur and the failure modes are more acceptable to me - I.e. I can inspect and anticipate if my gasoline car might be unsafe with more clues than around an EV car. You can smell gasoline. You can't smell a manufacturing defect in a battery pack.

k8sToGo 3y ago
I wonder if, back in the days, you would have allowed your house to be connected to the electrical grid or the gas grid.
sanderjd 3y ago
> But I think it is much less likely to occur You think. The point of gathering data and studying it is to attempt to replace our animal-brain intuitions with real evidence. I honestly haven't looked into the evidence on this enough either way, since I haven't yet seriously researched purchasing an electric vehicle. But I know that I have a big tank of gasoline sitting directly underneath a portion of my childrens' rooms, and a big pipe of methane running into my basement running to a couple little tiny flames that are always lit and sometimes turned into a big blue flame to heat the household's air, or a slightly smaller fire to heat its water. I trust these clearly dangerous things to be safe enough, but I haven't ever researched the evidence on the safety of these either. The only difference is that I've always lived with these dangers without ever really thinking about them; they're just part of the water I swim in. One day EV batteries will be no different. It's rational for novel dangers to receive more scrutiny than old ones, but new things become old before long.
- fragmede 3y ago

hijinks 3y ago

it's almost like 5 years ago the old guard car companies might have been paying reporters to hype up all the EV fires.

magicalhippo 3y ago

Here in Norway we have a relatively high ratio of EVs on the road, and has had so for many years now. As such there's some decent statistics showing that it's much more likely for an ICE car to start burning than an EV[1][2], up to 4-5x. Our EVs are on average newer, for the last few years the majority of sales have been EVs. As such our ICEs are on average older. Interestingly the number of cars catching fire[3] hasn't increased substantially since 2016. The number of EVs catching fire has doubled since then, but the number of EVs on the road has gone up 5x[4]. Here in Norway new EVs no longer come with the "emergency charger" that hooks up to a regular 220V socket, as charging using regular sockets has been identified as a potential fire hazard. [1]: https://www.motor.no/aktuelt/elbiler-brenner-langt-sjeldnere-enn-diesel--og-bensinkjoretoy-viser-tall-fra-landets-brannvesen/199867 https://www.motor.no/aktuelt/elbiler-brenner-langt-sjeldnere... [2]: https://www.elbil24.no/nyheter/myten-som-nekter-a-do/78217048 https://www.elbil24.no/nyheter/myten-som-nekter-a-do/7821704... [3]: https://www.brannstatistikk.no/brus-ui/search?searchId=9B13517C-F1CD-490F-82A1-57B9CA38ACA5&type=SEARCH_DEFINITION https://www.brannstatistikk.no/brus-ui/search?searchId=9B135... [4]: https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10090893 https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10090893

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> As such there's some decent statistics showing that it's much more likely for an ICE car to start burning than an EV[1][2], up to 4-5x. > Our EVs are on average newer, for the last few years the majority of sales have been EVs. As such our ICEs are on average older. So wait, do the stats show that ICE cars are more likely to burn, or are they just older on average?
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  The age distribution of our cars hasn't changed significantly[1] between 2016 and 2022. However back in 2016, only about 4% of our cars were EVs[2]. So the 2016 car fire statistics is essentially just ICEs, which would include young ICE cars as well. In 2022, around 20% of our cars were EVs. Given that the age of our cars has remained roughly the same, if EVs were as likely to catch fire as an average ICE in 2016, you'd expect[3] around 140-145 EV fires in 2022. Yet there were only 29. Of course, that's assuming I did the math right. [1]: https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/sq/10090898 https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/sq/10090898 [2]: https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/sq/10090899 https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/sq/10090899 [3]: 661 fires per 2.4M ICE cars in 2016 vs 564k EVs in 2022

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I think the article is grossly misrepresenting the dangers from lithium battery fires in other places than cars. Especially about escooters and bikes as well as air travel. There is statistically one fire a week on passenger aircrafts in the US now. ⁽¹⁾⁽² ⁾ New York City is trying to deal with a large number of fires started by ebikes og escooters. ⁽³⁾⁽⁴⁾ To dismiss this problem by finding a fire that happened in Vietnam that was incorrectly attributed seems quite biased. When it comes to the stats for cars, they are probably correct but somewhat misguided. Most electric cars are pretty new, a large percentage are nearly brand news. To compare them to the entire fleet of fossile fueled car fires is a bit unfair. I think if you compare all new and brand new combustion engine fires the stats would look different. May well be much higher for combustion engines, I dont know, but the comparisons used in the article are in my opinion biased. ¹ https://explore.dot.gov/t/FAA/views/LithiumBatteries/IncidentDetails?%3Aembed=y&%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y https://explore.dot.gov/t/FAA/views/LithiumBatteries/Inciden... ² https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/03/03/faa-lithium-battery-fire-smoke-airplane/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/03/03... ³ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/nyregion/e-bike-lithium-battery-fires-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/nyregion/e-bike-lithium-b... ⁴ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/ebike-battery-fire-new-york-gig-workers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/ebike-batter...

zelon88 3y ago

How can you have an article about battery combustion without talking about the chemistry? A gasoline fire is a well understood event. Gas ignites and burns until there is no more fuel, or no more air. We know to extinguish this type of fire, we need to remove the air. Once the reaction has stopped, it would need another fresh ignition source to reignite. A lithium fire is, on the other hand, is almost completely misunderstood by most people. It is a chemical chain reaction. It it an uncontrollable state in which the lithium becomes so hot that it perpetuates it's own combustion. You can remove the oxygen, but that's not the chemical that's keeping this reaction going. So the reaction will not stop. The lithium will keep heating itself, which will cause that heated lithium to heat more lithium, which heats more lithium, until there is no more lithium remaining. It is disingenuous to compare apples to oranges like what is being done by comparing ICE car fires to EV car fires.

rootusrootus 3y ago
Aren't most fires, especially big ones, extinguished by cooling them down?
ben-schaaf 3y ago
A lithium-ion battery fire is not a lithium fire; the lithium hexafluorophosphate electrolyte is non-flammable. You're mostly right about the rest, but it's really important to note that it's not a lithium fire. Lithium combusts in the presence of water, so fighting a lithium(not-ion) battery fire requires special care.

audunw 3y ago

It’s kind of absurd seeing some of the FUD around EVs from the perspective of li img in Norway now. We’re getting up to 20-30% of the cars ON THE ROAD being EVs now in some areas. I’d guess a quarter of my close neighbours have EVs. According to some, our neighbourhood should be a EV-fire hellscape and we should have blackouts every week. The roads should have to be replaced every month from increased wear. Nobody can go on road trips anymore. Yet everything is fine. Better than fine. As the statistics are pretty clear on: there’s fewer car fires when you have more EVs. Also air pollution is down When commenting on this topic online it feels like we’re living in the future, trying to argue with people from the past. If you’re wondering what a future with lots of EVs look like, you don’t have to speculate. All you have to do is come to Oslo or Bergen and take a look around. Yet people talk with absolutely certainty about how everything will go to hell when there’s too many EVs. (Yes, Norway has some qualities that makes the transition easier. Like a strong grid to start with, low speed limits and a strong economy. But then the technology was much more primitive and expensive when Norway got started. Also, Norway has a winter that is brutal on the range of EVs, and an insanely high share of Norwegians will drive hours to their cabins high in the mountains every other weekend in winter.. not the most ideal market for EVs)

vel0city 3y ago
I fully agree with this "feels like we're living in the future, trying to argue with people from the past" idea. My neighborhood isn't exactly new, it was mostly built in the 70s to very early 80s. There are several households on my street which I know have EVs. Given how many argue about the load on the grid you'd assume the power company would have had to massively upgrade the infrastructure here to support it. But in the end our actual peak power usage largely hasn't changed; we're just pulling a bit more power in the very late evenings and super early morning hours. Time when the grid around us has plenty of capacity.

DoktorL 3y ago

Electric scooters and such do create a new danger that didn't exist before: they let (indeed, encourage) you to take the hazardous part (the battery) inside an apartment to "refuel". An equivalent would be bringing a gas-driven moped into your place which is against the rules in many places, and why would you do it anyway. As such, it's important to take all possible reasonable steps to mitigate the risk. Those vehicles are still great overall, if only because, between air quality problems and exacerbated extreme weather events, fossil fuels cause deaths, injuries and property damage just through their normal usage. But the danger is there, and needs to be considered.