Originally published at: Electric vehicle "spontaneously combusts" on California freeway. Oh, you know the brand. | Boing Boing
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Kill it with blankets!
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How about what they used on Chernobyl? Boron containing sand? /s
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Does the Cybertruck do this too?
Because I really want to make a second Canyonero reference today.
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Does anyone have statistics handy on how many gasoline and diesel vehicles catch fire? There’s usually someone who pops up saying “well look at how many of those happen!” and I am not that person - in that I am not trying to suggest Teslas burn less or more often, and am just curious how it all breaks down. I would expect any time you have huge amounts of energy stored in a small place, you get fires when something goes wrong.
I personally know people whose car caught on fire underhood and they had to put it out in a parking lot with a fire extinguisher before it became a conflagration. It was not a Tesla.
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That will isolate a self-oxidizing (lithium ion or other) fire, but it won’t put it out. If the fire has its own fuel and oxygen, the only part of the triangle you can remove is heat. Water and lots of it is still the best option.
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The cybertruck does not do this, because it currently exists only in carefully photoshopped advertisements, and a few individually built lab models for testing. General construction lines where undetected battery faults and poorly attached wires that cause electrical shorts have not yet been set up to produce that particular mobile torch yet.
Yep, I was even in regular gas cars that caught fire under the hood twice. One of them had to pull over and put it out, then got back in and drove home, saying “Yeah, that happens a lot, this car is old. Keep the windows open.”, and the other one pulled over, got out the a fire extinguisher, and found that the fire had gone out on it’s own, but the car wouldn’t start anymore. Cost him almost a hundred dollars to get it fixed. I haven’t got any statistics, but it’s probably higher than the “reported” ones just because there will be a lot like those two who don’t even report it.
On the other hand, if your Tesla catches fire, it’s pretty much going to burn until it isn’t a car anymore. If you’re lucky, the electronic locks and/or windows won’t stop working, and you’ll be able to get out.
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Oh there are plenty more petroleum-fueled carbeques than EVs, simply because there are more fossil fuel vehicles on the road.
When it comes to EVs, tho, one brand in particular seems to be really good at catching on fire.
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Some random insurance company tried to compare NTSB stats to sales [edit:]…and their flawed numbers show up all over the place.
Personally I’m not convinced sales volumes are the most useful data point, and further searching found info that makes those numbers look even more suspect
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My grandparents car caught fire in the 90’s. We were on a road trip. Grandma was only upset that Grampa used her favorite pillow to smother the fire. The fire itself didn’t faze her one bit.
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For anybody wondering why lithium ion batteries don’t explode when hit with water, it is because they don’t contain elemental lithium. They contain a compound like lithium cobalt oxide, lithium manganese oxide, or lithium iron phosphate, LiFePO is by far the safest, albeit the least efficient,
That oxide part is why the lithium isn’t free to react violently with water and form lithium hydroxide and hydrogen gas, but it is also why they self-oxidize when the flammable electrolyte burns.
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There is no organization that keeps stats on auto fires by engine type; those stats were uncited and apparently just made up completely. Let’s not continue to spread the crap, ok
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Hey, here’s a twitter thread about how poor that study was: https://twitter.com/robbie_andrew/status/1487719216790835205
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Most of the “hybrids” in that study were just flex-fuel vehicles? I can’t think of a reason why you would want to skew the numbers so much against actual hybrids… unless you wanted justification for raising insurance premiums on a quickly growing market segment!
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Not at all. You’d need to compare against miles driven, at least. A lot of EVs are secondary vehicles for people that don’t get as many miles.
You’d also need to correct for age, because newer ICE vehicles are much much less likely to burn than older ones. Carburetors, points ignitions, and open distributors are fire factories, whereas modern direct injection and coil-on-plug ignitions are very safe.
I’d also imagine that the sample size for EVs is very small right now, because so few fires have occurred and hardly any have been sold relative to the billions of ICE cars ever made. We’ll probably need a lot more data on that.
I think we can say though that EV fires are a lot worse when they do happen. The cars burn to a puddle of slag every time and it takes a lot more first responders a lot more effort to put out. Most ICE car fires (at least the ones I have seen) don’t even total the car. A little foam in the engine bay, clean it up, replace the fuel lines and ignition, and it’s back on the road to burn again another day.
All that said, even if EV fires are twice as common and ten times as bad, that whole problem is way way way smaller than climate change. We can figure out fire safety for them, in time.
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While it may be true, I don’t see why folks should just give up on seeking alternatives to trucking 6000 gallons of water out to Highway 50 during high traffic. 
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CBC’s report says
George Iny, president of the Automobile Protection Agency, says … approximately 10,000 car fires that happen across Canada annually.
Multiply by 10 for the 
then…
I’ve been in a car fire… right in front of the town fire station as well. Nobody was hurt.
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