Safety First!
6 Likes
Nothing to see here. Gas cars burn every day. This one ran over a large obstruction in the road and everyone, including the dog made it out safely.
7 Likes
The thing that article doesn’t get into which is a real problem in larger facilities, is deflagration. Thermal runaway events produce heat which produces gas - but they don’t necessarily produce a spark. What can happen then in a container is the LEL (lower explosive limit) of the gas goes above 25% (of the total atmosphere in the container), and when a spark or flame is finally present things in common terms go explodey. A subsonic pressure wave is “deflagration” and a supersonic one is a “detonation”, and the detonation flavor can involve flying shards of metal. This probably has never happened on a car, because the gas isn’t building up inside of a strong container - my Chevy Bolt just has a shroud on the bottom with no significant strength. I’d imagine there’s not enough hydrocarbon gas in a car pack to explode a garage. No reason this couldn’t happen in a shipping container, though.
6 Likes
Get down deeper and down
Down down deeper and down
Down down deeper and down
Get down deeper and down
I have found you out you see
I know what you’re doing, what you’re doing to me
I’ll keep on and say to you
Again again again again
Again-gain-gain-gain deeper and down
Down down deeper and down
Get down
2 Likes
eject the core! eject the core!
semi-quasi-seriously it would be financially ‘nice’ to be able to dump the parts that are just going to burn the whole thing to slag. Oh, and if battery packs -could- be made swappable (“They can’t! It’s impossible! That’s dumb!” …soo the Chinese solution is unworkable? “Well, they’re commies, aren’t they?”) …that might make the recharging cycle much more convenient.
8 Likes
At least the doors unlocked. Not at all guaranteed with Teslas.
20 Likes
There is no credence to the rumor that the driver had tweeted “Elon sucks” minutes before the catastrophe.
29 Likes
I definitely think that electric cars are a good way forward over combination engines but considering how the battery tech is, how they’re made, what happens with old car batteries and when electric cars are on fire… All of these things are huge issues that haven’t been meaningfully resolved.
8 Likes
Dump them where though? On the road as you’re driving down the highway? That seems to be the place they always are when they catch fire - that, or parked on a city street and not moving, in which case dumping them would just put them below the non-burning parts.
What we need is a near-vertical ejection system, that launches burning parts away from the vehicle (and onto someone else of course).
1 Like
Imagine if this happened in one of Elon’s tunnels under Vegas. The tunnels are so narrow that the doors of the cars cannot open, so you’d basically be cooked. But, please, go on about what a genius Elon is.
15 Likes
@wazroth Did you start a bingo card yet? I think we’ve got three squares covered in one post!
25 Likes
Season 5 of Halt and Catch Fire has a strange start…
13 Likes
The most important quote from the article:
The couple and their dog, Coco, are safe and were uninjured.
12 Likes
On the plus side, it would lend weight to the case for investing in swappable battery infrastructure. And obviously, if your car can poop out its melting battery pack and roll to a safe distance without singing the rich corinthian interior, that’s great.
But that’s at best a partial solution, because it requires the car to (1) be upright and (2) not be obstructed by wreckage / trees / pedestrians etc.; otherwise you poop out the chunk of sizzling thermite and then just sit there being roasted from below by the flames of Hell.
Which – apart from slightly different insurance paperwork – is the same situation you have now where the solution is to let the whole car burn. That’s fine(?) as long as you can clear a 20-meter radius and stand around with marshmallows; but what if someone’s stuck in the car, or the car is stuck in the side of a building, or at the bottom of a pile of other cars?
4 Likes
27 Likes
I’m enjoying all the funny tweets while I can.
Soon they will be lost to the wind as Twitter faces outages and bugs.
19 Likes
Well, not much to see here, but it looks like there used to be more.
21 Likes
Ah, there it is. I knew there had to be one still lurking around here.
19 Likes
I don’t suppose prices for used Teslas have dropped one bit, have they?
1 Like
My concept is to drop a storage container (with bottom cut out) over the vehicle , and some sort of seal around the bottom to keep air from going in. Like a giant candle snuffer, but for cars.
Another idea is a battery pack that can eject… like a warp core … smaller and easier to manage for first responders than being inside the vehicle.
