Here are two different stories, but with a common link. First, the news from Volkswagen:
Volkswagen’s managing director has warned the sale of electric vehicles is ‘stagnating’ as a poll revealed just 2 per cent of drivers would buy one in the near future.
Alex Smith warned there are currently few incentives to buy EVs.
He claimed sales are in ‘stagnation’ with EVs still ‘relatively expensive’ compared to petrol and diesel cars, adding: ‘It’s true to say that with the retail price of an electric car, you will find a premium.’
Not so much “find” as “get beaten about the head by” that premium, but let me not interrupt the thread.
It came as a poll of 2,375 UK motorists found that just 2 per cent would buy an EV right now. The survey, carried out for industry body the Society for Motor Manufactures and Traders found more than half are not planning to buy one until 2026 or later.
The figures led to growing calls for more support for private buyers to switch to EVs ahead of the planned ban on new petrol and diesel car sales from 2030.
The “support” is, of course, a bribe I mean government subsidy. Funded with taxpayer money.
But apart from the price “premium” (exorbitant cost), why would people’s enthusiasm for Duracell cars be weakening? Of course, there’s that small matter of there being not enough power sockets — even in tiny Britishland — to replenish the battery when the juice runs low: “Oh, the government should just pay for those” (with taxpayer money).
Then there’s this little wrinkle in EV ownership:
An electrical vehicle fire at Nissan Headquarters Tuesday afternoon required several more hours and 45 times more gallons of water to put out than a conventional vehicle fire.
It’s a challenge the Franklin Fire Department warns “all fire departments are struggling with” because lithium-ion battery fires often cannot be extinguished until the battery cell has released its energy.
Firefighters were dispatched around 4:42 p.m. after the car caught fire in the parking lot of 1 Nissan Way. According to Franklin Fire Marshal Andy King, the vehicle, a Nissan Leaf, had been charging on a Level 3 charger, which is the fastest charging device.
That’s when its lithium-ion battery cell reportedly overheated, went into a thermal runaway condition and caught fire. He said firefighters applied water to cool the battery cell for several hours before the fire was extinguished.
No damage occurred to the charger or other vehicles. According to King, firefighters are accustomed to responding to conventional vehicle fires, which are typically put out with one fire engine and anywhere from 500 to 1,000 gallons of water.
However, Tuesday’s fire required nearly 45,000 gallons of water and multiple units, including an engine, tower, battalion chief, rescue, hazmat, and an air response vehicle. In a news release, the fire department urged EV owners to take precautions against fires.
The very best precaution against these kinds of fires, one would think, would be not to buy these spontaneously-combusting wheeled Roman candles in the first place.
As for dealing with the fires themselves: I think that every charging station should be required to have a large tank of water — maybe double the size of a normal backyard swimming pool — so that the fire department can just push the burning vehicle into it until it’s completely submerged.
Then, when all the fuss has subsided and the fire has finally died, the car’s owner should be required to drink a pint of water from the tank.
And now I think I need to head off to the range, because when I read how Gummint is trying to force everyone to buy one of these fucking firebombs, I can feel myself going into a “thermal runaway condition”.
The problem with lithium & water is lithium chemically reacts (burns) on contact with water, releasing hydrogen and producing lithium hydroxide (causes chemical burns). Lithium doesn’t burn with the same explosive speed as sodium or potassium (same chemical family), but we used to have fun in the chem lab dropping a small piece of lithium into a beaker of water & watching it go.
So when you are spraying water on a lithium fire, you are just providing more material for the lithium to react with, which it will do until it is consumed. Then you have the hazmat problem of dealing with the lithium hydroxide. Contrast this with the nickel hydride batteries, which don’t have these problems, but also don’t have the same amount of power for their weight vs lithium (tradeoffs).
Yet again, we were sold a bill of goods.
+1 Steve
You need a Class D fire extinguisher or lots of sand to put out metal fires .
I imagine the fire burned itself out, the water did nothing but make a mess.
My first job out of college was as a tech doing lithium reductions and Grignard reactions with magnesium. Any water in the solvent led to rather spectacular fires.
I remember Ethyl Corporation’s catalog cover showed a man running out of a burning building. They made and sold a variety of alkyl halide chemicals, some were pyrophobic, they burned when exposed to air.
I got really, really, really good at fighting fires at that job. They burned the place to the ground after I left.
=
Kim, I do believe you are on to something good here. Tesla builds an olimpic pool (heated of course for us northerners) next to EVERY charging station. When no in use for fires, the area kids can enjoy a good swim. Of course the fee for charging will include a buck for the pool maintenance and the life guard that must be posted there 24/7 seeing as it cannot be fenced off at any time. Win-win for every community and just think, there could easily be 4 pools in every podunk of 5000 people and maybe 500 in the city of Shitcago or Lessangels, not to mention Hooston. NYFC is no problem, just put all the charging stations next to the river and add a ramp for the FD to push them over the wall. Solutions can be elegant and if expensive enough, no more self igniting cars through market forces.
So, apparently every new Ram truck from this year forward will be at least a “mild hybrid”, or something. From what I can tell, they’ll have a smaller lithium battery in the back of the cab that’ll provide some extra boost for, hell, I don’t know. The standard V8 engine already produces 400 hp. But anyway, that pretty much cross them off my list since I’m not going buy any vehicle that can spontaneously combust like that.
They still have their classic series without the battery, but very few options and trim levels. Probably better to drive my 10 year old truck until it craters, then spend money to fix it up again and keep driving it. I think the average age of the car on the road today is well over 10 years, and that’s only going get worse as new cars get more expensive and EV’s are forced on us. We’ll just keep the old ones running, ala Cuba.
Lithium battery fires are a Class D fire, like magnesium. Water is not going to put it out.
What will put it out is large quantities of dry sand, AKA smother it.
ah yes more subsidies from the government with ever increasing amounts of money stolen from taxpayers. Global warming caused by humans and the need to combat it with higher taxes and a lowered standard of living is the biggest hoax pulled on people, EVER.
according to these meatheads, Global warming is a problem caused by people so we need to get rid of cars fueled by oil. The electric cars burst into flames so we need more fire trucks that are electrically powered to put out these fires etc etc. The “solution” is far worse than the alleged problem. This is typical of government’s approach to anything
JQ
There is a far greater hazard than just the batteries going into thermal runaway, and that’s the poisonous cocktail of gasses released by the burning battery pack. The smoke contains not just hydroflouric acid (nasty, nasty shit. If it gets into your lungs you’re a dead man walking), but also hydrogen cyanide gas. Yes, the very same stuff they used to put criminals to death in the gas chamber.
Now, if one of them catches fire outside it’s just a PITA, a training exercise for firefighters, and an insurance claim. It’ll self-extinguish after the energy is released. BUT… Underground car parks, and especially those underneath things like office buildings or high-rise apartment buildings are an entirely different and far more serious issue. Often these are limited access, so an entire second alarm’s worth of fire trucks can’t get to the burning car, the poisonous gasses have nowhere to go and things generally get nastier from there. But wait! There’s more!!
Let’s say Big Gummint gets their way and pretend 50% of cars in that car park are EVs, which they want to see happen by 2030-2035. OK, great. Now, in that underground car park the EV at the charging station goes into thermal runaway. People are in there walking to and from their cars when it happens and they get felled by the smoke. The FD can’t get anything more than a single hoseline on it from a standpipe, which is akin to pissing in the ocean. Now the burning car is so hot it lights off the cars on either side. And they light two cars, and they light two cars, and so on. Now you have a massive unquenchable fire burning potentially for days (see the Felicity Ace, et al) With ferocious heat being released alongside the concrete supports holding a big 30-story apartment building up. There’s only one way that story ends, and it won’t be a happy ending for anybody involved.
Smothering a fire with sand works when the fire is in fuel that needs air to burn; it won’t smother gunpowder (with fuel and oxidizer), nor will it smother a battery, which has to be made with components that react with each other. Most battery chemistries are low energy density, so lack the energy to burn too hot, but a thousand pounds of lithium battery is a _lot_ of energy, and all a blanket of sand might do is direct the heat downwards.
The fire just has to burn itself out as the reactive components of the battery are used up. The water is not to extinguish the fire, but to remove the heat (mainly by boiling water), so it doesn’t radiate as much heat and set other things on fire.
So, something like the backfires that are sometimes set by the firemen fighting brush and forest fires. Take away one of the three sides of the fire triangle.
A few months ago I just happened to be talking with an UBER driver on a drive to the airport. She described that a couple of years ago she worked in a EV battery factory. As mentioned above, water ain’t worth a crap in putting out these little bombs when they catch fire. The process in the factory was to get the battery into a large steel dumpster (if I recall a fork lift or something like it) and then drop tons of sand on top of it.
When cell phones are known for nasty battery fires, I can’t believe folks are willing to pack their family on top of a thousand pounds of bomb material and feel safe.