Interesting to see some nice fossil fuel talking points in this thread. All to be made redundant since we're on the cusp of a massive revolution in battery costs and safe chemistry. Things are about to get interesting. :)
Yeah, a fire that occurs when the car is being driven is a lot different than a fire that happens in the middle of the night when the car is parked in an attached garage. I'm sure the latter sometimes happens with gas cars but the relative rates seem relevant.
I searched around and did find some interesting statistics; most car fires resulting in fatalities occurred due to crashes. 80% of car fire fatalities are men. This strongly suggests that reckless behavior is by far the greatest risk factor.
Not really. If there’s thermal runaway you may have to douse them with water for a few hours. But there’s equipment now that can help with this, letting the firefighters walk away while the car battery safely dissipates its heat.
"EVs were involved in approximately 25 fires for every 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline-powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in fires for every 100,000 sold."
Yeah, there really should be something akin to human mortality risks available, but for cars. Human mortality is always divided up by age, and various car risks should also be divided up by model year.
> An analysis of car fire reports from 2012 to 2022 revealed that a passenger EV battery has a 0.0012% of catching fire, while the same sample indicates that ICE cars have a 0.1% chance of catching fire.
Everyone I know and almost every neighbor has an EV. Basically every new car sold is an EV. None of these EV's have catched on fire as far as I know. It's not really a problem.
Most EVs have specific guides for fire fighting. For example, Tesla’s include the HV disconnects that need to be cut or disabled, and the best way to fight it: https://www.tesla.com/firstresponders
Imagine there being hundreds of models of different make and model year of EV, and you are a firefighter facing down a vehicle in the process of turning itself into superheated slag while spewing toxic smoke, and you have to play the game of whack-a-mole of trying to find where to cut so that you don't get 400 volts in your face, while trying to save the people trapped inside.
If you’re genuinely curious then ask the firefighters in Norway. In urban areas around the third of the cars on the road are EVs. And there’s probably a wider range of models than anywhere in the world.
When asked firefighters say that EVs are an improvement. Even if it’s a bit trickier to deal with a fire when there is one, there are significantly less fires than with ICE, and it takes longer for the fires to reach their peak intensity.
There was also a big fire in an airport parking garage recently. Started by a parked ICE car. Not a single battery pack ignited in that fire. Imagine if they were all EVs. No fuel poured on the fire at all (except the plastics and such of course)
There’s no reason why the car should become a superheated slag with the right equipment. All you need to do is to apply water to keep it cool, and that will generally keep the battery from getting too hot and igniting the combustible materials. There’s a lot of development in making good equipment for this. There’s was a study showing that a garden-hose like device that sprays water evenly on the battery from the underside can keep the battery cool with fairly little water use. Another study showed that you can use even less water by drilling a hole in the battery pack and injecting water directly into it. I imagine firefighters will eventually get some kind of remote controlled rover that can safely do that operation at a distance.
So there’s lots of room for improvement but EVs are already a step in towards safer cars.
There's logic to disable the HV source automatically in a collision (well, to open the contactors anyway), the cut loop is a redundant safety to ensure that the HV controller gets the message to cut power.
Where? Genuinely curiuos, I've been over my vehicle and haven't seen one. It's a Ford Mach E, so knowing how to isolate the HV system if I must would be nice.
The owner's manual version includes removing the frunk, which is a lot of work.
As another example, my Renault Megane E-Tech has specially designed "fireman access"[1] for firefighters so they can quickly get water to the battery in case of fire. It also has a battery quick disconnect switch[2] under the rear seats.
Well... It's seems... Childish, to be polite... In case of fire, typically after a powerful crash since EVs are not catching fire for no reasons every now and then, of course fireman's have easy access to open the appropriate small opening INSIDE the vehicle to extinguish it, also given the typical pressure of their water gun and the fact they can't perfectly fit the hole and there seems no easy air passages to avoid squirt water everywhere, and of course, they have easy access to a plastic Qr code in a specific small place of the vehicle to see the relevant instruction remaining nearby with a smartphone, perhaps under bat weather conditions, other vehicles burning and so on...
This seems to be what I call manager's driven design or dumb biped design.
Oh, I go further: most modern vehicles, not only EVs, are designed by people with very NO DAMN CLUE about roads and safety. Let's observe the very common mania of a big front tunnel to offer large arm rests, can holders, ... and also to impede a passenger pushing quickly the fainted driver foot out of the accelerator, easily access the break pedal while being able to steer and see the road, internal volumes not designed to move from one seat to another if the car is even only parked in tight spots, not even counting an emergency exit from the tailgate. This is the classic design of students at a desktop with no imagination of the real world outside.
And I say this as a relatively happy EV owner, who have already noticed an immense slice of missing and badly done things simply because of lack of real world, eagle eye view.
I've seen it, but that's was a VERY EASY scenario of an isolated vehicle with nothing around, try to do the same in a more realistic scenario like a vehicle crushed downhill, with a bit of dry vegetation on fire around, another with some vehicles crashed, deformed and one onto another. Even if there are no people to rescue, those alive are already recovered and eventual others are dead, how do you reach such small hole, perhaps if the car is on one side or overturned?
To me it's like an old movie of "theory vs reality with an oil ship with a serious fire on board and the young trainee trying to follow the protocol working on chemical extinguishers when an officer brutally push him out "IT'S DAMN TOO LATE!!! GO!!!".
It's not much about the involvement but the way we design cars (and essentially anything) today, the designer mindset and usual organization. Ignore the extreme scenario: various EV brands offer V2L functionalities, ALL I know offer an adapter to the charging port for such purpose, meaning you can't have 230Vac while driving or inside the vehicle, now how damn frequent is the fictional advertised scenario of a picnic with an electric grill aside the car vs you are damn trapped in the traffic, all stopped for long and you just want your laptop powered INSIDE the vehicle or you have a fridge in the trunk, a real one with a 230V compressor? To me the reasoning behind current V2L design is "well, 99% will not use such functionality, while 20% keep curiously asking for that (for incomprehensible reasons), so we add it in the cheapest way possible". In the reality it would be not much expensive put the 230V inverter in the trunk on one side and offer 230V sockets in the trunk and in the middle/back part of front seats. It's only a matter of understanding damn realistic real life usage vs not having a clue of the real world.
Another example: we have VARIOUS domestic car chargers, because well, most EV owners own a home with a garage/some space to recharge at home, since living on public chargers it's no life... Well, vast part of the inhabited world have good potential photovoltaic power, and most EV owners live in such places... Why the hell exactly ZERO vendor offer a real p.v. integration for their chargers? So far in the EV only two claim to have p.v. integration, both are p.v. inverter/battery inverter makers, one it's Fronius another is Victron, both claims are well... Questionable... The can ONLY charge in AC, meaning loosing ~30% of p.v. power in the process while at least Fronius already sell hybrid inverters with 400V batteries integration, the very same batteries of 99% of cars... Why not offer DC-tp-DC charging MUCH more effective, MUCH simpler, MUCH less risky and bi-directional by default because yes on damn all EVs you can both charge and discharge from DC at least in EU/CCS combo ports, so the car became de facto part of a home p.v. system with storage. NO DAMN VENDOR offer that. Only one USA vendor offer DC charging and bi-directional usage to power the home BUT NOT p.v. integration, it works grid connected to charge, only off grid to discharge. Heat pump vendors with DC compressors? Similarly NONE I know offer DC-direct power optional (a thing with nearly no cost to be added) to run on p.v.
Long story short ALL "green new deal" projects/tools are designed by people who show to have no clue about green new deal and real world applications. That's a classic sign of managerial-driven things, where the manager know how to organize people and know economy but damn nothing else, so apply the same knowledge and ignorance to selling apples, cruises, fighter jet and computers with ridiculous results where people who seems expert in the field invest time in convincing people he/she works for a perfect future that's actually totally surrealistic...
We let giant tanks of gasoline sit around, which are fire bombs. I’ve been in a home fire started accidentally from a gas can and it was nothing to be trifled with.
Gas car fires happen all the time. They just don’t make the news because it’s the boring devil we know.
Stored energy is stored energy. Anything capable of propelling a car at 60+mph for hundreds of miles contains some chemistry that really wants to party.
> Around 18% of EV fires occur while the car is plugged in and charging, but the percentage could be as high as 30%
This says nothing about the incidence of the fires. ICE vehicles also catch fire, sometimes when not running and unoccupied. Without knowing the rates or numbers the figure is meaningless for comparison.
Solid state batteries are also not safe. No battery is. By its very nature, if you puncture the battery, you short out the cells, current will flow, which will get turned into heat.
Even if the battery is not flammable, something in its vicinity almost certainly is (plastic, rubber etc.). Especially in a house.
I'm planning my house right now and yeah the garage is a big problem, there is no way I'm keeping even an electric bicycle close to my living quarters.
Gas cars can also spontaneously burn but if you have an alarm and a few fire extinguishers you have a chance to at least delay the spread until the firefighters arrive, with a battery fire you're fucked
If having an electric car in a garage is a worry then keep it outside...
Also, if that worries you, you should probably worry about anything battery powered. That means phones, RC toys, laptops, external battery packs, power tools...
Lastly, if your gas car spontaneously starts burning in a garage, it's probably not a good idea to rush to an enclosed garage, opening door/window might cause a blow up...
> Also, if that worries you, you should probably worry about anything battery powered. That means phones, RC toys, laptops, external battery packs, power tools...
You might want to look into a few things: battery capacity, energy, chemical reactions.
> Lastly, if your gas car spontaneously starts burning in a garage, it's probably not a good idea to rush to an enclosed garage, opening door/window might cause a blow up..
Most of them start with small electrical fires that propagate and after a looooong time finally get to the gas, nothing will explode
I know EVs somehow got very polarising but come on... can't you tell the difference between a phone battery and a car battery ? really ? There is a reason why electric bicycles and scooters are banned from many cities public transport and buildings. Even firefighters recognise that EV fires are an absolute pain in the ass to handle. I know people love their EVs but stop drinking the kool aid after the first gallon
You just need a fire in an enclosed space running for a bit of time.
> can't you tell the difference between a phone battery and a car battery ? really ?
I have seen the result of a house fire due to bad laptop battery.
Once a fire starts it's typically bad.
If you are worried about EVs catching fire, then any battery has the same risk percentage to start a fire. (defective samsung mobile phones is a good example of an issue and it being resolved)
Sure, it's much worse and much faster for an EV to catch fire. Still, a regular battery can kill you just as well.
I just leave my EV outside, I don't think it will catch fire, but if it does it won't kill me.
I also used to leave my gas car outside, I dont think that would catch fire either.
I havent seen too many regular consumer devices starting fires so that risk might be low.
> can't you tell the difference between a phone battery and a car battery ?
Far more people have died due to house fires started by phone batteries than car batteries. Knock the phone off your bedstand into your bed while it's charging and...
Generally not a great idea to keep high capacity power tool batteries in your living space. Many insurance companies won't cover the resulting damage from a fire caused by one.
What utter nonsense. EVs are already extremely wide spread in many parts of the world, and the statistics clearly show that they’re far safer than ICE when it comes to fires. Even when people routinely charge their car at home overnight. The density of EVs in my area is insanely high (30%ish) and I haven’t even heard of a single case of an EV catching fire in a garage. The cases I’ve seen have either been on the road or during fast charge.
An EV fire takes significantly longer to reach its peak than a gasoline fire. Yeah it’s possible that the electrolyte combusts in a somewhat spectacular fire at the start. That could ignite some things around the car. But electrolytes are very light and volatile. Not like gasoline that sticks around and burns for a long time.
If you have a fire extinguisher you can deal with the fires that might have been started in the garage. EVs are designed to vent burning electrolyte away from the vehicle so the car itself is not likely to start burning yet.
Then if you have a garden hose nearby and maybe a sprinkler, you can douse the battery pack with water. That should prevent the thermal runaway from triggering another fire until the fire department arrives.
But I can not stress enough what kind of unlikely freak accident we’re talking about here. You should probably worry more about your house getting hit by lightning.
Solid state batteries are the future of electric vehicle
No, H2 is.
No heavy battery pack, easily created from solar or wind, eg green sources, immediate 100% refueling, low pollution and toxic waste, unlike battery creation and recycling, proven tech with multiple cars on the market, easily transportable via injection into Ng lines and extraction by filters at any point (infra already exists).
On the other hand, you are throwing away between half and two thirds of the energy used to refuel. (Edit: considering the energy expenditure from H2 production and the energy actually delivered to the car wheels.)
And the infra to refuel my hydrogen car definitely does not exist today, anywhere in my first-world country. But I do have a wall socket.
So Japan, Norway, and parts of California are not the 1st world?
Competitive? Every battery powered car costs far more than a gas car of equiv specs, and you never recoup that massive cost difference even after years, unless you drive immense differences.
So I guess we should go back to gas, according to you?
Of course, it is compeitive. And it is easy to refuel. Citing early adoption problems is not relevant.
> So Japan, Norway, and parts of California are not the 1st world?
Not sure if the two[1][2] Hydrogen stations in all of Norway really qualifies. We had some more but they closed down. One closed after blowing up[3] due to a couple of bolts not being tightened[4] according to spec.
The Danish hydrogen refueling stations all closed down in 2023. Reasons were no/low hydrogen production and just about zero vehicles available. Orsted has also shut down their PtX project.
Electric cars simply got too good too fast for Hydrogen to ever take off. Most EVs today has a similar range to HEVs, and already has the infrastructure in place, and doesn't have the energy loss that producing hydrogen has.
Last i checked, it cost about 60 kWh to produce 1kg of hydrogen, which will give you about 100km range. For comparison an EV can do about 400km on the same energy.
> For comparison an EV can do about 400km on the same energy.
I checked prices here in Norway. My car has a 60 kWh battery and my car can indeed do about 400 km when full. Hydrogen here goes for about 195 NOK/kg at the pumps, so 4 kg would be 780 NOK.
Even if I use an expensive super-charger to charge it up fully, at ~6.5 NOK/kWh it'll cost me 390 NOK. So half the price of H2.
Tesla super-chargers are now available for regular plebs and they charge about 5.5 NOK/kWh, and there's at least one other that charges around 4.5 NOK/kWh.
If I charge at home it's typically 0.8-1.2 NOK/kWh during summer, up to 2-3 NOK/kWh during winter. Since I have this option, I only use super-chargers a few times a year, when on longer trips.
There is an ongoing argument that producing Hydrogen using "surplus" power would bring the effective costs down, but considering that we don't currently have a massive surplus of energy, it seems rather wasteful to design the power grid for a massive overproduction just to produce fuel for cars that would run equally well on a quarter of the energy.
I'm not saying that there isn't a place for PtX. Some industries will certainly benefit or even require an alternative to gasoline/diesel, but for private transportation it's never going to compete with EVs in terms of cost.
I've already recouped the cost difference after 5 years of ownership of an EV, with similar driving patterns as before (or even less driving after the switch, thanks to increased teleworking).
> Of course, it is compeitive.
I state that hydrogen is not competitive for cars, and have provided a link that goes into a lot of factual considerations that explain why that is the case.
The burden is now on you to disprove my reference with concrete facts.
> Every battery powered car costs far more than a gas car of equiv specs, and you never recoup that massive cost difference even after years, unless you drive immense differences.
Have you seen recent prices?
Where I am gas cars tend to both cost more upfront then EVs, have higher taxes, higher maintenance costs and be worse quality wise.
A model 3 is very competitive in its class for example.
Norway does not have H2 refuelling infrastructure. They had a tiny handful of station around Oslo a few years ago, but I think they're all closed down.
I have driven around a good deal of the world (Alaska to Argentina, around Africa, around Australia and Europe now)
EVERY town or village I have ever seen has some kind of electricity, even if just a solar panel or two for charging phones. I’ve never seen a single one with H2 infrastructure.
There is no way the world is going to adopt something so specific and non-existent.
> Not a single gas pump existed at one time, yet they are now everywhere
Absolutely, and it took many decades to build them out. Are you willing to wait many decades to drive your H2 car to the stunning, remote or beautiful parts of Africa or South America? (Note, both of those have already been done, many times, by pure EVs)
Note also the build-out of H2 stations is considerably harder than gas stations.
> yet they are now everywhere
Based on my personal experience, that is not true. On many occasions I've driven close to 1000km without a single gas station. Often villages that don't have a gas station do have electricity (and 3G internet now)
Hydrogen, in practice, is almost always made from natural gas, because that's the cheapest way to make it. Whenever you hear somebody say "hydrogen vehicle", think "highly-refined natural gas vehicle".
I'm sorry, but this is a very foul argument. H2 can be made from green sources, hands down. Thus your argument is "We should never adopt H2 cars, because currently there isn't enough green H2". That's just plain silly.
If there's anything on this list that isn't green, then it means you're substituting gas powered cars, for electric powered cars which are derived from non-green electricity. And worse, fossil fuel -> electricity -> transmission cost -> batteries+loss, is far less efficient than just "fossil fuel".
And yes, it does work that way. For example, if I have 8 homes powered by green renewable energy, and I decide to start charging a car, where do you think the extra power comes from? Typically, more fossil fuel usage.
You may say "Well, we can use solar panels at home!" or some other such thing, of which only a tiny fraction of people can. But the argument then becomes "We can add more renewable...", which is the precise same thing as saying "We can add more renewable to make H2" as well.
Frankly, almost all battery cars on the roads are being charged by fossil fuel plants what would be shut down, if those cars were gas powered.
But that's not the goal, is it? Instead, the goal is to shift our infra over to non-polluting end-points, like electric (battery OR h2 powered) cars, and then as we shift more, and more to green electric generation? Well, we're there!
Which is why all this blather against H2 is just that. It's not about now. It's about the decades to come.
Give it up. It’s over. HFCVs and BEVs got the same benefits and incentives in Norway. We even had several hydrogen furling stations around Oslo. (Though one blew up in a spectacular explosion)
BEVs won. Hydrogen stations are closing down.
What’s the breakthrough that’s going to save the hydrogen car? And do you really think that - if that breakthrough gets to market - BEV battery technology will stand completely still in that time? BEVs are already close to matching hydrogen on charging/fueling speed and range.. and will probably have a negligible weight impact in the end.
There’s absolutely no way you’re going to convince anyone who has gotten an EV charger installed in their garage to switch to a hydrogen car. What.. would you switch to a phone that you had to go to a phone fueling station to keep it running? Ridiculous.
Hydrogen doesn’t stand a chance now because BEVs is reducing its potential niche to such a small size that hydrogen gas stations don’t really have a chance to reach a critical market size. They won’t ever be profitable.
And no, don’t get started about those without a garage. There are already a whole bunch of solution for curb side charging. I know the US is a bit behind on this. But it’s far easier to build out that kind of infrastructure than hydrogen stations. In one case you just need an electrician. In the other you need highly trained installers that know how to tighten every single bolt to the exact correct torque so no hydrogen gas escapes. (Yes that’s a real example, it was the solution found after investigating the hydrogen gas station explosion near Oslo.. just a bolt that was eeeever so slightly loose… hydrogen will escape through the tiniest of cracks)
Hydrogen for long range trucks, ships and planes could be a different matter. Specialised fixed routes with gas stations set up for those routes specifically, with a well known demand in advance.
Fuel cells actually do, it all depends upon their cost and size.
If some h2 cars have batteries, for efficiency purposes, are you asserting that these are heavy, massive batteries designed to provide 100s of km of range?
Or are they instead to buffer power, and tiny and miniscule compared to battery driven cars, and thus irrelevant in this discussion?
"According to the National Fire Prevention Agency, if an EV ever catches fire while you’re behind the wheel, immediately find a safe way to pull over and get the car away from the main road. Then, turn off the engine and make sure everyone leaves the vehicle immediately."
They should have written turn the ignition off ("ignition" also being a misnomer for EVs!). That will disconnect the battery, which won't stop the fire but will make firefighting slightly safer.
It's incredible how they talk about solid state batteries in the safer batteries section, but not about LFP batteries, which are much safer than the usual NMC and NCA batteries.
*Electric vehicles are 20 times LESS likely to catch fire than ICE vehicles*