I appreciate you posting this (though I don’t appreciate the AI slop image) but those numbers are a little sus. I posted a comment about this recently and included this link- https://ev-lectron.com/blogs/blog/ev-fires-vs-ice-fires-safety-comparison-and-analysis
I have hard time believing the stats in the picture.
So around 3.5% of all the hybrids eventually die in fire? Really? That number seems like it’s way too high.
I know EVs are safer in this regard, but I just can’t believe hybrids and gasoline cars being that bad. Do we have a source for this information?
P.S. The photos seem to be AI generated FWIW…
Furthermore, if its a world-wide stat, these chinese govt has produced a massive amount of EVs that they’ve parked in the middle of no where. If the EVs in the stats aren’t being driven, this isnt accurate.
I do not have anything against EVs, just misleading stats. But cant verify with no sources listed.
Fact 1: Car fires always neatly pop out of the engine block, they also have very little smoke due to the fact that cars themselves are a clean burning resource.
Fact 2: To put out a car fire you spray the side of the car as spraying the actual fire or engine block will make the fire VERY angry … and no one wants that.
is this ai? the firefighters dont seem to be holding anything and the firetruck looks wierd aswell.
Probably AI generated, yes. That caught my eye as well…
Oh you’re totally right, notice how the angle and position of the car is the same in each picture? The background also looks similar
Is the lesson here to drive diesel then? It doesn’t burn on it’s own like gasoline or lithium-ion batteries does.
Sounds like correlated data. Is this per year, or since cars were invented? I’ve heard lots of horror stories about evs catching fire and locking occupants inside. That doesn’t happen with gas cars
The locking inside thing is due to a weird number of EV’s insisting on completely electronically controlled door handles and locks. So if the electronics go out, you become trapped. If they just used normal mechanically controlled doors, that wouldn’t happen.
I think China is banning hidden door handles so hopefully that drives the rest of the industry to get rid of it.
ok but show the ev fires at least…
40hours to wait for an EV battery fire too calm down from a truck accident carrying the batteries. I’m not saying evs are bad by any means, but this image is disingenuous imo.
The actual images are also generated slop.
Well yeah it’s blatant propaganda. lol
The picture you offer for comparison is literally a truck load of batteries though. Seeing that an EV’s battery typically fits under the floor pan of the car, are we talking like, the equivalent of 10 cars worth of batteries in that pic?
But once the interior of a car catches fire from whatever starting source the pictures all look pretty much the same as they’re all filled with lovely hydrocarbon-based plastics that all burn in the same manner.
Well, except for the fact that lithium fires don’t go out. Like, you have to bury the entire vehicle in water to starve it from oxygen so that the fire will stop burning, and if you take it out of the water, then it will start burning again.
Like, don’t get me wrong. I’m very pro electric vehicle, but the quality of the fire matters just as much as the quantity of the fire.
Truck with burning batteries would be akin to a truck with a damaged burning fuel cistern/tank.
They make up for lost time I guess
A burning diesel trunk.
If it had been an electric truck 98% chance it wouldn’t have been on fire in the first place.
i wonder why hybrids catch fire at apparently twice the rate
Increased complexity from the other two solutions. More than just the two added together.
There was a video from a youtube channel of a towing company that was them going out to an EV fire and they had to shut down a major road for a port and it took them, like, 3 days of just monitoring the vehicle before they felt it was anywhere close to being safe enough to tow/extract so they could bring it somewhere else to allow it to fully burn itself out. There’s also a major concern for EV fires in tunnels cause there a lot of ways to fire suppress in a tunnel for an ICE vehicle and there’s just… no way to stop lithium from going up and continuing to burn.
Basically, we shouldn’t treat EVs like they’re a magic bullet when they can be MORE dangerous in a lot of ways. It’s important to get off of gas and oil as soon as possible but we STILL have to acknowledge the dangers. Chemistry IS STILL CHEMISTRY whether it’s gasoline or a lithium battery.
Which is why sodium batteries are becoming a thing.
Sure, but those are unlikely to be used in cars any time soon, if ever.
They are already in production.
Oh shit that’s dope. I had no idea. Looks like they’re on the lower end of range (less than 300miles at best) but expect to make up for it in extreme weather handling.
Specifically, this car has an expected cell energy density of up to 175 Wh/kg while lithium batteries are usually around 150-300 wh/kg. That’s a lot more comparable than I had thought they were.
I hope sodium stands up in the test of time but it’s going to be a whiiile since there are still manufacturing at scale hurdles. Tho them working at lower temps will def help EVs sold up north. The only sodium battery in a commercial application that I’m aware of is a Bluetti power station and that seemed to be mostly “okay” but it only came out last year.
They are already in production.
Bad comparison.
Because, showing the frequency without the proper filtering of the cause of the fire don’t make any sens.Give us the number of death caused by burning car by type of car, it will be much more revealing of the safety of the cars.
And yes the image is ai generated.
Also, a lot of those EV fires are deadly because Tesla doesn’t put mechanical door handles on its cars. People can’t get out of them the same way you can on older cars.
something like less than 10% of US cars are EV.
The problem is that as they increase the equipment to put out a lithium fires is a different thing. The Telsa EV 18 wheeler truck that caught fire required planes that dump water on wild fires to put it out.
ICE fires are super dangerous. Gasoline is explosive not just flammable.
But don’t undercut the reality of contemporary fire departments’ budgets not being able to keep up with a lithium soaked world.
Water can’t put a battery fire out. The only way is to cool it for long enough (in the order of magnitude of several days) to stop the fire from reigniting.
The issue is water eventually stops one type. 🙄
Getting a flaming car to sit in a pool ain’t easy.
The problem is that water puts out fuel fires, but fuels battery fires.
fuels battery fires
Not true. They put out burning electric cars with water all the time. The issue is that it usually won’t stop the thermal runaway reaction - it just pauses it. The car might re-ignite on its own later. That’s why my local fire station has a container full of water that they submerge the car in to cool the battery pack down and actually stop the reaction.
According to various tests, water has been found to have the most effective cooling effect. On the other hand, different reports have stated that extinguishing battery packs has in the worst cases taken several hours and required several cubic meters of extinguishing/cooling water.
Especially in Central Europe, in certain areas, so-called extinguishing platforms are commonly used for extinguishing and cooling electric vehicle battery fires. In the extinguishing platform method, the car is submerged in water. The advantage of this method is that it effectively prevents the fire from spreading, and the contaminated extinguishing water can also be collected. In the method, all battery cells - including undamaged ones - go into short circuit, and as a result, no combustion energy remains in the battery pack.
In practice, this means at least several days of submersion to ensure that all battery cells have short-circuited and that the battery’s charge has been completely discharged. As the fleet of electric vehicles becomes more widespread, it is worth considering whether submerging the vehicle is an efficient and appropriate method.
Firemen know that, they are trained to use foam and dust for electrical fires even if no lithium batteries are present.
Also it’s hard (or close to impossible maybe?) to extinguish a burning car with water if the petrol or diesel tank catches fire. There isn’t much difference in that regard to EVs (maybe in terms of how long after the apparent flames a battery might rekindle the flames).
It took the firemen 45 minutes to put out my car after the full fuel tank ruptured.
An EV catching fire isn’t an ‘electrical fire’, it’s a metal fire. That’s why it takes so long to put out and you just kind of try to suffocate it and let it die out.
(I didn’t know/heard about it on safety meetings that the firefighters differentiate between them, but that makes sense. “Electrical fire” in the firefighter sense, which includes gasoline burning on some wires that carry current.)
Big battery safety is a very new thing tho, a bit like ice vehicles stopped being rolling fireballs after a few decades, I’m sure batteries will integrate fire safety features (ducts, chemicals, switches, or just different types of materials used to store charge).
You should use a fire extinguisher in any case
Please learn about fire extinguishers before using one.
To be a (still realistic) meme the pic needs one more panel to the left with that one really unbelievably combustible EV :).
Every single person who spouts shit about EV fires also spends well over 20 hours a day with exactly the same battery technology six inches from their genitalia.
…they sleep with those batteries next to their faces.
…they abuse the hell out of the containers those batteries sit in. Drops, overheating, extreme temperatures, overcharging.
…most of them have multiple batteries in multiple devices on them. You stick them in your fucking ears. You wear them on your wrists.
But it’s the car that’s dangerous. Definitely the car. Not the bomb next to your dick.
I don’t want to fucking hear it.
While I agree with your sentiment, the glaring difference is none of the items you listed are used in situations which result in high speed, high mass, and resultantly high energy collisions.
EV fires wouldn’t be as newsworthy if Tesla didn’t have idiotic door latch mechanisms that trap occupants in their cars. EV fires would be less impactful if they didn’t use lithium batteries and if those batteries didn’t typically span the bottom of the passenger compartment.
Yeah, I totally can’t take the ear bud out once it’s caught on fire, it’s a really poor design…
Yeah, man, people walk around with little sticks of dynamite, why are they concerned about the literal ton of TNT on these cars? They’re equally dangerous! /s
I don’t disagree that it’s an overblown issue, but it’s not NOT an issue. EVs will burn for longer, hotter, and are harder to put out than ICE vehicles, but I don’t think it’s a compelling argument against adoption.
But the difference in scale between the examples you gave is extremely hilarious
