Scary stuff. Odd to see it was such a recent model. Fast charging the EQE can take it from 10% to 80% in 31 minutes. That's an average of 126 kW of power delivered while charging. At peak it can...
Scary stuff. Odd to see it was such a recent model.
Fast charging the EQE can take it from 10% to 80% in 31 minutes. That's an average of 126 kW of power delivered while charging. At peak it can hit 170 kW. Absolutely bonkers.
Imagine running 170 microwaves off a single power plug. How can you not expect that to catch on fire?
I’m not sure this is a good way to look at it. 170kw isn’t actually especially fast for the EV market at present. E-GMP cars for instance have peak charge rates around 240kw. The fastest charging...
I’m not sure this is a good way to look at it. 170kw isn’t actually especially fast for the EV market at present. E-GMP cars for instance have peak charge rates around 240kw. The fastest charging cars on the market, like the Hummer EV and GMC Sierra EV charge at about 350kw. And ChargePoint is already developing next-gen charging stations for EV semi trucks that can charge at 3,000kw
I guess the way I see it, I expect the EQE and other EVs with far higher charge rates not to explode for the same reason I expect bigger boats, bridges, turbines and all manner of things not to fail catastrophically just by way of having more load stress placed on them. Which is to say…I expect someone to have engineered them to handle the stress, and to have put multiple safety systems in place to prevent catastrophic failure. For reference, both the car and charging station are supposed to shut off if an unsafe temperature is detected anywhere in the system.
Watching the video, it’s not even clear if the car was charging at the time? Unless I’m missing something. To me, this seems more like something else. I honestly can’t fathom what a driver could do to the car themselves that would cause this, despite whatever possibilities police are investigating, but I suppose it’s possible. What seems far more likely is poor quality control à la the Samsung Note 7 debacle. It’s also possible the car was recently damaged or even repaired incorrectly. If this were the case, it’s possible that no (edit: currently implemented) safety system could have prevented the accident, because the car was malfunctioning in some way.
Also, it’s important to remember that car fires are not unique to EVs. Everyone has probably seen the remains of a car fire somewhere in a parking lot or on the highway. Things that require a lot of power inevitably produce a lot of heat…and when something goes wrong and they can’t get rid of that heat, fire becomes a possibility. That’s kind of just the case for any vehicle no matter the fuel type. I don’t know of any fuel source that is inherently immune to this in some way.
As someone who has engineered an entire battery pack for a vehicle with a custom BMS, I would say that my concerns are decently well calibrated. I've seen a guy arc weld a wrench to a battery...
As someone who has engineered an entire battery pack for a vehicle with a custom BMS, I would say that my concerns are decently well calibrated. I've seen a guy arc weld a wrench to a battery terminal that was already split into a "safe" maintenance configuration. If I hadn't been a major PITA about PPE, he'd have been dead instantly. 120, 240, or 360 kW are all within the same order of magnitude, which is strictly dangerous.
As you said- quality control, damage and repair issues are to be expected in any long-lived, high-quantity consumer product. But you can't simultaneously expect "someone to have engineered them... to prevent catastrophic failure" while recognizing that "poor quality control" can persist. Engineering is quality control. You're not buying a CAD model. You're buying what comes off the production line, bumps along in transport, sits through inclement weather for years, then, in a moment of desparation, is subjected to a bargain-bin fast charger that cut out a few capacitors and doesn't quite meet power delivery spec. Problems are to be expected.
And yes, the industry has performed nothing short of miraculous work to even get them to this level of reliability. The safety systems are certainly enough to keep the drivers safe, and I'd say any difference in operator danger with gasoline cars is negligible. But at the same time, we don't allow thousands of gasoline-based cars to refill in the underground parking garages of high-rise apartment buildings. That is a little insane.
To be fair, it's usually more like plugging into a basic wall outlet and slowly charging. L2 chargers are high power, but they're not even close to L3 super charging speeds.
But at the same time, we don't allow thousands of gasoline-based cars to refill in the underground parking garages of high-rise apartment buildings
To be fair, it's usually more like plugging into a basic wall outlet and slowly charging. L2 chargers are high power, but they're not even close to L3 super charging speeds.
Hey, this is a complete tangent, but since you might know first hand: may I ask why you figure that battery swap stations never took off for personal EVs? I always figured that they made a tonne...
Hey, this is a complete tangent, but since you might know first hand: may I ask why you figure that battery swap stations never took off for personal EVs? I always figured that they made a tonne of sense as compared to fast chargers, especially if skates and cell packs were designed to be “swappable first” so to speak.
Business-y folks seem to claim that it was due to consumers not wanting to rent their batteries (seems pretty easily avoidable by having a buy out clause), and “other technical” folks have said it’s because fast charging is so easily deployed comparatively (maybe plausible, but literally rolling specially made cells out of a fireproof bay seems like a small amount of additional sophistication).
Still doesn’t seem like either are a slam dunk, so to speak; I’m curious if a technical person in the industry has a different take?
Not in the industry, but these days battery packs are an integral part of the vehicle's structure as well. It would be a huge waste of material to duplicate that structure, once around the...
Not in the industry, but these days battery packs are an integral part of the vehicle's structure as well. It would be a huge waste of material to duplicate that structure, once around the batteries and once to hold car together. Not to mention if it is a replaceable structural component, it will be quite hard to fasten into place reliability.
So I think the answer here is d) all of the above. All these are real issues, maybe fixable, but together they're more trouble than it is worth.
Oof, Safari ate my response XD thank you for your reply :) this does feel a bit hand wavy, though, since that line of reasoning would also apply to doors (they’re structural and hard to fasten in...
Oof, Safari ate my response XD thank you for your reply :) this does feel a bit hand wavy, though, since that line of reasoning would also apply to doors (they’re structural and hard to fasten in place), for example.
I’m hoping for an underlying technical reason why they’re infeasible. For example, on a different subject: induction hobs can work on copper, but due to the atomic structure of copper vs steel metals, the efficiency is lower and the electronics are more expensive. Since the US market is price sensitive and dislikes induction to begin with, we haven’t seen them penetrate the North American market.
Battery swap stations are common in Chinese cities, where the rate of EV ownership among apartment/condo residents are much higher than in the US. Tom Scott did an episode on them.
Battery swap stations are common in Chinese cities, where the rate of EV ownership among apartment/condo residents are much higher than in the US. Tom Scott did an episode on them.
Aah, neat, thanks for the Tom Scott video! I've heard of (and done some research into) Chinese EV battery swapping systems, but my understanding was that they weren't terribly frequently used and...
Aah, neat, thanks for the Tom Scott video! I've heard of (and done some research into) Chinese EV battery swapping systems, but my understanding was that they weren't terribly frequently used and were primarily a marketing gimmick. Scooter battery swaps (gogoro in particular) seemed like they'd gotten a foothold, though that's a very different market than America's for EVs.
Think of it this way: if you were swapping to winter tires for a few months, would you be okay with just installing some random person's tires? If you were picking up a kid from daycare, does it...
Think of it this way: if you were swapping to winter tires for a few months, would you be okay with just installing some random person's tires? If you were picking up a kid from daycare, does it matter if it's the same kid you dropped off?
EV batteries can be worth almost half of the overall car's value, and they're as liable to wear & tear as any other part of the car. If you only deplete to 30% then slow charge to 70%, maybe once a week, your battery will be healthy and happy. But the Uber driver who takes it to 1% then fast charges to 99%, a few times a day, will have a battery that could be the focus of tragic Russian literature.
You would be almost guaranteed to see the rise of arbitrage schemes where people move emaciated batteries out to high-traffic vacation routes on long weekends to snatch up well-treated batteries on the one day a year you actually need a battery swap.
Plus, most batteries are structurally integrated into the chassis and specific to one sub-model, so you couldn't get as much reuse out of a battery swap scheme as you'd like.
If Michelin or another company specific to tires offered a service to do this, it was a reasonable cost, and I trusted they're not willing to face a lawsuit enough to judge that the tires they...
Think of it this way: if you were swapping to winter tires for a few months, would you be okay with just installing some random person's tires?
If Michelin or another company specific to tires offered a service to do this, it was a reasonable cost, and I trusted they're not willing to face a lawsuit enough to judge that the tires they replace have sufficient tread, probably yes.
If you were picking up a kid from daycare, does it matter if it's the same kid you dropped off?
That's just silly. But if it's a cooler kid, and I'm willing to face a lawsuit -
EV batteries can be worth almost half of the overall car's value, and they're as liable to wear & tear as any other part of the car.
...Because you can't swap them out easily. If there was an easy way to engineer around the skateboard being important to the structure, then that's the solution.
An old early 2010s Leaf is like $3k now; they came with a ~77 mile range and they face degradation from that. But if you could go and swap the thing's battery in a snap to something holding 150-200 miles, then it'd be an insanely attractive cheap commuter option or way to refurbish them into city rentals.
Aah, gotcha -- it sounds like you figure it's the emotional argument of not owning the battery + a lack of enforced standardization across the industry. The latter definitely makes sense; North...
Aah, gotcha -- it sounds like you figure it's the emotional argument of not owning the battery + a lack of enforced standardization across the industry. The latter definitely makes sense; North America couldn't even agree on one fast charging standard up until recently 😅 thank you for the reply!
To be fair, that much power is getting spread out over an extremely large battery so each individual cell isn't seeing that which helps when visualizing the scale. At the same time, 170kW is an...
To be fair, that much power is getting spread out over an extremely large battery so each individual cell isn't seeing that which helps when visualizing the scale. At the same time, 170kW is an insane amount of power and the fact that there are cars that can soak EVEN MORE power is mind blowing. 170kW is similar to the baseload of a small neighborhood. Even 60kW is bananas.
What's really crazy to me are the AC/DC converters used for Level 3 and the proposed Level 4 charging ... are liquid cooled. And not just the device itself, but there is actually a closed-loop...
What's really crazy to me are the AC/DC converters used for Level 3 and the proposed Level 4 charging ... are liquid cooled. And not just the device itself, but there is actually a closed-loop coolant running through the cable that plugs into the car, so that even the cable stays cool. There's an image here of Tesla's proposed line capable of up to 1 MW (1,000 kW!)
I'm hoping that the tech advancements for solid state batteries, and whatever technologies make up the interim between that and LiFePO4/NMC, mean that batteries and EV electrical systems will become more stable and less fire-prone. My vehicle can theoretically charge in excess of 150kW, but I haven't seen it because the battery is probably too hot by the time I start fast-charging. I also only charge it outside and in the open.
As I've posted before, it's also pretty cool that supercars and expensive sports cars that can charge at 430kW via 800V DC chargers. But I wouldn't want to charge those in an enclosed space and I think most of the chargers that exist are either at race tracks or at prestige spots (like Porsche's HQ in Germany).
Seeing things like this gives me mixed feelings about installing a charger in my garage, although realistically the risk is quite low (as mentioned by Lapbunny) and probably lowered further by the...
Seeing things like this gives me mixed feelings about installing a charger in my garage, although realistically the risk is quite low (as mentioned by Lapbunny) and probably lowered further by the lower charge rate of L2. There's also the fact that the situation probably wouldn't materially improve much if my car caught on fire in my driveway instead of my garage.
It'll be a good thing when less volatile battery chemistries have the energy density and cost effectiveness to replace lithium-ion batteries.
Thanks for reminding me I need to call the company that installed my charger because the breaker they had to install next to my charger melted. At least the breaker in the basement box eventually...
Thanks for reminding me I need to call the company that installed my charger because the breaker they had to install next to my charger melted. At least the breaker in the basement box eventually flipped.
Yikes, that's scary. What brand of charger, if you don't mind my asking? Also wonder if risk of this kind of thing is lower if e.g. charger is installed right next to a garage breaker box.
Yikes, that's scary. What brand of charger, if you don't mind my asking? Also wonder if risk of this kind of thing is lower if e.g. charger is installed right next to a garage breaker box.
No matter what type of energy storage we use, energy storage is energy storage. Any damage that causes that energy to be released quickly will create a dangerous situation. With chemical storage,...
No matter what type of energy storage we use, energy storage is energy storage. Any damage that causes that energy to be released quickly will create a dangerous situation. With chemical storage, a-la fossil fuels and chemical batteries, thats a fire. With flywheels, its a fragmentation explosion. Superconducting energy storage? Also explosions. Theres no reason to expect any battery chemistry to be less volatile, by the sheer nature of high energy densities.
That depends on your house and a bunch of things, but generally I would take a fire outside vs inside any day. You'd get more time to escape, have a chance of not rendering your home unlivable,...
There's also the fact that the situation probably wouldn't materially improve much if my car caught on fire in my driveway instead of my garage.
That depends on your house and a bunch of things, but generally I would take a fire outside vs inside any day. You'd get more time to escape, have a chance of not rendering your home unlivable, and I think you would have way less smoke in your house while you escaped.
In my case there's a bunch of trees not too far from the house, with one of the closest ones having branches directly over the driveway. If the car caught fire, it would too. The house also...
In my case there's a bunch of trees not too far from the house, with one of the closest ones having branches directly over the driveway. If the car caught fire, it would too. The house also overhangs the driveway somewhat. It might still be a bit better but the difference might not be all that great.
I wouldn't be opposed to just parking in the driveway anyway, but letting it sit out in the weather isn't great for the paint job.
I forgot to add... when I had an EV we installed the charger inside the garage but ran the cable under the door so we could charge in the driveway. We hung the charge plug thing on the newspaper...
I forgot to add... when I had an EV we installed the charger inside the garage but ran the cable under the door so we could charge in the driveway. We hung the charge plug thing on the newspaper hanger thing under the mailbox.
We wanted to keep the charger out of the weather but we mainly park outside.
Two questions: (1) parkade no sprinklers? (2) Surely this is a very isolated incident, since this model would have been on the streets for two years now.
Two questions: (1) parkade no sprinklers? (2) Surely this is a very isolated incident, since this model would have been on the streets for two years now.
EV fires are notoriously difficult to put out, and a sprinkler would at best suppress stuff around it. Even if they had a system, the thing would probably be burning for quite a while. Probably;...
EV fires are notoriously difficult to put out, and a sprinkler would at best suppress stuff around it. Even if they had a system, the thing would probably be burning for quite a while.
It's also a more interesting than an ICE car fire. It's still a novelty, so it grabs more headlines. Just like with autonomous cars. Statistically, they are already safer than a human (with huge...
he fires are much more hazardous and much harder to put out.
It's also a more interesting than an ICE car fire. It's still a novelty, so it grabs more headlines. Just like with autonomous cars. Statistically, they are already safer than a human (with huge caveats for weather conditions, etc) however any AV crash is going to make headlines. As opposed to non-AV cars, which have thousands of accidents every day.
To the point of sprinklers, while dumping water on a lithium fire won't extinguish it, it will reduce the temperature immediately around the fire and will make a big difference for mitigating and...
To the point of sprinklers, while dumping water on a lithium fire won't extinguish it, it will reduce the temperature immediately around the fire and will make a big difference for mitigating and minimizing the damage surrounding the fire (which you kind of touch on, just expanding).
Scary stuff. Odd to see it was such a recent model.
Fast charging the EQE can take it from 10% to 80% in 31 minutes. That's an average of 126 kW of power delivered while charging. At peak it can hit 170 kW. Absolutely bonkers.
Imagine running 170 microwaves off a single power plug. How can you not expect that to catch on fire?
I’m not sure this is a good way to look at it. 170kw isn’t actually especially fast for the EV market at present. E-GMP cars for instance have peak charge rates around 240kw. The fastest charging cars on the market, like the Hummer EV and GMC Sierra EV charge at about 350kw. And ChargePoint is already developing next-gen charging stations for EV semi trucks that can charge at 3,000kw
I guess the way I see it, I expect the EQE and other EVs with far higher charge rates not to explode for the same reason I expect bigger boats, bridges, turbines and all manner of things not to fail catastrophically just by way of having more load stress placed on them. Which is to say…I expect someone to have engineered them to handle the stress, and to have put multiple safety systems in place to prevent catastrophic failure. For reference, both the car and charging station are supposed to shut off if an unsafe temperature is detected anywhere in the system.
Watching the video, it’s not even clear if the car was charging at the time? Unless I’m missing something. To me, this seems more like something else. I honestly can’t fathom what a driver could do to the car themselves that would cause this, despite whatever possibilities police are investigating, but I suppose it’s possible. What seems far more likely is poor quality control à la the Samsung Note 7 debacle. It’s also possible the car was recently damaged or even repaired incorrectly. If this were the case, it’s possible that no (edit: currently implemented) safety system could have prevented the accident, because the car was malfunctioning in some way.
Also, it’s important to remember that car fires are not unique to EVs. Everyone has probably seen the remains of a car fire somewhere in a parking lot or on the highway. Things that require a lot of power inevitably produce a lot of heat…and when something goes wrong and they can’t get rid of that heat, fire becomes a possibility. That’s kind of just the case for any vehicle no matter the fuel type. I don’t know of any fuel source that is inherently immune to this in some way.
As someone who has engineered an entire battery pack for a vehicle with a custom BMS, I would say that my concerns are decently well calibrated. I've seen a guy arc weld a wrench to a battery terminal that was already split into a "safe" maintenance configuration. If I hadn't been a major PITA about PPE, he'd have been dead instantly. 120, 240, or 360 kW are all within the same order of magnitude, which is strictly dangerous.
As you said- quality control, damage and repair issues are to be expected in any long-lived, high-quantity consumer product. But you can't simultaneously expect "someone to have engineered them... to prevent catastrophic failure" while recognizing that "poor quality control" can persist. Engineering is quality control. You're not buying a CAD model. You're buying what comes off the production line, bumps along in transport, sits through inclement weather for years, then, in a moment of desparation, is subjected to a bargain-bin fast charger that cut out a few capacitors and doesn't quite meet power delivery spec. Problems are to be expected.
And yes, the industry has performed nothing short of miraculous work to even get them to this level of reliability. The safety systems are certainly enough to keep the drivers safe, and I'd say any difference in operator danger with gasoline cars is negligible. But at the same time, we don't allow thousands of gasoline-based cars to refill in the underground parking garages of high-rise apartment buildings. That is a little insane.
To be fair, it's usually more like plugging into a basic wall outlet and slowly charging. L2 chargers are high power, but they're not even close to L3 super charging speeds.
Hey, this is a complete tangent, but since you might know first hand: may I ask why you figure that battery swap stations never took off for personal EVs? I always figured that they made a tonne of sense as compared to fast chargers, especially if skates and cell packs were designed to be “swappable first” so to speak.
Business-y folks seem to claim that it was due to consumers not wanting to rent their batteries (seems pretty easily avoidable by having a buy out clause), and “other technical” folks have said it’s because fast charging is so easily deployed comparatively (maybe plausible, but literally rolling specially made cells out of a fireproof bay seems like a small amount of additional sophistication).
Still doesn’t seem like either are a slam dunk, so to speak; I’m curious if a technical person in the industry has a different take?
Not in the industry, but these days battery packs are an integral part of the vehicle's structure as well. It would be a huge waste of material to duplicate that structure, once around the batteries and once to hold car together. Not to mention if it is a replaceable structural component, it will be quite hard to fasten into place reliability.
So I think the answer here is d) all of the above. All these are real issues, maybe fixable, but together they're more trouble than it is worth.
Oof, Safari ate my response XD thank you for your reply :) this does feel a bit hand wavy, though, since that line of reasoning would also apply to doors (they’re structural and hard to fasten in place), for example.
I’m hoping for an underlying technical reason why they’re infeasible. For example, on a different subject: induction hobs can work on copper, but due to the atomic structure of copper vs steel metals, the efficiency is lower and the electronics are more expensive. Since the US market is price sensitive and dislikes induction to begin with, we haven’t seen them penetrate the North American market.
Battery swap stations are common in Chinese cities, where the rate of EV ownership among apartment/condo residents are much higher than in the US. Tom Scott did an episode on them.
Aah, neat, thanks for the Tom Scott video! I've heard of (and done some research into) Chinese EV battery swapping systems, but my understanding was that they weren't terribly frequently used and were primarily a marketing gimmick. Scooter battery swaps (gogoro in particular) seemed like they'd gotten a foothold, though that's a very different market than America's for EVs.
Think of it this way: if you were swapping to winter tires for a few months, would you be okay with just installing some random person's tires? If you were picking up a kid from daycare, does it matter if it's the same kid you dropped off?
EV batteries can be worth almost half of the overall car's value, and they're as liable to wear & tear as any other part of the car. If you only deplete to 30% then slow charge to 70%, maybe once a week, your battery will be healthy and happy. But the Uber driver who takes it to 1% then fast charges to 99%, a few times a day, will have a battery that could be the focus of tragic Russian literature.
You would be almost guaranteed to see the rise of arbitrage schemes where people move emaciated batteries out to high-traffic vacation routes on long weekends to snatch up well-treated batteries on the one day a year you actually need a battery swap.
Plus, most batteries are structurally integrated into the chassis and specific to one sub-model, so you couldn't get as much reuse out of a battery swap scheme as you'd like.
If Michelin or another company specific to tires offered a service to do this, it was a reasonable cost, and I trusted they're not willing to face a lawsuit enough to judge that the tires they replace have sufficient tread, probably yes.
That's just silly. But if it's a cooler kid, and I'm willing to face a lawsuit -
...Because you can't swap them out easily. If there was an easy way to engineer around the skateboard being important to the structure, then that's the solution.
An old early 2010s Leaf is like $3k now; they came with a ~77 mile range and they face degradation from that. But if you could go and swap the thing's battery in a snap to something holding 150-200 miles, then it'd be an insanely attractive cheap commuter option or way to refurbish them into city rentals.
Aah, gotcha -- it sounds like you figure it's the emotional argument of not owning the battery + a lack of enforced standardization across the industry. The latter definitely makes sense; North America couldn't even agree on one fast charging standard up until recently 😅 thank you for the reply!
To be fair, that much power is getting spread out over an extremely large battery so each individual cell isn't seeing that which helps when visualizing the scale. At the same time, 170kW is an insane amount of power and the fact that there are cars that can soak EVEN MORE power is mind blowing. 170kW is similar to the baseload of a small neighborhood. Even 60kW is bananas.
This was a parking garage. I highly doubt the car was fast charging and it's entirely possible it wasn't even charging at all.
What's really crazy to me are the AC/DC converters used for Level 3 and the proposed Level 4 charging ... are liquid cooled. And not just the device itself, but there is actually a closed-loop coolant running through the cable that plugs into the car, so that even the cable stays cool. There's an image here of Tesla's proposed line capable of up to 1 MW (1,000 kW!)
I'm hoping that the tech advancements for solid state batteries, and whatever technologies make up the interim between that and LiFePO4/NMC, mean that batteries and EV electrical systems will become more stable and less fire-prone. My vehicle can theoretically charge in excess of 150kW, but I haven't seen it because the battery is probably too hot by the time I start fast-charging. I also only charge it outside and in the open.
As I've posted before, it's also pretty cool that supercars and expensive sports cars that can charge at 430kW via 800V DC chargers. But I wouldn't want to charge those in an enclosed space and I think most of the chargers that exist are either at race tracks or at prestige spots (like Porsche's HQ in Germany).
That is actually insane.
Seeing things like this gives me mixed feelings about installing a charger in my garage, although realistically the risk is quite low (as mentioned by Lapbunny) and probably lowered further by the lower charge rate of L2. There's also the fact that the situation probably wouldn't materially improve much if my car caught on fire in my driveway instead of my garage.
It'll be a good thing when less volatile battery chemistries have the energy density and cost effectiveness to replace lithium-ion batteries.
Thanks for reminding me I need to call the company that installed my charger because the breaker they had to install next to my charger melted. At least the breaker in the basement box eventually flipped.
Yikes, that's scary. What brand of charger, if you don't mind my asking? Also wonder if risk of this kind of thing is lower if e.g. charger is installed right next to a garage breaker box.
The charger wasn't the problem; it was the actual breaker box that local code required to be installed next to the charger.
No matter what type of energy storage we use, energy storage is energy storage. Any damage that causes that energy to be released quickly will create a dangerous situation. With chemical storage, a-la fossil fuels and chemical batteries, thats a fire. With flywheels, its a fragmentation explosion. Superconducting energy storage? Also explosions. Theres no reason to expect any battery chemistry to be less volatile, by the sheer nature of high energy densities.
That depends on your house and a bunch of things, but generally I would take a fire outside vs inside any day. You'd get more time to escape, have a chance of not rendering your home unlivable, and I think you would have way less smoke in your house while you escaped.
In my case there's a bunch of trees not too far from the house, with one of the closest ones having branches directly over the driveway. If the car caught fire, it would too. The house also overhangs the driveway somewhat. It might still be a bit better but the difference might not be all that great.
I wouldn't be opposed to just parking in the driveway anyway, but letting it sit out in the weather isn't great for the paint job.
I forgot to add... when I had an EV we installed the charger inside the garage but ran the cable under the door so we could charge in the driveway. We hung the charge plug thing on the newspaper hanger thing under the mailbox.
We wanted to keep the charger out of the weather but we mainly park outside.
Two questions: (1) parkade no sprinklers? (2) Surely this is a very isolated incident, since this model would have been on the streets for two years now.
EV fires are notoriously difficult to put out, and a sprinkler would at best suppress stuff around it. Even if they had a system, the thing would probably be burning for quite a while.
Probably; Edmunds cites studies that the EV fire risk is at 0.0012% of cars vs 0.1% of ICE cars. But again, the fires are much more hazardous and much harder to put out. Some risk assessment guy at MBG is probably staring blankly at a screen on a call right now.
It's also a more interesting than an ICE car fire. It's still a novelty, so it grabs more headlines. Just like with autonomous cars. Statistically, they are already safer than a human (with huge caveats for weather conditions, etc) however any AV crash is going to make headlines. As opposed to non-AV cars, which have thousands of accidents every day.
This is roughly analogous to nuclear energy. Way fewer safety incidents, and way cleaner operation, but when there are failures, they’re really dire.
To the point of sprinklers, while dumping water on a lithium fire won't extinguish it, it will reduce the temperature immediately around the fire and will make a big difference for mitigating and minimizing the damage surrounding the fire (which you kind of touch on, just expanding).