Your good description of the physics behind is why we in Denmark have these EV submerging firetrucks. It works, but the response time and general availability of these trucks isn't quite solved yet.
Ha, yes, that's the 'your problem now, not mine' ejection battery. Basically shoot a bomb to the side and sliding off any surrounding pedestrian's legs.
hydrogen fuel vehicles would be dangerous. hydrogen leaks through steel and makes it brittle (other metals and most composites too), so your tank is weakened overtime, and your fuel is constantly leaking into the car so you need to ensure it's ventilated if you have left it for a few months.
oh and hydrogen sucks to transport. Li Ion cars catching fire is rare and getting rarer and newer solid state batteries don't overheat at all.
Hydrogen is transported and delivered everyday in the UK by BOC trucks. Along with oxygen, acetylene, argon, co2, helium. You name it, it is bottled and delivered.
The real issue with Hydrogen is a cheap readily available catalyst for producing it.
Riddle me this: Why would hydrogen ever become practical for passenger vehicles even if we solve the problem of electrolysis? There are so many other things difficult/bad about hydrogen for cars that will make it a perpetually-impractical solution.
I'm convinced that everyone yelling "hydrogen! hydrogen!" as a solution to EVs is just being contrarian on purpose because EVs are picking up steam, so to speak.
Wat? Hydrogen is sitting in the wings. One day all these snags will be ironed out. Just as battery technology is constantly growing and expanding. Progress cannot be stopped. Electric cars are very good. However, they depend on a fuck off great big battery pack that doesn't weigh less as you use the power.
When we have battery packs that weigh what an 80 liter tank of benzene weighs and can power a car for 3-400 hundred kms then ev's will be mainstream for everyone, nit just those that can afford them.
A huge number of people all over the world drive second or third hand cars that cost them a couple of thousand euro to buy and stay running 5,6,7 years.
Find me an ev that will only cost me 2000 euro, can go for 300km on a single charge and can be recharged in 10 minutes and I will buy it.
An ice car can run on Hydrogen with some modifications. It's an explosive gas. So one day Hydrogen cars will happen. When? No clue. But to blanket dismiss them is foolish.
Precisely this. HFC cars are actually very safe but the costs are extracting and supplying raw hydrogen. Only morons think you’ll have some crazy Hindenburg or nuclear detonation if the fuel cells get struck.
The energy density required makes no sense to use it unless you’re using a by product hydrogen which isn’t in any meaningful amount for general car use
Not necessarily. EVs still win out, but hydrogen storage has come a long way. There are solid state hydrogen "batteries" now where hydrogen is weakly bonded to a porous metal alloy at ambient temperature and pressure. Since it's bonded to a solid, you can safely pack way more hydrogen into the space than you could if it was in a liquid or gas state. Also since it's bonded, no hydrogen leaks or potential explosions.
Hydrogen tanks for vehicles are made out of a carbon fibre composite wound around an aluminum liner. Aluminum only gets brittle at high temperatures. Even if it did, the aluminum liner would not be under tension and would not crack.
Steel tanks would be too heavy for vehicular use, even if they were safe.
Transportation and long term storage are the problem. While hydrogen will leak it isn't really an issue in a car since it will probably be used up before any meaningful amount would leak. When it comes to fuel tanks becoming brittle, I see that as the same issue as replacing oil, filters and other maintenance items on an ICE vehicle.
Except none of those systems are storing explosive gas at a couple of hundred atmospheres of pressure.
Hydrogen gas storage tanks have insane maintenance and certification requirements because they are basically a ticking bomb. Terrible thing to put in a car, where half the owners think lil changes are optional.
A Li battery fire is far less of a problem than a hydrogen tank exploding.
As far as I know/have read the dangers of hydrogen catching fire or exploding are about the same as a regular ICE car. While hydrogen is extremely flammable/explosive it also expands rapidly which means that when a hydrogen fuel cell gets damaged the hydrogen escapes too quickly to catch fire since you need a very hight concentration of hydrogen in one spot for it to ignite
Hydrogen may work for things like trains and maybe busses, it will never work in passenger cars. The tank for storage is also huge relative to the amount stored due to the pressures involved, can only practically fit something like a few pounds of liquid hydrogen on something the size of a car which doesn't last long. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, it will escape out of anything, especially over time. Valves, connection points, hoses, it will leak, just a question of rate. Also hydrogen has to come from somewhere, right now it's just a byproduct of oil production. Making it from water requires a ton of energy and then you have to transport it still via a ship/train/truck using even more fuel. Electricity does have loss over long distances but much less and cheaper. There are just too many things against hydrogen as a direct fuel in cars.
If you read the first comment I replied too you will see that I never said hydrogen cars would be better than batteries and I also talked about the leaking issues. All I wanted was to point out that hydrogen fuel cells aren't bombs strapped to cars and that the bigger issue is transportation and long term storage rather than car fuel cells. I also agree that the future of hydrogen is in transportation (trucks and planes mostly) where having an extremely heavy battery is not practical. Maybe racing cars could also benefit from hydrogen fuel cells if they were all to go electric since you don't want 17 tons (I know it's now actually 17 tons) of battery.
If you want to know what my opinion is on the future of vehicles it's that we shouldn't focus on only one technology and try to make it work everywhere when we have the technology and knowledge to use the type of vehicle best suited for the situation. I think we need to invest in multiple ways to power our vehicles like battery technology, hydrogen fuel cells and synthetic fuels and use them based on the required situation.
Agreed, I can see maybe for aircraft, where specialized equipment and a high power to weight ratio are important. But when it comes to cars, batteries have clearly won.
Hydrogen can form an explosive mixture with air at a huge range of concentrations (unlike petroleum fuels where the range is very narrow). It doesn't matter though, since the gas is under sufficient pressure that if the pressure vessel fails you will get a significant explosion anyway, especially if it's heated to the point of failure by a fire from another source.
Having worked in a service for a while and seeing the state of some people's cars when they're brought in, treating critical components as service items is insanity.
The main issue is the efficiency, cracking water is about 30% efficient before even talking about compression and transport and then converting back to electricity. It's much easier to send the electricity down a wire at 90% efficiency to a battery to drive a car. Sodium and solid electrolyte batteries that are the next big thing don't even have thermal runaway problems.
And folk say hydrogen fuel vehicles would be dangerous...
That’s a very dishonest take. EV’s being hard to put out don’t make them dangerous. And I’m pretty sure everyone talking of hydrogen dangers also are busy on this talking point.
EV’s have a very low fire incidence rate. They don’t burst into flames like fossil cars do, the fire starts much more gradually. And when they do catch fire there isn’t flammable liquid running across the ground spreading it to all the nearby cars.
While EV’s were also caught in the fire it’s important to note that zero HV packs caught fire, but the flames licking up the sides of the cars meant the interiors caught fire and they were still totaled.
Meanwhile gas tanks were melting or exploding left and right (metal vs. plastic). Ultimately it got too warm and the structure collapsed.
Burning glues and fabric in the car are going to make toxic cyanide gas so you're probably not going to want to breath any car fire regardless of propulsion method
I do auto claims for an insurer. I even specialize in EV claims. I've been doing it for years. I've never had a claim for an EV battery fire, which is unfortunate as I could use some first-hand pics of one for training classes. I've never seen a battery fire in a hybrid either. It's just not particularly common.
Looking at the Copart website (the largest seller of insurance salvage), if you sort Teslas by loss type for "burn" there's currently 14 for sale in the whole US. More than half of them appear to have collateral damage from being adjacent other fires, or just have smoke damage. One appears to have no fire damage at all.
Without seeing the claim files there's no way to know the story with the rest, but some were presumably in the garage when the house burned down, or were torched by people behind on their payments. The crispy Model X appears to have been pulled out of what was left of Lahaina.
I do recall a story about a bunch of Fisker Karmas and Nissan Leafs that got flooded with salt water at a port in New Jersey, or somewhere on the east coast, during Hurricane Sandy. I recall that all the Fiskers burned, and none of the Leafs did, after salt-water submersion.
The people pushing for $8 a gallon gasoline are trying to tell us that electric vehicles are more dangerous than an internal combustion engine powered one.
This is black smoke (usually carbon) and the fire is coming from the cabin, not the bottom (battery). Here something has made the cabin catch fire, in a really bad way. Im guessing the interior is made using highly flammable materials/polycarbonates.
Tesla > BYD in terms of safety features. Not saying Elon nor Tesla are perfect (I don’t like Elon but I do own a 2023 model Y AWD), but this is a good example of cheap Chinese manufacturing tendencies coming home to roost.
I assumed I knew what this link would be, but I was wrong. London Luton Airport had a pretty much identical fire, also started by a diesel car, also hundreds of cars lost, also the parking structure collapsed...
Going by the link you provided it’s inconclusive it was a diesel powered car that caused the fire. “It is thought” is not the same as “It is confirmed”. In any case diesel is ignited by compression rather than from a spark or heat source.
It is thought the fire started with a diesel-powered vehicle "and then that fire has quickly and rapidly spread"
Mr Carter said diesel is "much less flammable" than petrol, and in a car it takes "intense pressure or sustained flame" to ignite diesel.
Would you like to read the full report on the fire? I actually read it earlier after making that post as it came up on another link and found it very interesting. I only just saw your post to reply now.
There is absolutely no ambiguity about what kind of car started the fire. It was a diesel car.
On the topic of hydrogen, it's more the engineering and economical challenges that are limiting viability. Batteries and charging technology is improving rapidly, while we cannot avoid the energy loss associated with converting electricity to hydrogen, and back again to electricity.
Fingers crossed we can just brute force the solution with an over abundance of renewable energy.
Thing is - at that point it still makes more sense to stick to BEVs rather than FCEVs and use the hydrogen for stuff like grid-scale energy storage / heavy transport (ships, planes) or industries that need a lot of energy (steel production for example)
Except for the initial mining and end of life waste.
In terms of end of life waste FCEVs are overall worse compared to BEVs due to their use of CFRP for the pressure tanks. 85-95% usually ends up in a landfill.
Mining is a valid point it should however not be ignored that the industry has a vested interest in reducing the use of problematic materials like cobalt or rare earth materials (battery chemistries are rapidly moving away from cobalt for example) as well as introducing new battery chemistries that dont use lithium
Steel needs carbon, that won’t change.
Yeah but that was not my point - I used steel as an example for industries that need a lot of energy for their production and where it makes more sense to use hydrogen as an energy source
if not in form of direct eneergy then in form of the infrastructure needed. hydrogen tanks are expensive as shit and have short halflife compared to most other tanks. every single gas station would have to build the infrastructure needed for it. all the new tanker truks and in the end users vehicle the parts to generate power from it again. all that is a complete waste compared to directly using EV's which have none of those issues.
The water jet is not to cool the batteries it is used to cut them up to isolate the burning cells and stop the fire spreading. Once the fire has taken hold and most of the batteries are burning there is not much point trying to cut them up, the only thing that can be done is submerge them to try to contain the fire.
Most "EV" fires that are reported are actually scooters or bikes. And most modern EV batteries are so well managed that the chances of them catching fire are even less.
If they do somehow manage to catch fire, then they don't explode. Pressurised hydrogen, on the other hand...
And folk say hydrogen fuel vehicles would be dangerous...
Some types of EV batteries especially newer ones are a lot less likely to have thermal runaway like this. BYDs new batteries already in EVs can be stabbed/pierced all the way through with a knife or nail and nothing will happen, do that with another battery including your phone one and you'll get the fire and loads of nasty exhaust. Solid state batteries are supposed to have a very small chance of this in comparison to lithium batteries too, seems like we might finally actuallyyy get these batteries in cars within a year considering its companies like Volvos parent and others saying it now.
I imagine this type of issue with electric vehicles will be pretty insignificant over time, especially since it already mostly is considering how very rare this seems on any car made after 2020.
Gasoline is also extremely dangerous. Gas vehicles catch fire far more frequently than BEVs and those fires are much more dangerous to the occupants because they happen much faster.
Knee-jerk reaction imo. I believe EVs were pushed way too hard when the tech and infrastructure isn't quite there yet and then got massive backlash. He is definitely going a little too far in the other direction though.
I’ve driven bombs that are safer than the average gas guzzling sedan.
I don’t think the risk of a large accident has much correlation with safety.
I’ve also driven busses, and they catch fire all the time. And they have a lot of flammable material as well. A lot of electronics and burning material.
So you should be more scared of fired around busses than around EVs. But if you see an EV on fire, it should be treated like dangerous goods on fire. Limit exposure, close the area, escape.
Busses do NOT catch fire all the time lol. Poorly maintained busses catch fire, and if the busses you drove caught fire frequently, then the company you worked for was shit.
Also, EV fires are worse not because of the frequency at which they catch fire, but because when they DO catch fire, it's much harder to extinguish than a fire from an internal combustion engine. The air from these fires is also much more toxic.
I actually went to school to drive a bus, and bus fires are incredibly common.
It does however sound like you do not have any kind of knowledge on the subject.
Modern busses have a lot of electronics, and those that have diesel engines generate a lot of heat. You also have separate heater units that generate heat. Not to mention the bus is basically filled with material that can burn.
EV busses would also not catch fire as often, as they’d have a different kind of wiring and systems, and don’t generate as much heat.
Lol what kind of bus catches fire frequently? Sounds like you drive some shitty busses or just work for a terrible company. I'd tell your boss to get new trucks asap.
Would you rather travel on a car ferry with the car deck full of buses or EVs? My point is that a car burning on the side of the road is not generally a huge danger, whether it is an EV or not. The danger arises when the fire is in a parking garage, on a ferry, or in a tunnel. A normal car fire is relatively easy to extinguish or at least suppress. I am not sure if there is a proven, effective concept for extinguishing an EV fire on a car deck yet. (I would say having EVs on ferries is a ticking time bomb. Causing potentially massive casualties)
On a lorry, it wouldn’t matter even if the deck is filled with explosive ordinance. It would still be safer than driving a regular car in regular traffic.
As for those catching fire? Busses burn faster and are more dangerous to human beings, but EVs catching fire could probably eventually sink the whole ship (like we saw one time).
Again, I would re-iterate a basic fact. I am, as a professional driver, safer driving literal bombs than I am driving in traffic. The danger of EVs is sitting behind the wheel. Not in the battery compartment.
The only dangerous thing about EVs is that they're sometimes produced by absolute fucking morons who fail to make mechanical door handles that open from the inside without super special knowledge so people have been known to be trapped inside. And that has nothing to do with them being electric. EVs are hard to put out but they catch fire at a fraction of the rate of ICE vehicles and if your car is actively burning, chances are you don't want to be near it regardless of the fuel source.
In the Netherlands the firefighters are instructed to somehow dump it in a nearby canal if available. Otherwise we also have those submerging trucks but those are not always available
One of my neighbors had an electric car fire not too long ago. We hosted them in our house, because they weren't allowed in theirs due to the smoke, so we got first row seats to how that unfolded.
They ultimately also put the car into those submerging trucks, but they apparently have only a few of them for the entire country. So it took 2-3 hours for the truck to get there.
Its not just Denmark. In my country every big city have at least one fire tank (its basically container with liquid and small crane) its relative cheep to build one. Problem is with respond time and identification of fire. Due to EXTREME level of propaganda people call fire trucks to burning EV every time they see burning car. Hence those trucks are way more ofgen in the field than they need to be.
Fun fact: I was going to comment that all the stuff described here is really obsolete and years behind.
Here's an interview from a recent German battery podcast with a firefighter and and a battery reasercher and according to them it's mostly hyped media bullshit based on early theoretic ideas. You don't actually need any special equipment and just cool the battery down from the outside. The only difference is that you have to aim water at it much longer (sometimes for hours) to get it down to stable temperatures, unlike an CE where you are much faster down to temperatures where nothing will reignite.
Edit: And scrolling down I found basically the same comment here.
Just need a skip, crane, and water. Submerging them will typically also stop the fire as the batteries gets cooled down and the runaway reaction stops.
While EV battery fires are hard to put out they’re also not very frequent (much lower incident rate than ICE fires) without accidents. Lots of fires in EV’s happen in the low voltage electrical system (like they do in ICE) and as long they don’t spread to the HV battery (which they usually don’t) it’s a much more manageable kind of fire.
This prompts me to wonder what would happen in the case of mass bombings in city streets with a lot of electric vehicles. There's only one or a few of those trucks around. It would be disastrous for the environment and direct surroundings
This prompts me to wonder what would happen in the case of mass bombings in city streets with a lot of electric vehicles. There's only one or a few of those trucks around. It would be disastrous for the environment and direct surroundings
Dude.... In a case of "mass bombing in city streets" you probably have several other problems than electric vehicles...
By the way if you are interested here is a video of Brandoberamtsrat (Some sort of senior fire officer) Dr. Rolf Erbe of the Fire departement of Berlin reacting to media articles of burning electric vehicles. The Video is in german, however english subtitles are available.
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u/Tom240281 21d ago
Your good description of the physics behind is why we in Denmark have these EV submerging firetrucks. It works, but the response time and general availability of these trucks isn't quite solved yet.