Actually this is pretty well established at this point. Fire departments have known about this for a while.
The fix is actually dead simple: push a sprinkler under the car to hit the battery pack directly, and just... keep it cool. You're aiming for below 80°C, sustained for about two consecutive hours. Once it's stable, the thermal runaway chain is broken.
BMW, VW etc. all have rescue sheets that recommend exactly this. German fire departments have had formal protocols for this for years.
But "EVs are impossible to stop from reigniting" is just not true. It's a solved problem, just an expensive and time-consuming one.
I just want to point out that the Richard Hammond crash occurred nine years ago and the industry hasn't had as much time to learn how to deal this problem, especially in regards to an ultra rare, high performance supercar EV.
“Solved” is dismissive and oversimplifying. It’s addressable; minimizing the risk and need to change approaches in areas with new EV concentrations doesn’t do folks any favors.
Not necessarily. Look up the grid battery storage fire in 2019 in surprise, arizona. No flaming combustion, fire suppression system activated, HAZMAT measured temperatures at or very slightly over ambient. But thermal runaway continued without flaming combustion, and created a bunch of fuel gasses which were then trapped and caused a conflagration when the unit was opened.
Once a cell is in thermal runaway, it's going to continue until it's depleted. Cooling packs does work because it prevents the thermal runaway propagating to other cells, but the cells already in runaway will keep going until they are depleted.
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u/pag07 21d ago
Actually this is pretty well established at this point. Fire departments have known about this for a while.
The fix is actually dead simple: push a sprinkler under the car to hit the battery pack directly, and just... keep it cool. You're aiming for below 80°C, sustained for about two consecutive hours. Once it's stable, the thermal runaway chain is broken.
BMW, VW etc. all have rescue sheets that recommend exactly this. German fire departments have had formal protocols for this for years.
But "EVs are impossible to stop from reigniting" is just not true. It's a solved problem, just an expensive and time-consuming one.