FD eventually put car and battery into pit of water. Might be something for us posters to remember.
Watch: Sacramento firefighters fight their first Tesla fire that kept reigniting (msn.com)
Well FD’s need to get ready for these events to happen more often. Water isn’t the trick for vehicle Li-Ion battery fires. They’ll need to have; chemical, CO2, or powdered fire suppressants.
Rivian is having battery fires on the factory floor before the vehicles even get out the door. Brave new world of the electric battery powered car.
I’ve been following electric car battery fires as the news stories appear. All of the above have been tried and don’t work. I’m sure the problem’s being worked on but at the moment nothing seems to work, all firefighters can do is keep the fire localized and prevent it from spreading and just wait for it to burn out.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s a real “Car Guy.” Not a conservative at all when it comes to new automotive concepts he’s got no use for electric cars for a number of reasons and won’t touch one with a ten foot pole.
A friend has a new Chevy Bolt? Volt? The small one, anyway. He got a service bulletin telling him not to park it indoors and to keep it away from buildings. Otherwise it’s a fairly nice car.
Well as ol’ Ben Franklin once said:
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!”
Makes charging it up kind of hard.
Yeah. Maybe he could use a charger hooked up to a gasoline powered generator? [:-^]
One of the Ford brochures I read talked about you can use the new F150 hybrid as a level 2 charger for electric cars.
So you can get a hybrid F150 to charge up your Mustang Mach-E.
Now that might make a good marketing strategy for Ford:
“Buy a new F150 Hybrid and we’ll make you a deal on a Mustang Mach-E!”
When I followed that link yesterday, it had a link to a story about a fire at the rail yard in Sacramento. I don’t see that link today. Maybe I could find that on a railroad website.
Batteries for EVs are still a fairly novel and new technology. It is going to take a few years for battery fires to be reduced and for fire departments to have the gear and training to combat them. And even as things are now, EV fires are far less to be feared than natural gas explosions from faulty gas lines and appliances.
In the words of a fellow from GM’s Proving Grounds, after an apparent EV fire there this spring, and as quoted in the Detroit News - such fires are going to be "exposure events. "
Protect the exposures and don’t worry about the vehicle itself.
Thousands of gallons of water are just a waste of time and resources, unless you can submerge the vehicle, as indicated in the article cited in the thread. We can hope that some technology is developed that will allow fire departments to extinguish these fires, or that some technology in the batteries themselves will be developed to make them self extinguishing.
What causes lithium ion battery fires to ignite, and what is the fuel that burns in a L.I. battery fire?
Is there a known technical solution to eliminate L.I. battery fires? If so, what is it?
Maybe the answers are in this link:
Typically it’s a short in the EV’s battery pack. Wayne mentioned above that FD’s have tried to use the methods I stated, but I can’t find anything besides FD’s using water.
There’s currently a metallic filmed blanket testing to extinguish li-ion battery fires. Also a fluid called AVD
Of course these come with greater cost than water.
THIS Thread seems to beg the question: In regards to these new Battery Electric Locomotives (?) IF submersion is the fastest 'Fix" for a Lithium/Ion battery fire… On who’s authority does one run the engine in to the closest river or creek? to extinguish the fire, and then; what department (supervisor) gets to write the loss report out for THAT loss?
An electric, four door Mustang. I don’t know which is more wrong.
If it proves to be a problem, perhaps making the battery enclosure essentially watertight, and adding a fire department connection to the locomotive…
Going back to the ‘early days’ of the Thunderbird - when it got turned into a four door lead sled - Ford does know how to screw up good things.