Gasoline fires are different than a battery fire. Battery fires are class 2 or self oxidizing. They require substantially more resources to mitigate. A gasoline fire can be extinguished with traditional fire fighting methods. Battery fires basically need to be babysat for a day while they cook off.
An EV fire is at least 10x worse than a gas vehicle fire. Hybrid fires due to batteries are also misclassified as petrol fires. If you catch a gas fire in time it can be put out with a bit of water or a fire extinguisher. It is also exceedingly rare. An EV fire is not extinguishable, burns several times hotter than any petrol fire, may reignite for weeks or months, and emits shocking volumes of toxic gasses that can injure anyone around. Although the fires can't be extinguished, firefighters still spray hundreds of thousands of liters of water onto battery fires, and that water is polluted and not captured. The whole thing is a nightmare.
The possibility of EVs catching fire all together inside an underground parking garage in a high rise should scare the hell out of anyone sane. Sprinkers will do nothing for that, and all that heat could permanently damage the building. The gasses could suffocate anyone unlucky enough to get stuck down below.
Not all fires are created equal. The problem with battery fires is that they are hard to put out. The surest way how to put out an EV is to drop it into a big water tank and let it soak for days.
I am not sure what's your point? There's far less EVs now, and a negligible percentage of them are over 10 years and badly maintained. Also, the nature of fires is still very different.
With gasoline you can put it off using water, while for EVs water will actually make the fire worse and you'll need special compounds to turn it off.
Metal fires (class D) are much harder to fight than petroleum fires (class B). They can burn way hotter, reignite after seemingly going out, and of course react to water to produce hydrogen.
Current fire fighter directives for putting out BEVs is either dump a loader bucket of sand on it (which most don't have yet), or drag it some place safe and let it burn out.
Also gasoline just sits there until ignited. Lithium battery packs can have various failure modes which send them into thermal runaway. Chevy Bolt EVs are being recalled en masse and owners told not to charge overnight or in a garage, least it go off unattended.
Data from the National Transportation Safety Board showed that EVs were involved in approximately 25 fires for every 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline-powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in fires for every 100,000 sold: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/environment-energy-coordinatio...
Statistics from 2015 showed that 174,000 vehicle fires were reported, and almost all of them involved gasoline vehicles. Tesla claims that gasoline cars are 11x more likely to catch fire than a Tesla, and that the best comparison of safety is fires per billion miles driven. If we compare using this method, there are approximately five EV fires for every billion miles traveled, compared to 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars: https://driveelectriccolorado.org/myth-buster-evs-fire/
I'm by no means sure of the relative danger, but plain old gas cars can also have pretty big fires. Is it actually worse with batteries? The energy density is if anything lower.
You think Tesla needs to rethink the fact that... batteries store a lot of energy? I really think you're missing the point.
Going full-on didactic on you: Vehicles have huge energy requirements to move them around. To meet those requirement they need to store energy on-board in some manner. This creates known failure modes where damage to the vehicle releases that energy in an uncontrolled way. That's bad. But it's completely unavoidable given the constraints of the system.
You seem to want Tesla to do the impossible and invent batteries that don't burn. Which seems ridiculous, given e.g. Ford's nearly-century-long failure to invent gasoline that doesn't burn.
The question you should be asking is "Are battery fires safer than gasoline fires?". And... duh. Yes, they are. And it's not even close.
In an EV fire, you have an initial fire that burns hot and releases lots of fumes (a large part from all the other crap in the car combusting), and then you have a very long period where you have to dump water on the battery to keep the internal oxidation under control by cooling it. The later part is much less dangerous for the fire fighters.
I would think most gasoline cars catch on fire because there is severe damage to the front-end, the fuel lines are ruptured, and gasoline ends up on the hot engine and ignites. I would think a major advantage of an electric car is that it doesn't have that mode of failure. So replacing it with another mode of failure that also results in front-end fires is... not great.
Not the same at all. First, a gas car doesn't simply catch fire while sitting in a dense parking lot. That's the most likely place for an EV to catch fire, as it's charging.
Second, when a gas car catches fire, it's almost always after a car incident. Firefighters arrive, and put the fire out easily.
Do you know what firefighters do when an EV catches fire? Nothing can stop this fire. Literally nothing. So firefighters have to evacuate everyone at least half a mile in radius. Then let it burn down. Which may take a full day. Or more. Read the protocols.
As if EVs needed more negative externalities
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