When the salvage company was unloading the EV's that had burned on the car carrier ships, the batteries re-ignitd on the dock. The fire had been "out" for 3 weeks. They picked up the cars and put them in huge vats of water.
We were retired downsizing from a large home, thinking of a condo. We decided against it because a neighbor could have an EV charging then burn. Most condos have not yet caught up to this problem. A rule at least to require outdoor charging. Not one place we saw has any rule yet. So we bought a smaller, single level home in a neighborhood. I am a retired firefighter and considered this issue.
I was pulling into a parking spot at the grocery store last week just then I noticed that the car in front of me was an EV, also known as an explosive vehicle I immediately pulled out and found another parking spot. Your vehicle is not safe in a parking lot because at any time anyone could pull up next to you and park with their explosive vehicle. This really is a nightmare.
Great explanation. Some people are so anxious to rid us of the tried and true internal combustion engine and adopt what their short sided thinking about electric vehicles will do for the world that I believe they deliberately ignored and swept aside these very dangerous problems. From what I've seen with gasoline car fires they are relatively easy to extinguish especially it the fire fighters are called and get there quickly. I would bet there isn't much if any worry about reflash with a conventional car fire like there is with electric. I am a boat mechanic working at a marina with wet slips and dry storage. A lot of people for some reason are starting to convert from lead acid to lithium batteries. There is negligible gain compared to lead acid especially when the fire potential is considered. Also most of us in the business know the only thing most boat owners know about marine electrical theory or any other electrical theory is what some self proclaimed expert internet guru has told them. My point is with over 300 in stack storage these batteries, their installation short cuts, and poor maintenance including water intrusion is ripe for major catastrophe.
How much are garages being told to pay for their own property and public liability if they service these potential fire bombs, imagine an EV catches fire and destroys everything, even customers cars, they will have to remove all peoples cars to work on a single EV now!
People go to lithium batteries because the Lead Acid batteries don`t last. Now when you buy them you have to decide how much you want to pay for one. A cheaper one has a shorter life then a more expensive one. This is nonsense and a scam to get more money from our wallets. Btw that true trusted gas engine needs refined oil to run and we all know what that misery brings. Does Deepwater Horizon , Lac Magnantic, Exon Valdez, Kalamazoo, the burning Kuwaiti oil fields or the countless war for oil ring a bell.
This is virtually inevitable under load! The power draw must match capacity and as bat gets older therm is very likely. Its surprising this isn't common. Obviously cars go threw so much during a simple drive. A mere puncture, a metallic spec/sliver/screw(a f*cking gum wrapper!) etc flies in threw the vents and is an almost guaranteed goodbye. Simply charging and a surge happens, or just one bad bat during manufacturing can also cause this obviously, but these aren't even the main reasons! The draw is astronomical compared to laptop or phone and running a large quantity in series is a caveman solution! I mean, these vehicles are ticking time bombs and this has been understood since the 60's, when we already had a better option. I don't recall immediately but the alternative is capable of 50mph and is a fune solution both for environment and general safety, but no one cared about the environment then and obviously demanded faster stringer cars. We could use that older tech if we want to drive slower more expensive cars for environment sake, but lithium ion battery EVs are bad on so many levels I want tear my hair out when i hear people bring this up like "oh see this happened what a surprise!" They lio leak toxins when not in use for extended periods, mining is toxic, processing it is toxic, and its just a massive amount of toxic when done and inevitably exploded. They are a fine thing in a laptop or a phone but their preset use in disposable vapes and cars out to be criminalized! Its such a waste to use them on cars on so many levels its frustrating to this is even debatable. Theres is literally nothing good about lio powered EVS for the environment on so many levels and I hate cars so I am not even talking from a gas lovers perspective! Using lithium ion bats in series in cars is simply a caveman solution. Musk is a fucking hustler pulling wool over boomers eyes for investments promising a better solution eventually. Theres no need we if we want ev we could have had them in the sixties and can have em easily now too just not powered by lithium ion its upsetting!
I really hope they can come with some sort of separation layer, that will react with electrolyte at high temperatures and basically make battery into solid, non-flammable bricks.
That is the gist of the problem in that a specialised vehicle battery has not been developed in the hysteria of the climate panic and a lash up of torch batteries has had to do. The climate panic is an emotional thermal runaway in many ways, to match the cobbled together technology attempting to sustain it beyond current capabilities.
That's an excellent point! It is like the 'population bomb' hysteria of the late 1960s has led to almost every developed country having a below-replacement birthrate that threatens social programs caring for the aged.
6 years ago, we put a $1000 down payment on a future Thesla that was never produced. They were promising $32k EV. Fortunately a few months later, we saw a documentary like this one and we withdraw our down payment to purchase a Toyoya Camry instead. So glad the EV was not available. Thanks to this info, we were not scammed into buying an EV.
EV`s are not a scam. Just like them Ford F150 trucks with the tanks on the side that burst into flames after a side collision were not a scam. It is just bad design. And you are just not very well informed.
@@bossman6174 not well informed? Hahahahaha.... that's good. At least I don't have a political agenda and I'm not profiting from EV's or lithium batteries. EV's from the 90 like the Honda and the Saturn were not scams as they fulfilled their promises, no lies on their short range, cheap acid batteries and no gizmos to fall apart. I wanted one. But auto makers are not interested in manufacturing a safe and durable EV. Also, Ttere are safe proven solutions for lithium batteries, but not a single auto maker is interested. They don't care about our safety at all. It's a SCAM, a life threatening scam and a nuisance for our society and a desaster for the environment. Here is the deal, EV buyers cannot sue the manufacturer, but non EV buyers can.
Except there is no lithium metal inside a li-ion cell, its lithium cobalt oxide as the cathode. What happens when you introduce water to that? (Hint: its not the same as with lithium metal.) What happens to lithium metal is irrelevant in this context.
@@jibbtaylor Only if the flood is with salt water, since it is way more conductive and corrosive. If you look at all the stories of EVs catching fire when submerged or partially submerged, that water is always salt water.
Excellent video. The explanation was crystal clear and all the jargon was explained. Now I know engineers have a fancy term for fire -> thermal runaway. Are there tests on our EVs that we can do say quarterly to figure out if they are at risk?
@@StacheDTraining It's the worst of both worlds. Still uses gasoline, but also has a huge battery that can catch fire. The cost to replace a degraded battery can be very high even in a hybrid.
EV's are firetraps plain and simple it these car companies would just use hydrogen or a diesel electric like trains we could not only be more fuel efficient but we would not have these death trap lithium batteries.
Twice I've bought packs of 8 of those batteries with two in each pack faulty, good quality branded ones. If I can't get 8 good batteries in a pack, how can they put 7000 in a car and they all work?
@@slimjim1125 it's not the fact that it catches fire. Yes, ICE vehicles also do. But what is a problem is the experience if they do & how difficult it is to handle that fire, especially once it goes into TR
lol a total fail from day one - let’s review - Lithium is a pure element found on the elements periodic table - all elements have properties - copper turns green over time, gold sparkles, lead melts at low temps, hydrogen is flammable - add a few protons, neutrons and electrons and right below hydrogen you will find Lithium on the periodic table and lithium has an interesting property - it ignites into flames on contact with water - silly humans - a doomed path lol 🤪🤷♂️👍
I use a lot of lipo batteries in model planes and helicopters if they are damaged they can still burn in water but if you put them in salt water it does kill them
EVs have a niche place at best right now. Mass production EVs are no where even remotely ready. They are just pushing out what the mandates are pushing for. EV's. All the research I have conducted shows me that right now, in our current state of technology, batteries are not up to this task yet. It has been independently proven that the creation of 1 EV car puts more CO2 in the atmosphere than 1 combustion style auto.
That's true, and dependng on the production type for electricity, that deficit can be overcome in as little as 8k miles in the likes of Norway/Sweden and around double that in UK and some other European countries with high renewables and nuclear output.
I really disagree with the term "thermal runaway" in a battery fire. It is more realistically called a chain reaction. Thermal runaway is more a condition where a reaction starts, and the heat produced accelerates the reaction, creating more heat, speeding up the reaction more, creating more heat, and so on. Yes that happens in a battery somewhat as well but the "cell to cell chain reaction" component isn't a thing in thermal runaway. The thermal runaway that occurs in a battery such as in an EV is on a per cell basis. It does give the appearance of runaway to the entire battery but that is simply not the case.
it is in a sense, still a thermal runaway, rather than simple chain reaction. A simple reactions inside the battery isn't enough to create the heat necessary to making the same reactions on neighboring cells. It is the inital internal short in the battery, either due to a phsyical, electrical or thermal abuse inside one or more cell, which starts the initial 'heat up', which, in most lithium battery, is a self-fulfilling heat source due to how exotermic the reactions are, reaching upwards of above 500C degrees at minimum, where majority of the isolators inside the battery already melted at below 200C, means more internal short, creating more heat, which in turns heating up the reactive electrolyte, combusting them with the oxygen released from all the metal oxides inside the battery which starts to decompose at such high temperature (and even faster), creating a self-generating oxygen fires, with both the electrolyte and vented gas available to fuel the fire. The extreme heat generated by even a single failing cells is high enough that in short moment, it's reaching high enough temperature for the neighboring cell to also heat up enough to melt their internal isolators, creating even more internal heat, and reintroducing the same cycle again, again and again. The heat, rather than simple chain reaction, is the reason it is capable of this much destruction. It's the heat that melted the isolators, allowing more and more internal short happened, which generates more heat. It's also the heat that facilitates the decomposition of metal oxide, releasing their oxygen content, allowing for a fire capable of burning without external oxygen source, generating more heat.
@@MadScientist267 chain reaction doesn't need the heat to incur the circle, thermal runaway does. Without all the component keep generating heat to incur more heat generation, thermal runaway will just be a single, one time thing. Chain reaction doesn't need heat to works. Example: Nuclear chain reaction only needs the neutron and critical mass, no heat exactly required. And in the beggining, when you describe the thermal runaway, well, it's exactly what happened inside the battery....
@@danieltanusetiaji8931 A chain reaction is any reaction that leads to more of the same reaction. The mechanism that connects them (in this case heat) is irrelevant. Stacked dominos falling is a chain reaction all the same.
@@danieltanusetiaji8931 I think you're referring to a single cell. I'm referring to the entire battery as a whole. Starts with one cell that is not happy, and before you know it, that cell's thermal runaway, yes, causes a chain reaction to start that takes the rest of the cells with it. I can go with that. I made that point pretty clear in the original 🤷♂️
I work with random condition lithium cobalt cells and there are some that start heating up around 3.6 volts during charging. This is only half full so something is happening internally. This is the condition that causes thermal runaway. The bms MUST have thermal protect.
An Australian company founded by the University of Brisbane developed graphen (Carbon) aluminium battery. Without litium it is less dangerouse, more energy, less thermal problem, quicklier charge time and longer life time.
The EV1 was, and is, the only ev (with easily recycled dependable, safe lead acid batteries) that would have been largely accepted by everyone and for that reason they were destroyed.
Have you seen the Danish Battery Briner system? Brine can be cooled to -18 centigrade without freezing, so more heat is removed more quickly than is possible with CO2. The salinity also shorts the cells, removing the energy sustaining the runaway.
I am convinced this extreme heat generated by the "Thermal Runaway" of lithium-ion batteries can be harnessed to power something like a steam engine. Perhaps I should pose this suggestion to someone who understands thermodynamics and basic engineering - like Greta Thunberg, or Elon Musk.
Well if they do they don't catch on fire just like they are seldom if ever victims of a crime, thus are soft on it. They especially seem to look the other way on white collar political crimes, if democrat, and if they and/or colleagues are partaking in it
Car manufacturers conduct (oh, not an intended pun) multiple failure and crash tests to assess the safety of their cars and obtain a safety rating, don’t they? ANCAP rating. All car manufacturers know what happens with failed battery packs, don’t they? They know how to stop and extinguish battery pack failures, don’t they? It’s about time the EV industry explains. EV driver just having a small fire extinguisher in the boot is obviously inadequate.
Why aren't Battery Boxes vented? By putting in a burst disk, you are guaranteeing that hot gasses and pressure is built in the box? What if we vent the box when the first battery starts spewing hot gas?
Per yesterday's exploding pager attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon: If its possible to deliberately and remotely cause thermal runaway, can the pager batteries themselves be the only explosive involved?
Disturbing! You displayed yet another video of a battery venting underneath the driver's door. That is the door that will _always_ have someone needing to exit. Don't these EV makers have enough sense to vent the hot gases well away from any of the vehicles doors?
What did they think was going to happen when they pack all that energy into tiny little boxes? This is why carrying around _potential_ energy is always going to be safer and more reliable than carrying around _active_ energy, like electricity stored in batteries. Batteries are fine when it's for a power drill, or a flashlight, but when you have huge multi-hundred pound batteries strapped to the bottom of a moving vehicle, then you're basically sitting ontop of a bomb ready to blow. Gasoline cars are more safe because the energy within the gasoline is _potential_ energy and it can do nothing until it is ignited and even then, it is very difficult to get _liquid_ gasoline to burn. Gasoline _vapors_ are what burns, so keeping the gasoline inside of a sealed container or system is the safest way to handle it, and said systems need a quick cut off device so that if a fire gets started, you can seal off the rest of the gasoline and kill the fire rather quickly.
Lithium is seriously dangerous however any EV with battery storage would also be quite dangerous under fault conditions (70kW is a lot of energy)... They could keep the combustion engine and convert water into Browns gas which might work or equally, using electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen and feed the gases directly through a hydrogen fuel cell to run an electric motor🤔🤷♂️
I had a electric scooter that had a 451 W motor. It went 18 mph and I just got it like I plugged it up two hours later and start making like a hopping or popping sound. I unplug it immediately then it starts to smoke and make a hissing sound again
Man, more and more people are being forced to buy electric vehicles. People are buying electric scooters, bikes golf carts etc… These random uncontrollable fires are going to really cause havoc everywhere in the future.
My Chinese made Ariel Rider Grizzly, 2 wheel drive, dual motor, dual battery, 52v fat tire E-BIKE shorted out, caught fire, and exploded, BETWEEN MY LEGS this summer as I gently old man rode it along on a dirt road at 10 mph! Since then, dealing with the company in, imagine that, Portland Oregon, has been a 6 month nightmare of trying to get it worked on and fixed. BEWARE! E-Bikes are made "there"!
I believe that the Li-Ion battery is going to be replaced with something else in the near future. Toyota Prius for the first three generations used NiMH batteries and no major catastrophes have happened with those, and their reliability is amazing. The load on Li-ion batteries to power vehicles is just too much for this technology. There is no way I would even consider buying of of these current EVs as they are, in my opinion, still in beta testing phase. If a car submerged in water can actually burn, is absolutely nuts.
We would starve without electric vehicles. Those vehicles are locomotives with large diesel or gas turbine engines making the power to spin electric traction motors. If batteries were more efficient and less dangerous, we would use those.
i have 4 ego lithium batteries and everytime i charge them it smells like something is burning and even if i sniff the charger it has a burning smell, i store them in the house cause they say the batteries don't do well in extreme weather like in my plastic shed. question is is that normal for them to stink
Ships at sea United States Navy. 🇺🇸 A thermal runaway is an emergency alarm resulting in all hands to man firehoses or firebottles. Maintenance personnel will quickly access the overheating battery as quickly and safely as possible (before a detonation or fire occurs). A chain of sailors with gloves form a chain to the nearest catwalk. Once the offending battery is removed, this is handed as quickly down the chain of sailors and Jettisoned overboard. Yes, even aircraft can suffer from a Thermal Runaway.
A battery casing with a vent leading into a water canasta. Allowing venting and directing the flames towards a water body . Might be a good invention to anybody smart enough with the financial backing.
Can you please include in your videos that EVs are much less likely to catch on fire than gas cars? Looking at the comments, people seem to be comparing EVs to perfection rather than to internal combustion cars.
@@StacheDTraining cell failure rate is 1/10 million, assuming 10 yr lifetime yields 1/100 million years. Having 10k cells in one battery yields the failure rate of 1/10000 years, or 1 vehicle per 10k per year, or 1/1000 in 10 years lifetime. Looks like 10-100 times larger than the conventional vehicles
Unfortunately, that is the problem because these batteries are made up of many individual cells, wired accordingly to achieve high voltage and current! In my opinion, this is technically unmanageable! As shown here, one cell failure is enough!
Only now am i beginning to like social media, i now get to hear about the EVs burning, corporate big wigs would otherwise hush it up, as would governments. 😮
@@slimjim1125 before RU-vid I saw my science teacher put lithium ion from inside a battery in a glass of water and it lit on fire. There's also many videos here proving it as well. Just type in lithium in water
This makes all electric cars with lithium batteries potentially unsafe. A safer non lithium battery needs to be designed and those cars with lithium batteries should be taken off the road one would think. Tesla and other EV makers need to rethink the battery. This is just my opinion which may not count for too much. Too much is invested already to change anything and I get that. It is what it is.