cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/620960
This accident could be a scene in a horror movie.
I’m not a Tesla fan by any measure, but I edited the headline for this post. The original headline made it seem like a specific feature of the Cybertruck trapped the victims, but then the article explains it was really that the battery was burning so fiercely that the police just couldn’t free them. The deadly feature of the accident was the lithium battery, which is common to many makes and manufacturers of EVs.
EV fires happen. But they happen far more rarely than ICE car fires. Only the latter are considered normal so you never hear about them.
EV fires are just worse. Traditional firefighting methods cannot put them out. EV fires can reignite up to 72 hours after initially burning. They burn at 5000 degrees, enough to melt concrete structures.
This just seems to be a risk we take with EV cars at the moment. We need to figure out how to account for the risk.
You put out a battery fire with water. Doesn’t get more traditional than that. The difference is that you have to keep an eye on it for a while longer because it can reignite. But again that’s nothing firefighters aren’t able to handle. They require some extra training and new procedures but nothing fundamentally out of the ordinary.
Everything you’re talking about is patently false, and I sit and listen to the OEM chief and our local FD talk about it every week. The amount of water necessary to put out an EV fire is substantial and not always enough, never mind the obvious access issues. And after the fires are over they tow them to the county yard where they are monitored, like I said, for 72 hours, because they can light right back up.
My municipality is about to be in a fight witht he State because of a mandate for EV chargers, and how putting them in garages is literally a life safety issue. It’s not apples and oranges, but ICE and EV car fires are not the same situationally.
Also we (but not Hollywood?) have forgotten the earlier days of ICE vehicles burning in a significant proportion of the crashes as fuel leaked or a small fire got to the tank.
But yeah, that shit got normalized for us quickly.