Not a lot to say about this one, really:
We have an EV catch fire on a Car Carrier Ship. (Fremantle Highway in the North Sea) The crew try, but can not put out the fire (as is typical of EV Fires). As the fire spreads, one crew member ends up dead. The ship is now abandoned at sea in the North Sea. Under tow and with other “rescue and recovery / salvage” vessels around it. Fear is that it will end up sinking.
So, about those unstoppable EV Battery Fires… just how much “embodied CO2” and “embodied energy” just went up in smoke? How much air pollution does one big ship fire make? Etc. etc. It looks like this is at least the 2nd ship to burn recently.
Hooray For Captain EV Dunsel…
Expect EV Shipping Insurance rates to rise rapidly. The sooner the EV industry moves away from Lithium Ion batteries the better.
Note that this ship was carrying 25 EVs out of 2857 cars. As that percentage rises, such fires will happen much more often and with much more catastrophic outcomes. Here it was about 1 in a Hundred odds of an EV starting a fire. (25 out of 2500-ish) so you will have about a 100 times increase in the rate of such a ship fire and loss when the whole ship is full of EVs. (Assuming a constant rate of EV damage / fires per EV).
As the video states (from a firefighter) the CO2 fire suppression system on these ships can not put out a Lithium Ion battery fire. Once it starts, you are literally toast.
As the whole hold becomes “packed with EVs”, fire will spread from car to car much more rapidly and with far more damage per hour. Expect catastrophic loss of ships, and crews, from time to time. Also, expect to have some harbors closed for long periods of time should this happen when entering, leaving, or docked at port.
Now consider all the Ferry Ships that take passengers, and their cars, from port to port in places like British Columbia, Canada, Alaska, and I’m sure there are many in Europe too. That’s going to be “fun” the first time one of them has a Lion fire in the car hold…
Welcome to the brave new world of EVs, brought to you by our “Green” Lords & Masters…
Musings from the Chiefio 
Here’s another one:
During loading of cars… but unclear if it was an EV.
Maybe also consider what could happen in the Channel Tunnel or any other long tunnel. Could that cause a failure of the tunnel itself? At least with a ship you are surrounded by non-flammable water, and not a hard barrier.
Depending on the weather/waves, travel by ship can be pretty bumpy. If an EV has a relatively minor collision, it’s known that the battery may fail, which is why the insurers now specify that such cars be tested (how?) and that until fixed they should be stored 50′ from each other in case they catch fire. Thus I’m thinking that the shaking-around that I’ve experienced on some sea-trips could similarly damage the batteries to a similar extent.
As far as I’ve seen, ICE-based cars have more fires per 1000 than EVs, but the problem is that the EV fire is way more dangerous and much harder to put out.
Geoff here covers this ship fire too, and adds some interesting bits about EVs that I’d not known.
In particular…
It seems that the Tesla does not have interior door handles. You push a button to request the car to open the door. Nice and cool and all… but as Geoff points out: What do you do if your battery catches fire, your electrical system stops working, and you are now trapped inside a flaming coffin with no way to open the door? Eh?
In ANY significant accident, there’s a high probability of battery compromise. (think 50 MPH into a stopped cement truck…). The idea that the door can not be opened is just horrific… There was a case of 2 kids ~18 / 19 just graduated High School, out in the parent’s Tesla, took a corner too fast, crashed and burned. Both cooked. I’d wondered why they didn’t just bail out of the car since it was mostly intact. I guess now I know…
@Simon:
Geoff, in the video just above, also raises the issue of an EV fire in the Chunnel…
FWIW, ICE car fires tend to be in and around the engine, limited in size due to limited fuel there, and contained by the metal firewall and fenders. An EV fire tends to be under the passengers, limited only by the fuel / oxidizer in the battery, and several thousand degrees hotter, eventually consuming the entire car and anything near it.
It isn’t the NUMBER of car fires per type of car, it is the SIZE and ability to extinguish that matters.
Here, ONE car fire took out an entire ship. Were it a gas car, it most likely would have been one engine in one car and some smoke in the air. (CO2 suppression system would have stopped it).
The unfortunate thing is that Tesla has gone to Lithium Iron Phosphate that is much much safer and doesn’t burn that I know of; just in time for the general public to learn that if you hear “Lithium” run away screaming…
The end of travel by Zeppelin.
Enovix brake flow battery technology addresses this issue
https://www.enovix.com/brakeflow/
@beththeserf: Ah, yes, the Hindenburg. IIRC, that’s the zeppelin the Titantic crashed into. Those poor people…
On a more serious note — I have had a bit of fascination with dirigibles since I was a kid. A nice dirigible ride is one of the items on my bucket which will likely not be fulfilled. Certainly, for most people, a catastrophic fire from hydrogen is the BIG fear of Hindenburg’s design. And, with the cost and rarity (getting more rare every day) of helium, there seems to be no good replacements for hydrogen. Well, there is ONE replacement, but whether it is good or not depends on how much high tech you can throw at it. Instead of using a lighter than air gas, you just pump out the air. A big dirigible (300metersX50metersX50meters) will hold something on the order of two million pounds of air. Pump out all that air and you have 2,000,000 lbs of lift. Let it leak back in for landing. Simple, huh? Oh! Yeah, there are going to be some rather significant compressional forces on the outside of your structure. How big? Imagine the same structure pumped up to one atmosphere above ambient. Now, just reverse all those forces; tensional forces become compression, compressions become tensions. Could we build such a structure with today’s tech? I think probably yes. Compression spars made of carbon fiber with hollow interiors, and filled with compressed hydrogen or helium to increase bending resistance. High strength, low stretch membranes, coated to make them effectively no leak at one atmosphere. Powerful electric air pumps, with the initial pumping being done on the ground with local electricity. Maybe even regenerative energy collection done when air is leaked back into the envelope.
And of course you can cheat and have a hybrid dirigible with part of the envelope (up near the top, away from humans, machinery, and most of the wiring) using hydrogen. And if it DOES leak there, the hydrogen goes up, away from most of the ignition sources. Would it work? I think we have the tech for it. And it is ever so much more elegant than flaming EVs. Now, if only there is some solution for all the more mundane problems with dirigibles. Like bad weather.
Regarding tunnel fires, the Caldecott Tunnel fire on April 7, 1982 is a disaster that people in the SF East Bay will likely long remember. Here are a couple of links, and a picture of the carnage of that event.
Having driven that route between Oakland and Orinda many times in the 1980s, it still gives me the willies. EVs on a car ferry, say, between Calais and Dover, or Ostend and Dover are a disaster waiting to happen.
Links:
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/40th-anniversary-of-Caldecott-Tunnel-fire-17037648.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel_fire
And a pic (car is that of the DUI [o.17] driver that started the chain reaction wreck):
Looks like a “rallycross” race was canceled after an EV burned up the garage and the other cars:
https://www.carscoops.com/2023/07/sebastien-loebs-lancia-delta-evo-e-rx-rallycross-destroyed-in-battery-related-fire/
Spectacular photos in that article… hit the link.
So… maybe we need to put 50 feet between all charging stations?… just sayin’…
As EVs rise from 1% ranges to 50% of cars, these events ought to increase about 50 fold. It’s going to be an interesting learning experience…
Me? Not going to park next to EVs if I can help it…
The Geoff video gets my thumbs up. I had to go check my door handles to make sure they weren’t just a button. I think they passed, but then it could just be the haptic feel… Locks and unlocks are all electric, so I am a bit surprised that there is a mechanically connected handle …
So how do you put out an EV battery fire? Water doesn’t do it, we know. I’d bet CO2 does not do it either — the battery is not really “burning”, that is oxidizing with anything provided by the atmosphere.
CO2 is for diesel engine rooms, enclosed spaces. For car decks, they have “drenchers”, pumping salt water.
Brand new EVs catching fire when they are not even charging? What is going on?
@YMMV:
A Battery has both the reducing agent and the oxidizing agent inside of it, by definition (other than “air batteries”) and that is THE problem. You can not put out a battery fire with excluding air as it contains its own oxidizer. The exception is those batteries that use a reducing agent (i.e. oil / petroleum / plastic) as the electrolyte. They do benefit from added air.
What is “going on” was mentioned in the videos, but not emphasized. There are “speed limits” in loading the cars (ignored) and drivers are expected to avoid bottoming the cars on the steep and rapid change of angle loading ramps (ignored) so many cars get to “Bang on the ramp to floor join” which is fine for an iron frame or steel differential, but for an EV Battery that is the floor / frame of the vehicle, can damage it such that a short and fire start some time later. Maybe only 1 in 1000 and not a big deal when you have 25 EVs on a 3000 car ship, but once it is 3000 EVs then 1 in 1000 will be 3 fires on every ship…
I’m sure a great deal of litigation (taking years) and “corrective measures” (taking more years after that) will happen. Unfortunately, I will likely exceed me “Drive By Shelf Life” before this is sorted out; so No EV For Me (and I’m still not going to park next to one if I can avoid it…)
So, what car do you have that isn’t “just a button”?
I’ve heard stories about locking a thief inside the car. No doubt the back seat of a police car, that is possible. Or the back doors of any modern car with child-safety on.
Turns out it can be true on some cars (no definitive list given):
https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/technical-stuff/131542-being-locked-inside-car-3.html
All we know for sure is that modern cars have an inside trunk release.
It’s annoying enough that you can’t roll down the windows without turning the car on in some way. I had a Jeep TJ for over twenty years because it was all mechanical. Crank-down windows, real keys, a manual transmission that did not override your choice of gear. Things just worked. I don’t think newer Jeeps have the same quality.
The True Nolan,
Re dirigible, pity the noble gas Helium is running out. Finding ways to tame
the combustible/ Hydrogen, as you suggest, may be possible. Meanwhile EVs!
Hazards abounding…
Pingback: Climate Collections
It’s only a matter of time until an EV fire breaks out in one of the multi-level basement garages of one of the new high-rise condos (e.g. One Rincon, 60 stories, ~380 units) in San Francisco.
@beththeserf: “Re dirigible, pity the noble gas Helium is running out.”
Well, we can always fill the dirigibles up with Argon.
(Yes, of course I am joking!)
@YMMV:
Sorry it took me a day, I was “on the boat” ;-) But I think I’ve got things as you requested.
If EVs were not the current save-the-world fad, they would be banned already, at least the non LiFePO4 EVs.
Diesels used to be that, then all of a sudden they were evil.
If there was an alternative, maybe EVs would be banned.
ICE cars are slowly being banned.
Painting yourself into a corner: The EPA is tightening the MPG regulations again. The way activist regulators work is they make the regulations just barely achievable, and then they keep tightening the screws. I don’t know why anyone bothers to make cars anymore.
LiFePO4 is getting affordable (for solar, boats, RVs, etc). That still leaves the other problems for cars, range, charger supply, etc.
Get a horse ;-)
@TMMV:
I have a small assortment of Old Cars that I expect to maintain in drivable condition until I am no longer in drivable condition ;-)
I’l not be buying ANY New Car so the EPA can go pound sand. IF I ever buy another vehicle, it will be an “antique” that can be maintained with parts from a machine shop and require nothing with a computer in it or programming.
Worst case would be needing to “make my own” out of some junkers. On Matt’s Off Road Recovery he has built several of his “recovery vehicles” out of old trucks. So it is proven possible. I’m also fairly certain I now know how to do it. (Having overhauled several cars over the years from Air Cooled VW to pickup trucks to… and having taken junk motorcycles and restored them to rideable.)
Cars just really are not very complicated at their core. If you get 80% of it “already done” is an old “junker”, the remaining work is quite doable DIY. Biggest PITA I’ve found is AC being cranky and on things newer than about 2000 the electronics parts die and become unavailable. So something Pre-1990 is best. (Yes, I already have a couple…)
It is basically just a couch / living room on wheels with an engine and brakes (plus steering ;-) Transmission is just one big drop in part… (I’ve done an overhaul on a manual transmission, not hard. Someday might want to take an automatic apart.)
IF you get an old CJ or XJ jeep, you can get parts “forever” in terms of drive line gear and motors. The rest can be just fabricated as you need it ;-)
@E.M. re DIY transportation – I mentioned just a few weeks ago on the previous W.O.O.D. – I think… maybe it’s there – that I no longer think we’ll go back to 1700s tech if the GEBs succeed in destroying pretty much everything. I based that on the fact that we have mountains or repairable stuff AND cars in wrecking yards.
–
–
[Voiceover]
“Think Mad Max Motors as your next stop for that special vehicle. Be sure to ask about our ever-popular Machine Gun option. E-Z financing, too. Flash enough gold or other tradeable stuff, and you can drive away today!”
@H.R.:
it all depends on what collapses. In a minor “gas refineries shut down for a month”, we all drop back to 1932 for a month…just hunker down and wait, live off the food in the pantry. IFF The entire electrical grid is destroyed, 90% of people starve due to no food deliveries for 6 months (among them the folks who fix oil refineries and drill for oil…); then we end up at about 1700’s level of tech but with a huge shortage of horses for a few decades… In between, intermediate dates.
My general thesis is that you drop back to the “era” where you still have that level of technology available to you. So IFF we drop back to “limited gas” it will be like the Great Depression or W.W.II “gas rationing”. However, IFF the ability to refine and deliver gas ends, all those cars in junk yards are only useful for the Smith to remake them into ploughs and swords…
IMHO, there are 2 major exposure points that are not appreciated quite enough.
1) Modern agriculture can not operate without a LOT of petroleum and fossil fuel energy embodied in synthetic fertilizers. ANY generalized collapse of the Oil Economy means a deep global famine. Simply due to the lack of operating machinery on farms and the halt of synthetic fertilizers. (IFF you only have a shortage, well, see that Great Depression and / or 2008…). So lose access to oil, about 1/2 the people in the world die shortly thereafter. (All those people in cities, with no dirt, no natural water supply, and who buy their food weekly at the store).
2) We have progressed greatly in the extraction and refining of all sorts of metals and ores. Only a few people at a few companies can make that work. All the “easy ore” that can be upgraded and refined by a few guys around a campfire have been mined centuries ago. IF there is a generalized loss of “modern technical society”, we will not be able to have A New Bronze Age… Or any of several other steps to modernity. There will be a lot of refined metals on the surface as inventory, so we likely have about a decade to get back on our feet… but… IF you can’t get that done in time, we end up back at Hunter Gatherer but without the stepping stones to modern metals refining… so hopefully somebody remembers how to do things like float separation…
Basically, agriculture and mining. We can’t do the simple “retrace the path to modernity” as the resources we used the first time are all gone. (The forests of Europe and North America that fueled the Iron Age Smiths are gone, for example.)
So we end up in a “couple of years max” race condition to get back to relatively modern methods or belly flop back to Aw Shit… all while over 1/2 the population dies.
Oh, and one other Outside Possible:
IF a big ass rock falls from space, of a size that has hit before, and lands in the Pacific Ocean making an, oh, 400 foot tall wall of water Tsunami…
That takes out all the ships in the Pacific and likely the Indian ocean too. It also wipes out the ports, and all the industrial facilities along the shore anywhere around those oceans.
Now, with all the shipping from Asia, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Australia, USA, Canada, etc. etc. wiped out:
How do you get the needed parts and materials to repair all the damage done? How do you get the coal from Australia or oil from Indonesia? Etc. etc.
Look at how much we already depend on just China. 97% or some such of all pharmaceuticals. How do you rebuild the ships with the Korean, Japanese & Chinese shipyards gone? How do you get the coal from Australia to turn iron ore into steel? From where do you get that ore? How do you feed all those folks with the major food suppliers (USA, Canada, S. America, Australia) on the other end of a shipping supply chain that no longer exists?
Believe it or not, I think that one is worse than an EMP… and certainly WILL happen at some point. Just a matter of time (that I hope ends up being 10s of thousands of years more…)
But, “the good news” is that there’s a good chance that someone on the other side of the world stays operational and modernity can bootstrap back up from them. Eventually…
@E.M. – I just assumed the refineries would be wiped out and the Mad Maxmobiles would run on alcohol.
What you can’t finish drinking, you put in your car ;o)
A l-o-o-o-n-g time ago there was a posting here about cars during WWII that ran off cordwood was it? I think they were steamers. I forget how it all worked, but people came up with those cars because gas was heavily rationed.
Hmmmmm… I need to look that up.
Anyhow, we’ll have plenty of frames, wheels and brakes. All we’ll need is some means of propulsion.
@H.R.:
Part of the fuels problem is just that folks will be scrambling for enough grain to EAT and won’t have 2000 lbs of extra to ferment and distill to alcohol for the car.
The sheer quantity of energy we get from oil and coal is so huge folks just do not grasp it. It took, IIRC, about 30 acres to power 1 mule. (The other 10 you could eat from…). Now figure you car is a few hundred mule power. That’s a problem (especially without the ‘mule droppings’ for fertilizer for that field of hay…)
So how many people have 300 acres of pasture / grassland / hay to power their car?
LOTS of things were tried in times of war and shortages. “Gasohol” was around. (In fact, the first Ford (Model A?) had a dual fuel carburetor. Gasoline or alcohol. Early tractors ran on all sorts of things from kerosene to logs. (Steam tractors… and why I have an 1800s book on steam engine engineering and design… “for that day”…)
But the one I think you are pondering is the Gas-O-Gen or wood-gas generator:
https://www.autopuzzles.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=o9noe5mu74r51ku22e6p0kld25&action=dlattach;topic=18954.0;attach=35017;image
Popular in Sweden and anywhere else with a lot of wood. You get about 1/2 of the rated engine power. Oh, and it takes a big pot of wood chips and / or an extra radiator to condense the creosote out of it and not gunk up your engine.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/renewable-energy/wood-powered-generator-zmaz81jazraw/
Essentially, you suck air backwards through a bed of coals and make CO gas. Charcoal is less prone to gunk making, but would works too.
That will be good for maybe 1 out of 100 cars. Then you are out of wood. Oh, and you will need a car without all the modern computer controls…
FWIW, this “survival alternative energy” was a hobby of sorts of mine for about the last 50 years… make that 55… I ran my old Ford, in High School, on gasohol and my VW got fed things from propane to Diesel / gasoline blend (about 20% is starts to smoke a lot ;-) Even ran a Honda Trail 90 on propane valved into the air intake… from a propane torch.
Part of why I have an old Diesel is that I can run it on alcohol or propane or natural gas in the air intake as a ‘co-fuel’ or on Jet-A, Diesel, Kerosene, K1, K2, and plant oils in the fuel injection system (and I have…)
Anyway, the problem isn’t finding a way to make a gas or liquid that burns, it is finding a way to make enough of it when everyone is scrapping for food. Old Moonshiners would tune up a hot engine to run on moonshine. Fuel and self delivering hooch ;-) Thus was NASCAR born (and the alcohol fuelers…)
So yes, there will be folks doing the Mad Max thing, on several fuels, including alcohol and wood chips and cardboard. But it will be about 1/100 or 1/1000 of the present miles / kW available from oil…
But that would not stop me from buying 10 acres or even 40 acres of “crap land” covered in scrub trees and welding up a gasifier…
Ahhh, the gassifier. Now I’m beginning to remember. I’ll need to hit the archives.
Yeah, I knew a while back you went over alternative fuels and actual DIY fuels you have tried.
I’m not sure you have to turn your food grains into alcohol. It would be a PITA, but if you need wheels or even something to power a rototiller so you’re not hand cultivating, there’s all sorts of crap inedible vegetation that can be fermented and then distilled. Yes, low yield, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
Just wait for my IPO on…. Kudzu-hol™ [Franchises are available] ;o)
@H.R: “the Mad Maxmobiles would run on alcohol.”
You may be right, but when I run “Mad Max” world in my imagination, it goes something like this.
Guy 1: “OK, we need to go barter some goods at the trading post ten miles away. That’s a 20 mile round trip, so we’ll be burning about a gallon of ethanol.”
Guy 2: “A gallon of ethanol? How about we cut it with water to make it 50/50, that’s now 8 quarts of 100 proof. We get two other guys, pull the wagon there and back, and we each get a whole half gallon of high grade hooch to drink! We can do it easy in two days.”
Guy 1: “HOT DANG!! I’m in!”
Late comments after a busy weekend.
There were RORO (Roll-On; Roll-Off) fires before EVs. 12 Volt batteries can initiate fires. Vehicles must have sufficient fuel to ensure they can be driven from (possibly remote) port parking onto and within the ship, then the reverse. Plus one or two additional cycles for onward shipments. Finally, onto and then off car carrier.
Statistics from 2014-2016, when there were relatively few EVs on the road are surprising:
From: https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v19i2.pdf
Each year, from 2014 to 2016, an estimated 171,500 highway vehicle fires occurred in the United States, resulting in an annual average of 345 deaths; 1,300 injuries; and $1.1 billion in property loss.
These highway vehicle fires accounted for 13 percent of fires responded to by fire departments across the nation.
The term “highway vehicle fires” includes fires in passenger road vehicles (e.g., cars, motorcycles and off-road recreational vehicles), freight road transport vehicles (e.g., dump trucks, fire apparatus and tank trucks), and agricultural and construction vehicles.
This topical report addresses the characteristics of highway vehicle fires as reported to the U.S. Fire Administration’s (USFA) National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) from 2014 to 2016, the most recent data available at the time of the analysis.3 NFIRS data is used for the analyses throughout this report.
Tesla Fires per Million Miles statistics – less relevant for shipping, more relevant for vehicle users.
From: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
Scroll down to “Vehicle Fire Data” near the bottom, then expand the 2021 section. The Methodology and Update below that section suggest that Tesla is trying to present meaningful and comparable data.
——————————
From 2012 – 2021, there has been approximately one Tesla vehicle fire for every 210 million miles traveled. By comparison, data from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation shows that in the United States there is a vehicle fire for every 19 million miles traveled.
In order to provide an apt comparison to NFPA data, Tesla’s data set includes instances of vehicle fires caused by structure fires, arson, and other things unrelated to the vehicle, which account for some of the Tesla vehicle fires over this time period.
——————————
I’m not a complete Tesla fan-boi. I do believe that accurate information can advance the discussion.
That was a very interesting report. It’s not really a long read. Thanks, Nick
There is a difference between EV fires and gasoline or diesel fuel ICE vehicle fires. It’s not covered in that report that I noticed. E.M. has a nice comparison way upthread.
Also, I didn’t see any breakout of BEVs vs ICEVs in that report. I may have missed it, though.
There just isn’t enough data ending in 2016 on passenger BEV fires per passenger mile(s) vs passenger ICEV fires per passenger mile(s). I’m not sure that’s available even now in 2023. Without that data, it’s hard to put a number on which type of vehicle is the greater fire risk when driving.
There are a lot of battery-powered forklifts out there, although to my knowledge, few are Lithium Ion powered. The weight of the lead acid batteries is a plus as they provide the counterweight for the load. (I had a job operating a triple-mast battery forklift for a year while I was going to school. Schweet!) ICE forklifts have to have deadweight ballast added. I’m not aware of any large-scale adoption of battery powered construction machinery. Stationary cranes often use electric motors, but they are not battery powered.
I’d be interested in knowing what the incidence of vehicle fires is when fueling, by type of vehicle. What is the rate when filling up the family flivver vs charging up the Rivian?
Anyhow, that’s 2 or 3 car transport ships done in by BEVs and I am aware of a couple of ICE car transport ships that have had fires. I’d guess there are more than a couple since millions of ICE cars have been transported by ships vs thousands of BEVs. But the only way to compare the hazards of shipping each type is to compare the number of each type of cars transported vs the number of shipboard fires. Ohhh, I suppose some insurance company somewhere has someone trying to work that one out.
We should start getting some real numbers soon. Insurance companies need that sort of information, and they will dig for it themselves if they need to,
AFAIK most ICE fires are caused by an electrical fault. Occasionally it’s something else – for example I had a Ford Fiesta where I’d noticed a strong smell of petrol, and had told my wife to not drive the car until it was fixed (may have been a needle-valve failure in the carburettor, thus flooding it), just before heading off to work. By the time I came home again, she’d driven to the next town and it had caught fire. Some designs are more prone to failure than others, but for that sort of carburettor fire there’s mostly some forewarning of a problem that can be fixed before something bad happens.
There was one Vauxhall (Opel) model that spontaneously went up in flames fairly frequently from an electrical fault. I can’t remember the model, though. Some wiring on the back shelf of the passenger compartment, and it could happen when the car was parked and unoccupied. Should have been fixable, and should have had a recall for that fix.
For the BEV fires, they can go up in flames at any point, whether being driven, charging, or not.
OK, I figure that any such fault should be analysed and the reason found, and then a fix should be applied. Add to the lessons learned for future designs. A bit expensive, but over time things get more reliable and safer. The problem with BEV fires is that you don’t have much left to analyse and determine the cause. Thus you’re really left with theory to work out possible causes, fix those, and see if the fires still happen. We’re still in early stages of this process.
It might be an unexpected bit of physics that causes it. For an example, Tantalum capacitors have a dielectric of Tantalum Oxide (Ta2O5) made by anodising the Tantalum. This is normally a polycrystalline layer of very high resistance, but under some circumstances (mostly temperature) this can change to a monocrystalline layer that has a much lower resistance, so the capacitor suddenly becomes very leaky and, if there’s a high-enough voltage across it, it passes a lot of current and burns up. Though Tantalum capacitors are normally high-reliability, they can suddenly fail for no obvious reason. Just needs one small area to change to crystalline, then that area heats up and crystallises the rest.
Thus may take a while to solve the battery problems. Even then there’s going to remain the standard problems of chaffing of insulation of the wires if a design or assembly process is a bit wrong, or the manufacture of the wire itself has some fault, as seen in the electrical fires of ICEs. If a plug/socket connection is vibrated enough, then the connection becomes damaged and gets a higher resistance, causing more heat to be produced and a possible fire-source. Basically, anywhere you’re using a high electrical current, there’s a possible failure-mode that ends in flames. Car manufacturers always look for cost-savings, so even if something is currently free of failures, the next redesign may not embody all previous knowledge.
And, of course, any “beta testing” that happens during design and manufacture may not cover some real world conditions and definitely won’t cover all of them (combinatorial explosion). Thus, the real test of any economic good is when it gets sold to the general public. ;p
@cdquarles @Simon Derricut @H.R.
For EV vs combustion fire rates – A comment with Tesla Fire Safety Statistics is in moderation. Their claim (approximate numbers; text abridged and reformatted; from /VehicleSafetyReport under Tesla top web level):
————————
From 2012 – 2021
– one Tesla vehicle fire for every 210 million miles traveled.
– one US vehicle fire for every 19 million miles traveled. Data from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation.
————————-
For 2012-2018
– one Tesla vehicle fire for every 170 million miles traveled.
– one US vehicle fire for every 19 million miles traveled.
I infer:
– US data includes hydrocarbon and electric powered vehicles.
– Tesla vehicle fire safety is improving.
I agree, it is still early days for EV battery safety, the industry is climbing the first steps of the learning curve.
I am aware of these risk factors:
– Battery format: Cylinder vs. Pouch/Prismatic. If one pouch in a battery module swells, it puts pressure on neighboring pouches disrupting their safety. This can initiate a runaway situation. Cylindrical batteries provide superior protection against this scenario Several manufacturers – GM, BMW – are moving from pouch to cylindrical cells.
– Battery chemistry. @H.R. covered that well.
– Safety measures. Most manufacturers have a mechanism to isolate the High Voltage battery. A mix of relays, pyro fuses, “Fireman’s Loop” or similar that keeps HV DC in the battery module. This also includes battery pack shell strength and collision protection.
– Experience. LG Energy is relatively new. Their early generation pouch cells have a troubling record with Chevrolet Bolt and Ford F-150 Lightning. There have been fewer Bolt fires recently.
– System monitoring, reporting, analysis and feedback cycle time. @Simon Derricut raises that issue. This is vital but easy for non-IT or aviation professionals to overlook.
For the last 12 years before my recent retirement, my day job was complex computer system troubleshooting for a large global company. I worked closely with the systems monitoring team to ensure they collected and retained “metrics that matter” for nearly every computer around the world. As I learned more, I would provide the SNMP tree ID for additional metrics. The network team collected WAN traffic for every data center.
The data helped me look like a genius – when there was a problem I could immediately review server stats to identify often-obscure issues; minor network traffic anomalies could point at a root cause. One of my favorites – spurious TCP Retransmits allowed me to deduce that voltage sag during production line startup was affecting aging IT equipment on the line. Easy remediation was to install UPS for the IT equipment. It could not be justified during construction – if the power went out the batch was ruined, so there was no apparent reason to keep the IT equipment running.
Tesla, with its Silicon Valley DNA, sets a high bar here. Every car monitors every battery module, motor, inverter, breaker… The data is sent to Tesla. It seems to generally happen when the car has a Wi-Fi connection. Since Tesla sends software and firmware updates to the car via Wi-Fi, owners are motivated to ensure the cars have Wi-Fi access. If there is an anomaly, the data snapshot is sent via cellular connection and recorded in non-volatile storage. I think Prosche also has good monitoring but a weaker collect-analyze-correct-distribute mechanism.
Tesla uses the data to optimize battery management. As trouble scenarios surface – several Tesla Model S had battery fires shortly after charging a few years ago – the firmware is rapidly updated. The pattern is to distribute the updates to employee vehicles first, then ramp up to others as reliability is documented.
Tesla also uses the data to work on cell improvements with Panasonic, its long-time battery supplier. Early Tesla battery packs aged poorly. Many owners with 85 KWh and 90 KWh packs reported significant capacity loss and even module failures as time passed. My Model S with a 100 KWh pack was manufactured in mid-2017. There is about 6% – 8% capacity loss after nearly 94,000 miles, many Supercharger visits and charging to 100% before most road trips. Subjectively, I see few battery pack complaints from owners with 2017 and later vehicles on user forums.
Nick – E.M. uses a whitelisting method for commenters. It appears your first comment was as ‘Nick’. That went to moderation until E.M.’s team (E.M., E.M., E.M., and E.M. Sometimes EM. is off for the day taking care of other business 😉) clears the commenter to the whitelist.
Your second post was as Nicholas, which needed to be cleared to the whitelist. Also, more than, IIRC, 3(?) links kicks your comment out to moderation or spam, I forget which.
And then, for reasons only known to the gods of bits and bytes, some comments just disappear into cyberspace never to be seen again and for no apparent reason.
Since you’re new here and E.M. has been playing Captain Bligh as well as gardening and going through his vehicle inventory (among the other things he fusses with) you may experience some delays before your comment appears.
It’s best to stick with one handle and one email addy to *ahem* “enhance your commenting experience”. **
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It’s good to see some BEV data up through 2021 and in passenger miles. I’ll need to have a look at that later. I’m tied up with household obligations at the moment.
What your latest post made me realize is that BEV fires are reported, including lots of pictures or video, but the year of the car rarely is, or at least I’ve never noticed it.
The recent fires on transport ships mean that someone made a manufacturing boo-boo. The fires involving vehicles on the road could be caused by the owner and the way the owner is charging the car, road damage, or battery age, meaning it may be an older, less stable version. Are there particular years that tend to go up in flames? I dunno.
As was said above, finding the root cause of a BEV fire can be difficult or impossible to determine from a smoldering puddle.
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**My local grocery store has a sign that says “Security cameras have been installed to enhance your shopping experience.”
I’ve been meaning to stop by the service desk and ask for the list of enhancements to my shopping experience that these cameras provide. So far, my own list has only one item, “Feeds my paranoia,” and that can hardly be considered an enhancement.
@H.R.: “I’ve been meaning to stop by the service desk and ask for the list of enhancements to my shopping experience that these cameras provide.”
I REALLY don’t like cameras being used to track law abiding people traveling in public — but I might be not so adamant about cameras in shops and stores. I have seen a surprisingly large number of stories from people who are accosted in shops and grocery stores by other shoppers. And if the argument is between you (minding your own business) and a woman of any age, all the lady has to say is “he hit me, he threatened me, he put his hands on my no-no-square!” Trust me, the police will automatically take her word over yours. Unless the store has cameras, YOU will be handcuffed and arrested and taken to who knows what ultimate end.
Nick Nicholas:
I have an issue with the habit of folks citing the NUMBER of EV fires vs ICE fires and / or citing the same number “per vehicle mile”. The issue is that those metrics are not capturing the issue that bothers me about EVs.
I’ve seen a LOT of vehicle fires. Something about having been driving for about 55 years and in some years doing over 100,000 miles a year… on the road consulting type job plus a lot of “seeing the country”. While, occasionally, one will destroy the car, almost all of them are stopped by the firewall as an engine fire. Often with hardly any engine damage and near zero risk to the passengers. Frequently put out with about a 2 pound dry fire extinguisher (or even just opening the hood and waiting for the gas that leaked out of the system to burn off in a minute or two).
Compare the EV Fire. From what I’ve seen, it typically completely destroys the car, often an adjacent car (or two or three or…) and sometimes takes out the whole house, garage, building, or even a giant ship. They can not be effectively put out by anything short of a pumper truck (or two, or three…) and occasionally required a fork lift to dump them off a pier or drop them in a hole dug by a backhoe and drowned in 40,000 gallons of water.
It just the sheer size and intractability of the fires that’s the issue. Secondarily, the fact that Lion batteries have a strong tendency to grow dendrites and burst into flame when they short out the cell, made worse with deep cycle use (i.e. using your whole battery) or less than optimal charging patterns (i.e. real life charging challenges like in Alaska, Canada, or the Mohave Desert… trying to reach Van Horn Texas…)
I will never ever have one with a Lion battery charging in my garage. I care too much about my house, my family, and my life. Frankly, I’d not even sleep in one at a charging station trying to cross the country as there seem to be some “issues” with escaping one that is on fire with the battery not powering the electric doors.
FWIW, I could easily be happy charging a LiFePO4 battery in my garage. They don’t burst into flames with dendrite growth. I’m planning to make a Battery Box and put an inverter in it as a kind of “Whole House UPS”. I’ll either use flooded Lead Acid (if I need to go cheap at first) or LiFePO4 if I can afford to “buy the best” or after the proof of concept Lead Acid batteries reach End Of Life. LiFePO4 is commonly used as the “House Batteries” in RVs, as a point of reference.
I believe I’ve seen that newer Teslas have gone to LiFePO4 batteries…
So this also indicates that Fires / Mile or Fires / Vehicle needs to be further divided by battery type. Lion Batteries are banned on airplanes, in several kinds of shipping, and have burned up a few homes when even things like kids toys have burst into flame. That’s an issue. It does me no good to be told that “EVs go a zillion miles between fires” if there is no information about how many of them were LiFePO4 (and perhaps other chemistries like the Lead Acid used in some DIY cars I coveted in the ’70s and ’80s) and how many were Lithium Ion.
What I care about is: IF I buy an EV and it has a Lithium Ion battery, will it go 150,000 miles with ZERO chance of burning my house down or killing my family? (I have put more than 150,000 on individual cars a few times… One made it to 450,000 miles after I bought it with about 200,000 on it (Mercedes Diesel) and a Honda I bought new I sold with 14 years and 275,000 miles on it. So IF it is going to kill me or burn my house down at 150,000 miles, that becomes a “probability of 100%” with my use profile.
THAT is what needs to be addressed. Not some statistic about average vehicle miles per fire with zero metric on severity of the fire or ease of extinguishing it OR tendency to take down whole buildings and ships when it happens. And since this issues gets exponentially worse with charge / discharge cycles (and EVs are fairly new), we need to know WHEN in the life cycle these fires are “due”…
@H.R.:
One of the shipping channels said that the yahoos loading cars on ships often ignore the speed limits and hot dog them, so much that they tend to bottom on the steep ramps at the transition from ramp to flat floor.
I think that indicates a place where battery damage will be a high risk… and if only “1 in 1000”, with a 3000 vehicle ship that starts to become a certainty…
@E.M. – Welcome back, Captain Bligh! How many had to walk the plank this trip? 😜
Hmmm…. I’m wondering about the fires per passenger mile. I also expressed some interest in the age and upgrades to the batteries, but yes, the important difference is in the fires.
Anyhow, I’ll have to look at that report and see if it includes fires not on the highway, i.e., while charging or in a garage or parking lot. I dunno if that 212 million miles includes every lithium-ion BEV fire or not. And does that fire on the ship count at all? That’s one fire per zero miles and dividing by zero tends to make statistics a little messy. I’ll have a look at some point. It should be in the footnotes somewhere.
Oh, one other thing I haven’t figured out. How are passenger miles determined? I figure it’s some statistical WAG. Any time you don’t use actual tallied data and use statistics instead, the answers all depend upon the assumptions.
P.S. – I hope you don’t mind me ‘splainin’ a bit about how blog commenting works here, and I was probably off a little on a couple of things. I thought you’d be offline a bit longer and I didn’t want Nick/Nicholas to remain in the dark about delayed comments.
@H.R.:
Any time someone else explains things so I don’t need to do it for the millionth time is a big win ;-)
Nobody walked the plank. However…
At least 2 out of 3 “woke up on the dock” after “whiskey was involved”. (it seems that 1.75 L is bigger than 750 ml even though the number is smaller… ). One was escorted back to his boat by Dock “security” (which is mostly the guys who help tie up ropes you toss to them when docking…), or so I was told, and his spouse was PO’d at him again per what I was told, me being uninvolved; and one got on the wrong boat (but after resolving the confusion the gun was put away… 8-0 )
I’m pretty sure I ended up soaked to the skin due to rain (since it was low tide and I would not be able to get back to the dock had I been in the water…) but did not drown (which tends to also confirm “rain not ocean” was involved since it is hard to drown in the rain but ocean is easy…) I also woke up in bed in warm dry clothes so I figure at some point I got back to the boat and changed clothes. I hope.
In Summary: At least 2 out of 3 got wet and were “planked” on the dock, but nobody walked a plank… as walking was a skill no longer in evidence. Then things got cleaned up and it was “suddenly morning” (or maybe afternoon…)
Or so the story is told…
Oh, and a resolution was put forward to measure everything in shots, not L or ml…
In Other EV Stuff:
I’m certain the “fires / passenger mile” is a WAG based on some speculated “average passengers per trip” statistic from (God only knows where) multiplied by some “Average miles per trip” statistic from (God doesn’t even know where) then multiplied by trips / year (Yet Another Wag, but perhaps derived from insurance company claimed miles driven per vehicle so certainly quite accurate, cough.) and then divided by the reported fires.
Per “All the fires”: I doubt anyone has a clue. Car burns up, guy sells it for scrap, who gets told? I know of a couple of “car fires” that never got reported to anyone. Hood was open, hose got replaced, all was good again.
So yeah, I figure it is all WAG all the way down. Might be a SWAG – Scientific Wild Ass Guess – IF they use “funny statistics” to make their guess all sciency like…
Tesla passenger miles –
Funny that… I told about how Teslas are now ubiquitous around my neck of the woods, thus spoiling our game of ;Spot The Tesla’. I see them mostly occupied by just the driver. Passengers are rare.
Hmmm… maybe the kids are out of college and the parents think, “Hey, let’s get a Tesla now that we’re no longer fronting tuition.” So, mom or dad gets to drive the ZOOM! toy (they are fast!).
My township is into status. I kid you not, there are more Porsche Cayenne SUVs around than Ford Escapes. Three or 4 Porsche Panameras cruise around the hood, and those are a complete “Why a 4-door Porsche sedan?” in my book. Lots of Beemer Ms and Mercedes AMGs, too. And now, lots of Teslas.
We’re not around in Winter, so I don’t know if the Teslas get parked when the blizzards hit or not.
Also, I am beginning to question the passenger miles data. Too many assumptions. What should be fairly accurate is percent of vehicle fires by model. All 57 States (or 54, depending on the pResident) have excellent vehicle registration records, so number of cars by model should be readily available. Also, insurance companies probably already have the fire data because they made the payouts. All one needs to do is put those two together.
I think that the precent of each car model that catches fire would be the best way to look at the data. And it can’t be skewed because Ford quit making the Pinto ;o)
But still, it comes down to the type of fire more so than the number of fires.
Nice to have at least some figures here, but “passenger miles” should really be “car miles”, with a breakdown into how old the cars were when they burnt, why it happened (crash or spontaneous), and the other consequences of those fires. As EM said, for most ICE fires there’s often no major damage to anything else, since the fuel supply is limited, but for BEV fires there can be major consequences.
Despite the relatively few fires per passenger mile for BEVs, looks to me that they might end up with more fatalities, especially if the door-locks are disabled so the people can’t get out. Plus there’s the health risk for people fighting the fire, since there’s a lot more nasty stuff emitted. Also a pretty severe risk of the BEV fire setting fire to something else, and if inside a building destroying that building.
Seems to me therefore that the statistics are being spun to make people think BEVs are safer than ICEs, whereas they are in fact more dangerous. For people who state that using a bicycle is better for your health, it’s similarly left unstated that you have a much higher risk of injury than when driving a car. No crash-proof cage around you. Another Tour de France competitor died recently after a crash, just running off the road. However, for F1 racing cars, going very much faster, normally the driver walks away. Only time you get a fatality tends to be the bad luck of bouncing back onto the track and being T-boned by another car. Car racing is a dangerous sport, but far safer than it used to be.
In order to get high-capacity batteries, insulation and connections need to be pared down to the minimum that’s necessary, which reduces the tolerance for any manufacturing failures. It’s actually pretty amazing they work so well in general.
T J Rogers of Cypress Semiconductor and Enphase Technologies explains Brakeflow technology being used in Enovix batteries.
There’s a misunderstanding in this discussion of fire and safety statistics. All the statistics are vehicle miles. None are “passenger” miles.
NHTSA deals only with vehicle miles. I don’t know how they calculate the statistic. One could assume the NHTSA method provides a reasonably consistent correlation with actual vehicle miles per year.
Tesla reports all safety statistics in millions of vehicle miles. Their instrumentation and telemetry likely provides relatively high accuracy.
A very small percentage of US vehicle sales have been Battery Electric. An even smaller percentage of vehicles in use are Battery Electric since average US vehicle useful life is somewhere above 12 years. Thus, using total annual US Vehicle Miles as the denominator would introduce negligible error.
Finally, Toyota uses NiMH batteries in their Hybrids. This may provide @EM a bit of solace.
Nicholas – the percentage of fires for EVs may be a lot lower than for ICEs, but the consequential losses from them may still be significantly larger. However, I’m not seeing that data, so I’d be just guessing based on what I’ve seen of such fires. For example, in Germany an electric bus caught fire whilst charging and set light to the others. There are a lot of electric scooters around, and they tend to get charged inside to stop them being stolen, and there have been a number of house-fires started.
Numerically, probably not a high risk, but if it happens then there’s a high risk of a lot of damage. You’re sitting (literally) on an incendiary device with a whole lot of stored energy.
Back when I was designing electronics for Xerox, I had to look around 5 years into the future to see what chips would be available for a sufficient time into the future that we would be able to complete the projected run of production before the devices went obsolete (or expensive or hard to get). This is a problem for electronics – availability will change. As technology changes, there’s a die-shrink every so often so the same function requires less actual silicon (so cheaper to make) and at each change there are subtle (sometimes not so subtle) changes in functions that may affect the design. A board that used to work fine may start failing with the shrunken dies. Might be a timing change or a drive-level change (input or output) and if any design is a bit marginal we might have problems with an increased percentage of boards.
This will be a problem with BEVs, where the chips have gone obsolete or the fabs that made them have changed their processing line. Or maybe if China invades Taiwan and TSMC isn’t supplying them to the West. Maybe even if a few people (surprisingly few…) died from some lab-escaped viral disease,and the remaining people don’t have the knowledge of design and manufacture. If a specific chip becomes unavailable, and your BEV suddenly needs it, it’s a rather-large doorstop and no longer a vehicle.
Politicians have become aware of this problem, and started to build fabs (or at least encourage them to be built) in Europe and the USA, so that critical chips can be made locally. It’ll take several years before production starts, though. Unsurprisingly, a local shortage of people competent in setting up the fab or running one (TSMC will be sending their folk to the USA to start with).
The point of saying this is that your Tesla may be fun to drive and work well for your needs, but there are extra risks of it suddenly becoming a brick or of it burning down your garage and house and maybe killing or severely injuring your family.
Last time I went through the Chunnel, they stuck a warning label on the van because I had a camping-gas stove with around 300m of Butane gas. A fire risk! Given the ship fires this string started with, I’d expect them to ban EVs from passing through fairly soon. Maybe not a high risk of it happening, but massive damage if it did and we have examples of that risk eventuating so it’s not just a WAG that the risk exists.
I’d like to have an electric car. Given my background in electronics, I’d probably be able to fix it, if I could get the bits. However, I don’t have enough kW available to charge it quickly, and I occasionally need to travel further than the available EV range to pick people up from the airport. There’s also the problem that I couldn’t afford one, and I’ll probably try to keep my 1994 Nissan Micra running as long as I can get spare parts and it remains legal to drive it.
@Simon Derricutt –
I agree BEV battery technology is in its early days. I still view Tesla’s Fire Safety stats as a demonstration that at least one vendor and its supply chain are climbing the learning curve.
Meanwhile, established ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicle makers still expose owners to risk. From March, 2023:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/hyundai-kia-vehicles-recalled-fire-risk
NHTSA shares your BEV safeguards in that recall announcement.
I think contagious combustion is a risk whenever vehicles are parked in close ranks. Even in the pre-BEV era there were parking structure disasters where a single vehicle starts burning – whether from worn wiring, failed electronics, fuel / vapor leak meeting a spark… Hydrocarbon fuel is particularly dangerous in that scenario since fuel from a ruptured tank or line runs downslope, providing a path for flames to claim new victims. The same is true for vehicle carriers – the vehicle decks have aggressive fresh air circulation to minimize fumes. This link shows that even good air circulation cannot offset close packing. Click the “Open” button for video.
FWIW, we have a detached garage. Renovations claimed the original attached garage footprint.
You raise a good point about obsolete electronics. That affects nearly every vehicle manufactured in the last 20 years. I think Tesla has a slightly lower risk factor:
– Their onboard software/firmware update system includes a survey cycle where all devices are polled for their hardware and firmware versions. New firmware and drivers are downloaded and applied if either new hardware is installed or newer versions are available. Tesla also ensures the vehicle’s “digital twin” is updated.
– Tesla tries to minimize changes to physical dimensions and connection. This allows components on older vehicles to be seamlessly updated and integrated. This pushes “absolutely obsolete” further into the future.
My 2017 Model S:
… Cameras were replaced with upgraded models in March 2023. This was just as newer, incompatible cameras were being introduced in new production. Included in the Full Self Driving upgrade purchased during a “need cash – now!” markdown sale. Available to S and X dating back to late 2015 when Tesla shifted from Waymo to their own technology.
… Driving computer replaced with upgraded model in about 2020. That was obsoleted by the incompatible model introduced in March 2023. Also part of FSD purchase. Available to S and X dating back to late 2015 as well as early Model 3.
… Media Control Unit (large vertical screen) and dashboard screen replaced in 2021 while driving computer was upgraded. Included change from nVidia chip to Intel. I had to pay out of pocket. If I waited for the original units eMMC to die – and disable the car – it would have been covered by warranty. The newer unit was obsoleted in 2021 when landscape mode with beefy AMD chip was introduced. Available to all Model S and X since start of production.
@EM – A large number of solar panels and adequate battery storage are not portable, but would support most modern conveniences, including EV propulsion, if hydrocarbons were unavailable.
@Nicholas:
I need no solace. I have 2 Diesel cars, so nearly zero fire risk. (The others are gasoline, but remarkably safe design).
FWIW, in about 1975 I was hot to make an Electric motorcycle (even bought the frame w/o engine to do it) but then didn’t get it done before needing to move. In the early ’82 hung out at Maker Fairs looking at Lead Acid Battery E-Cars and thinking about how to turn one of mine into an e-Car. I’m not against them in principle.
Heck, even now, if I were not overstocked by about double on existing ICE cars, I’d likely be finding a Nissan Leaf with a dead battery and installing a nice safe chemistry for “all those runs to the local store” of about 5 miles round trip. NiMH and LiFePO4 being my two preferred. I was thinking of doing that in California about 5 years back.
But, Lion? No Way. It just bursts into flame spontaneously way too often. The FAA agrees with me on that… That Tesla has gone to LiFePO4 IMHO confirms it too. But I like to buy old used cars that will go another 100,000 or 300,000 miles and do maintenance for that run. There is presently no evidence that I can do that with any car newer than about 2002. Which is why I own 2 vehicles newer than that (2005 and 2008) but 5 older than that. And, BTW, I’m looking to dump the 2008 due to too many nutty repair issues. (Largely involving the electronics…)
So telling me about how great it is that Tesla continuously racks up maintenance to keep replacing the electronics with newer ones just does not improve my opinion.
FWIW, the “upgrade costs” and the “electronics costs” on my 6 oldest cars has been zero. I’ve owned the oldest ( a 1980 Mercedes Diesel) for about 30+ years now and expect it to still be running long after I’m not. It cost me $1200 when I bought it. The 2008 Mercedes has taken somewhere over $2000 in about 2 years in electronics FUBARs (thus being up for sale / dumping).
I looked at new Subaru Outback cars. The way you must interact with a giant tablet mounted to the dash to do most normal functions assured me I would never buy a new one. I have a 2001 Subaru Forester that is in the “keep forever” category. Lots of nice mechanical stuff and very little electronic. I love it. Needs a touch up on the paint, but interior is still fine and the running gear is fine too. BTW, it cost me $1400 about 5 years ago IIRC.
As far as I can see, anything newer than about 2005 is lacking in any value proposition, has massively increased maintenance costs and risks of electronic obsolescence, and if a BEV, risks killing you and burning your house down if you do not get the right battery chemistry.
Oh, and one other thing:
Having been a “computer security guy” for about 35 years, the notion that someone can install software in my car, record everywhere it goes and everything the cameras see, and choose to turn off my car any time; well, that’s just a horror show of its own.
Oh, and per solar panels:
I’ve been looking at that as I’m doing my “standby generator” search / design.
Panels on the roof: A huge cost suck due to roof issues. Need a new roof? Pay for a de-install re-install of all the solar and add that to the already high roof bill. Have a service contract with the installer? Look at the number of installers who go out of business…
Panels NOT on the roof: Back yard is largely under huge oak trees and / or is my garden area. Front yard is the septic drain field and likely not a good place to put them due to added weight and the need to run electricity over the ground in Florida Storms.
Panels “installed” have the Gone With The Wind problem due to hurricanes.
Panels “not installed” but portable have the He’s so heavy, he’s my bother issue. Lugging around a few hundred pounds of panel and support and then wiring it all up (rainy season?) and then taking it down again is not my idea of a good time.
Oh, and per “power the car”: There’s a certain size issue here… Look at the power needed to charge a Tesla from dead,, oh wait, you can’t do that, from 20% of battery capacity to full (oh, wait, you are supposed to stop at 80%)… but look at the power required. Then look at how many 200 W panels running at full power for the 4 to 6 hours of the day where you MIGHT get full power. Now figure out how many weeks it will take to charge your car…
It just isn’t going to happen short of about $50,000 of professionally installed panels and the space to put them in; and even then you will only really have it work well in places below 40 degrees latitude with low cloud cover (raining and dark clouds here today…) during about 1/2 of the year. (FWIW, I wanted to do it and then “did the math” and figured out it is a No Go. That, BTW, is why so many homes with roof top solar are “Grid Connected” and make the seasonal “duck curve” worse for the utility company.)
My “Old Home Town” in Fog Valley California had “Tule Fog” every winter. It was not until I left town and went to college that I found out there were places where winter was not 3 months of never seeing the sun. So local weather matters a Whole Lot.
I’m still thinking I’ll build a DIY “solar generator” (I hate that term… it does not “generate” anything and is not “solar”. They are a battery box and inverter that may, or may not, be charged from a solar panel…) and get about 400 to 800 w of portable solar panels. That’s enough for basic high efficiency lighting and charging electronics. Good for Camping and in an AwShit minimal electricity. (a small RV / tent for example).
But charge an E-Car? All I can say is “do the math”… and “size matters”.
Looks like most Tesla are about 80 kW-hr to 100 kW-hr to charge.
https://electrly.com/en/ev-charging-guide/tesla/how-many-kwh-to-charge-a-tesla
Figure 10 x 200 W solar panels (a large number, BTW) is 2 kW and will need to run for roughly 40 to 50 hours. At Peak Sun. That’s about (very generously and only if the panels are oriented perpendicular to the sun direction at a good latitude / season) 5 hours of the day. So roughly a week to 10 days. Maybe. IF there is no rain, overcast, clouds, heavy smog, snow,
You can improve that a lot IF:
You install a load of permanent panels on your roof.
Install a field of expensive commercial sun following panels on moving mounts.
Have acreage to devote to it.
Live in the tropics.
Can find and buy the latest Wet Dream 20% efficiency solar panels made of unobtanium.
You only drive the car 5 to 10 miles a day.
I’d love to be more positive about all this, but I was for about 30 years starting around 1975 and ending around 2005. I even attended the first demonstration of the Tesla Roadster to the IEEE meeting in Palo Alto and listened to the “pitch” from their chief design Engineer about all the magic they did to make it so cool. ( I can explain their choice of cell, then, the heat management and battery management systems…)
But the simple fact is that having watched this tech for about 45 years now, I’m very tired of all the Ra Ra and Hype that is in it and how poor the actual delivery of reality has been. I’ve moved into the “Show me the math” and simply “show me” group.
The only way until recently that they could make a car with decent range was by using dangerous and highly flammable battery chemistry. With the recent re-packaging of the battery they were able to take the 50% power density of LiFePO4 and make it work. Now we need to wait a decade to see what new issues that might have introduced. I will not be driving by then…
So still interested, but not enthusiast about it any more…
@E.M.: “But charge an E-Car? All I can say is “do the math”… and “size matters”.”
For a world where the grid is down and petrofuels are unavailable, about the only workable solution is gasified wood. I have seen videos of it done with pickup trucks (in the bed), conventional cars (towing a trailer unit), and in old WWII photos done by carrying a huge gas bladder on the roof. Not going too far with that bladder though…
Nicholas – yep, the cycle of failure – failure analysis – fix the error in all future designs isn’t followed that often. The wiring fault (and associated fire risk) simply shouldn’t happen now if the designers did a proper walk-through.
Nice to know you have all mitigations for the risks already, since I suspect most people aren’t aware of them. OK, there may be communications failures in a SHTF moment, and the constant interchange of data your Tesla does may be interrupted. I don’t know whether there’s some period of time after which your car refuses to go if it can’t call home, and if there is (either designed in or a bug) you probably won’t know until you hit the problem. The “call home and keep the factory aware of all events” has been in use for a long time with Rolls-Royce aero engines, and is a factor in their high reliability (and also a higher cost) so in practice it works, but for Tesla cars it also gives the capability to brick the car remotely (might be possible for Rolls-Royce,too). Great if someone steals the car and you can locate and recover it easily, not so good if there’s a bug or some hacker finds the way into the system and bricks either your car or all cars. I’ve been dealing with computers too long to accept such a large amount of code to be bug-free or unhackable. I can’t quantify that risk of your car becoming a brick, though I do know that if you don’t drive it for a few weeks then the 12V battery will discharge (even if the main drive battery is kept fully-charged, since that charging system doesn’t charge the 12V battery that runs the computers that are always-on and control the door locks) and then you can’t get into the car and need to dismantle some of the car to get at the 12V battery to charge it before you can drive it (or even unlock the doors and get in). Yep, a design fault in my view, but not sure it will be fixed unless a lot of people complain. Since when driving the 12V battery is charged, it’s just a software change.
It remains that in the current political climate that the likelihood of the grid failing is increasing, and also that electricity costs will rise – if you keep adding wind and solar power to the system, and reduce the number of baseload generators (fossil or nuclear) then at some point there won’t be enough electricity to supply demand, so the grid operators will implement demand reduction systems (basically, power cuts). With “smart meters” it’s likely that your car charger will be disabled, and either the AC or heating will have its temperature set-points changed to reduce demand. Bit of a bummer if you want to travel, worse if you have to travel (evacuation order).
On the bright side, I’m expecting some new physics to give us ways to generate electricity cheaply, and that such a generator should be able to be installed in a car, thus releasing you from that grid-tie and also allowing unlimited travel. Not here yet, but in a few years. That’s when EVs will come into their own – better in all respects than ICE cars except for the standard electronics obsolescence problem and thus problems if your car is too old to get the spares. I’m able to get new bits for my 1959 Massey-Ferguson tractor, but then there’s almost no electronics.
In the meantime, I hope you continue to be happy with your Tesla, and the nasty possibilities we’ve discussed don’t hit you. I’m pretty certain the problems will diminish over time though mostly that’s a reactive process – bad things need to happen in enough numbers that fixing them becomes urgent (reference Pinto fuel-tank problems). Initial customers thus see the majority of the problems and as things mature later customers see fewer problems.
Something confused me about the UAH posting by Dr. Roy. He said:
July 2023 was an unusual month, with sudden warmth and a few record or near-record high temperatures.
Since the satellite record began in 1979, July 2023 was:
warmest July on record (global average)
warmest absolute temperature (since July is climatologically the warmest month)
tied with March 2016 for the 2nd warmest monthly anomaly (departure from normal for any month)
warmest Southern Hemisphere land anomaly
warmest July for tropical land (by a wide margin, +1.03 deg. C vs. +0.44 deg. C in 2017)
If the UAH anomaly chart is created by subtracting the base period mean from the monthly mean, how can the July anomaly be lower than any of the previous anomalies? There is a higher temperature in the chart around 2016.
@jim2: “If the UAH anomaly chart is created by subtracting the base period mean from the monthly mean, how can the July anomaly be lower than any of the previous anomalies? There is a higher temperature in the chart around 2016.”
Yeah, confusing. What it looks like is that the values of the monthly anomalies are based on subtracting the monthly mean from the base period monthly mean, not from the total base period mean. The 13 month running average (in red) is the yearly mean of the monthly anomalies, not of temperatures. Since that red line is a yearly anomaly mean, it makes more sense that Spencer graphed it against a base period mean temperature which was created from yearly temps. In other words, don’t pay too much attention to the highly variable individual dots of monthly anomalies. More important (in my opinion) is the running annual average of anomalies, and its comparison to the base period temps.
“There is a higher temperature in the chart around 2016.”
No, there is a higher ANOMALY, but not a higher temperature. Looks like that 2016 dot is February, so it can easily have a higher monthly anomaly but still be lower temperature than July.
Hunga Tonga done it!
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/tonga-eruption-blasted-unprecedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere
@TTN – yep, that’s what I was afraid of. I’ve been interpreting this chart the wrong way for years. I want to see the absolute temp with a compressed Y axis so it doesn’t look so much like a straight line ;)
Looks like if I want actual temperatures instead of month-based anomalies, will have to back out the base numbers.
@Ossqss: RE the volcano, I saw a comment about it: “We need to immediately transition to electric volcanos. let’s put another trillion dollar bill through congress to solve the problem.”
FWIW – 51 hours off the grid, includes charging EV.
Seems fragile to manage home solar panels and energy storage through Internet connection to Tesla’s computers. The Tesla connection allows customers in some areas to enroll in its Virtual Power Plant. Tesla VPP sells energy from participating customers’ PowerWall storage batteries to utilities during peak demand periods and passes a portion of the loot back to the customer. Not sure whether Tesla has figured out how to marshall BEVs and PowerWalls to absorb “renewable” power when it exceeds grid demand yet the utility has a “take or pay” contract.
While this YouTuber gets Internet through SpaceX Starlink, they still depend on Tesla computers to monitor and manage their power supply.
It does demonstrate solution viability. Stand-alone management and monitoring would be far more resilient.
If a death happened in the nuclear industry we would never her the end of it. But death from industrial negligence with electric cars – there will be the now customary murderous political silence. All good with EVs – nothing to see here. Cats kill lots of sparrows. So EV fires and deaths are OK. Amaraight?
Aside from this tragedy that will be covered up (the family will probably be punished) – there is nothing, absolutely nothing, more beautiful than the sight of a ship full of EVs on fire. The sweetest thing on earth!
My impression is that EV fires generally earn media attention – relatively new technology draws interest. Combustion vehicle fires are rarely newsworthy unless there is substantial collateral damage.
Similarly, incidents involving autonomous vehicles (Waymo, Cruise…) or Tesla Autopilot/FSD earn coverage. Never any news about cruise control incidents – that’s established technology and it leaves few traces.
We don’t hear much about protected bird species lost to wind power. There is some coverage for whales lost to offshore wind – a beached whale carcass is larger and more odorous than an elephant in the room.
Finally, a survey of recent car carrier fires. The presenter points out that the final reports with likely root cause and preventive measures are rarely open to the public.
@Nicholas F – Hey, thanks for providing some data sources and a few bits and bobs that I did not know. That was interesting about Tesla monitoring Power Walls. I did not know that. I did know about the interaction with their cars.
Follow up — EV car carrier fire, how to unload fried EVs — dump them straight into a bin of water, because they are still dangerous even after a month.
Other videos also had some hot facts. The ship was not full, so deck 5, the loading level, was left empty. Everything above that level was toast. Below that level, there was no fire, so there were some cars that could drive off. Even so some of those cars were damaged. Also the ship engine room deck was not damaged.
more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqvm2HEp4Uk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSX2Saa7oS0