This happened after the [1]Mountain View crash in 2018 as well. But I'd be rather concerned about using water to extinguish these battery fires.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/05/10/tesla-battery-reignited-days-after-fiery-crash-in-mountain-view/

The article isn't quite accurate. Water and metallic lithium is bad, but not "explosive".

But batteries don't contain metallic lithium (water and potassium is even more bad, but you can put bananas in your cocktail)

The problem with Li-Ion batteries is that they contain their own oxidiser so smothering them with water (or CO2) doesn't really help - the general plan is to dump water on them to cool them down so the reaction stops and the fire goes out. The problem is then if they dry out and heat back up the reaction and fire can start again.

If it was in a scrap yard I would have thought leaving it to burn was probably the easiest option.

Lots of toxic smoke from those fires, leaving it to burn isn't the option it would be if it was a pile of wood in a scrapyard.

It's in Sacramento - who is it going to harm ?

This is only going to become a bigger problem as more battery packs arrive at the scrap yard. Having the space to remove and isolate battery packs from each other lest we see cascading fires is potentially going to be a big problem. :(

I think the best answer is removable batteries. As well as this issue, it makes the problem of degrading batteries less, makes it quick to change rather than slow to recharge, allows faster adoption as the users do not have to buy the batteries, and makes closed loop recycling easier.

should it not it be standard procedure to disconnect/remove the battery ? I do realise that this might not be very easy if the EV is all bent & twisted after some accident.

disconnect/remove the battery ?

They probably do, but it may not prevent the fire as that commonly results from internal shorting between cells within the battery itself, heating them to the point where the electrolyte ignites.

Disconnect and remove is not enough. What you need to do is discharge the battery so it contains less energy to start or maintain a fire. Recycling would be a good next step. Last time I checked this was difficult because battery technology changes fast enough to obsolete potential investment in recycling before a likely payoff.

Discharging the battery seems an excellent idea although IIRC Lion doesn't tolerate complete discharge well. You won't be reusing the battery or its component cells if you don't manage the discharge properly. There's also the issue of getting rid of maybe 50kwh (180000000 joules) of energy without (further) damaging anything. I don't think this is something one would want to try at home.

There's also the issue of getting rid of maybe 50kwh (180000000 joules) of energy without (further) damaging anything.

The first thing you'd want to do is inspect the cell packets for mechanical damage and whether their temperature is markedly over ambient. Which would mean opening up the battery compartment(s) (probably not as simple as turning a slotted cover using a coin) and pointig a FLIR camera at the contents.

The cells considered safe could then be hooked up to an inverter delivering mains power to be consumed by whatever. This would of course need some appropriate infra at scrapyards dealing with EV.

There's also the issue of getting rid of maybe 50kwh (180000000 joules) of energy without (further) damaging anything

So a self remelting/metal recycling car?

Just tap the molten aluminium out

When I was in the military, our unit would go through a boatload of lithium batteries that were used in radios. Each battery had a discharge button on them, that would put a resistor across the battery to discharge it slowly and completely. We'd typically mash the button and load up 40-50 of them in a connex and come back in a week with a voltmeter to check that they were discharged fully. If they were, great. Into the trash as "commercial waste". If they wouldn't discharge, they'd have to go into a hazmat barrel and turned in for recycling. Every once in a while, one would catch on fire, but they wouldn't burn up the connex. We'd just have to shovel out all of the molten batteries and chuck them into another hazmat barrel! Totally safe! :D

The battery pack has a pyrofuse in it which breaks the connection as soon as the airbags go off. The battery is effectively open circuit.

This won't really help stop a thermal event if the battery is damaged, but prevents electrocution for first responders cutting you out of the mangled wreckage.

Ideally it would eject the battery in the event of a crash.

The first Tesla used 10000s of individual 18650 cells - would love to see it scatter them all like a cluster munition.

It is more complex of a decision than that.

If a vehicle has been involved in a fatality, it is often kept in custody of the wrecking yard for an extended period of time to allow the investigation to complete. If there is any indication the fatality was the result of a defective vehicle, it could be held as forensic evidence for years through a court trial.

Removing the battery could result in the unintentional destruction of evidence. Evidence that could exonerate or convict. It doesn't matter how well the mechanic did at removing the battery, the fact the evidence was touched can be used by a sharp attorney to create a 'reasonable doubt' for a jury.

And if not touched one may be faced with a situation similar to the Mission: Impossible TV series: "This tape wil self-destruct within ten seconds"

"This evidence may self-destruct within a few weeks."

The chemicals in the battery are quite valuable, and there are facilities that can recycle them. Doing so should be standard practice, especially since they can be a hazard if left lying around and especially if damaged by rough handling in the junkyard.

If I remember rightly, the solar panel fires were caused by inadequate cable crimps on the connector pins - quite a different issue than the Tesla battery problem.

So, this Tesla has been wrecked, caught on fire, doused with water, caught on fire again, (repeat etc.), tipped on its side, dropped in a pit, and submerged in thousands of gallons of water.

In today's used car market it's probably, after all that, still worth about $10K over the new retail price.

I wish I were joking...!

With cool flame decals -

It's a "fire-proven" model.

+$15k

... burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.

how about airtight shipping containers? Use an inert gas to replace the oxygen? Or perhaps Neon!

Or just launch them into orbit

As has been mentioned just about every time discussions touch on Li-ion fires, from Samsung phones to MH370: they don't need external oxygen to keep burning.

This happened with a Tesla in my area. The driver crashed it, resulting in a battery fire. After much work the fire department managed to get it out. A week or so later it caught fire again just sitting in the wrecking yard.

I wonder if junkyards will stop accepting Tesla vehicles at some point, until a method to safely dispose of them is developed.

I think the bigger risk will be to insurance premiums. Insurers can't sell crashed vehicle on a salvage title, and there'd presumably be liability if the scrapyard is storing the vehicle. If they've bought it to part out, the risk would presumably be to the scrapyard's insurance policy.

Newer EV designs would seem to make the risks even worse, ie by embedding batteries into frame elements, it makes fire fighting and battery removal a whole lot harder.

Depends. If there is enough crash damage, there may be no practicable way of safely disposing of the battery.

In a way, it's like defueling a nuclear reactor in a power station. If you manage to pull out all the fuel rods, get them into the cooling pond, all it well. If just one of them gets stuck because of some damage somewhere (e.g. a graphite block, after years of being transmuted by the neutron flux, has crumbled and is jamming a rod guide), you've now got a huge problem to deal with. Same with scramming the pile: you need to do it quickly, whilst it's still possible to do it at all, because very soon it won't be!

With an EV, getting rid of the battery energy is easy, provided the battery is in good shape. The only way of making a battery of this sort (with fundamentally very reactive constituents) safe otherwise is to fragment and disperse it, but it'll likely catch fire whilst you're doing so.

At least with petrol and especially diesel, there's a good chance that a cracked tank will just drain away, and as long as it doesn't land on something hot / sparky, you can make it safe with a bucket of sand / water.

Why do I only read about Tesla fires? Biased reporting or do they have issues the other EV manufacturers don't?

There are a lot of Teslas on the road in the USA - probably 10x as the next competitor.

Most of the other manufacturers models are sold in small numbers, to meet 'must sell an EV model' rules and have very small low performance batteries.

China is the main market for non-Tesla and you aren't going to hear about a fire in China on the evening news.

EVs are still about 50x LESS likely to be involved in a fire than dead-dinosaur mobile, but a burning Chevy doesn't make the front of el'reg

that REALLY doubt's that these electric cars are "good for the environment"?

Not at all. While they don't burn oil products they have their own issues that potentially affect the environment.

Better for the environment is perhaps a better statement.

People don't seem to realize just how polluting oil refining is, not to mention the enormous amount of energy oil cracking requires.

Yeah, EVs require minerals that need to be mined, but gasoline/petrol doesn't emerge from the ground with a preset octane rating.

And while every method of generating electricity, including wind and solar, has their own environmental load, you don't have a tailpipe emitting burnt hydrocarbons everywhere you drive.

Yeah, the net effect of burning that Tesla is probably to put into the atmosphere greenhouses gasses in excess of the equivalent CO2 which has been saved during the car's (unduly short) lifetime. Also, we have to count all the CO2 that went into putting out the fire - including getting the appliance in situ, digging that pit, and pumping all those kilolitres of water.

Unless, of course, if it turns out some of the chemicals produced in the fire create aerosol cooling and the whole thing was a net benefit to the environment - in which case we need to BURN MORE TESLAS, STAT.

But your gasoline car you need to include the carbon emissions of keeping the a couple of carrier fleets in the middle east to protect our Saudi allies from those evil Greenpeace hippies

I have pondered this question for many years and I'm still not sure.

I think part of the answer to this is that once we humans produce too much of something we tend to start destroying our living conditions.

The sheer volume of internal combustion engines in the world all pumping out foulness means we appear to be doing some damage to bits of our life systems.

EVs don't generate the same foulness as ICE vehicles, but the do generate other foulness that we're only just starting to properly be able to monitor.

Once EVs become the dominant transport choice (and I suspect they will) we'll no doubt discover we're shredding some other critical support system and we'll need to find a solution to that.

One thing to consider is that the ICE method has really really been perfected (ok not perfect but they're very very good)- very clever people have worked on them for over a 100 years, so any efficiencies that can now be found in them are teeeeny tiny.

EVs on the other hand are relatively new, and certainly new to mainstream manufacturers/consumers so there are probably a lot more efficiencies that are waiting to be uncorked in the EV realm which may ease our rampage on the planets resources.

One thing to consider is that the ICE method has really really been perfected (ok not perfect but they're very very good)- very clever people have worked on them for over a 100 years, so any efficiencies that can now be found in them are teeeeny tiny.

Still, well to wheel efficiency of an ICE is about 14% now even with a century of improvements, EVs manage double that even when charged off a fossil fuel power station: it's much easier to run those at maximum efficiency and there's of course the option to use their waste heat which you simply don't have with a mobile source.

Sounds about right.

The question then is, how do further improvements happen, to make best use of whatever green energy supply we have?

For EV's there's probably limited room for improvement; motors are already close to the limit of what could be achieved, no one has come up with much lighter battery, tyres have to be grippy and are therefore lossy, etc.

The only big way to improve on the energy expenditure of an EV is to address the losses - friction and charging / discharging efficiency. If they made a cross section area : length ratio better, that'd do something for drag (long and thin is better). If they reduced the rolling resistance, that'd help too.

So, what's the limits here? Well, suppose you made the wheels out of solid steel, and ran them on steel rails? That'd be next to no rolling resistance. Of course, having rails then means traffic becomes a bit tricky, so perhaps they all get joined up into a long, organised chain. That also help with the aerodynamic drag. And as the rails are fixed, you could have a wire overhead to supply electricity too, so you could get rid of the battery weight / danger, and also the charing / discharging inefficiency.

Of course, I'm (facetiously) describing a train. That, really, is likely the best possible answer, because it also solves the transport problem for freight. At the moment, EV's look sketchy for heavy freight haulage, but trains have been doing that job electrically for a very long time.

Does This Matter?

Of course, it only matters if we have a limited supply of renewable / green electricity. If we get nuclear fusion going in a big way, then perhaps efficiency at the point of consumption becomes less relevant.

It's reasonably valid to use price as a proxy for energy expenditure. Spend $40,000 on buying a car (or anything, in fact), and there's probably a relatively constant (constant between manufacturers) fraction of that is energy costs, somewhere down the line. I'd take a guess that it's pretty significant fraction - say, 80%? That will be energy for heating the factory, smelting the steel, the gas that the workforce burns to cook dinner at home, the delivery truck, etc. When one considers the amount of diesel / petrol represented by $32,000, it's years and years worth of buying petrol / diesel and driving about powered by it.

So in countries like Norway, there has been a headlong rush for electric cars (Norway has a lot of hydro-electric power). In doing so, they're junking a national fleet of one sort of car, and buying another sort of car. If that's Teslas, well, a fair amount of the money spent is carbon derived energy consumed in the USA. They've exported a large fraction of their national emissions to another country!

Of course, ultimately, everything will become electric, and electricity will be derived in huge quantities from nuclear fusion. I mean, it's got to; we kinda screwed if it doesn't. But until then, it's probably best to promote and encourage, but don't provoke premature mass-scrappage of perfectly serviceable machinery. Every car scrapped ahead of its time gets replaced, and the energy cost of builing the replacement would be like driving a diesel / petrol car for (say) 10 years, but with all the emissions delivered in one single go...

With that comes the question, how long does a car last these days? They're distinctly more throw-away, more energy intesive today than ever before, even though in parts they last a lot better (rust, engine lifetime if expensively maintained (particulate filters, etc) are a lot better than a couple of decades ago). That right there is a huge problem that is largely unaddressed by EVs or any other development in law / design / standards. And at the moment, it looks like EV's will struggle to make it as far as 10 years without becoming economic write-offs.

Even the styling designers have a role to play here. For example, take the new BMWs with their godawful grills that even a mother would run away from screaming. They're going to look old, fast, and that will likely lead to an accelerated scrappage rate.

"Every car scrapped ahead of its time gets replaced, and the energy cost of builing the replacement would be like driving a diesel / petrol car for (say) 10 years, but with all the emissions delivered in one single go..."

I'm relieved that there are at least a few people who get this. Because I take my and my family's environmental footprint seriously, we try to not buy disposable stuff, buy used when we can, and don't replace perfectly working stuff just because something shiny and new and supposedly more eco-friendly comes along. As an admittedly extreme example, my car is one I rescued from the junkyard and restored. The environmental impact of building it was stamped "paid" in 1985. Yes, the marginal environmental impact of driving it vs. a new electric vehicle is not trivial, but neither is the impact of building a whole new car, and repeating that every few years.

I'm not suggesting that everyone should be like me and drive 35 year old cars. I get a kick out of minimizing my waste stream and keeping old things looking and working great, but I won't force that preference on you. But neither will I applaud the folks who junk perfectly good stuff and refuse to think about the environmental impact that causes.

in their cars made in China and possibly for those made in Berlin.

The article is wrong to say that Tesla only uses battery cells made by Panasonic. Panasonic cells are cylindrical. CATL are probably the pouch type.

The use of CATL batteries sort of makes the claim from their 'Dear Leader' that they are years ahead of everyone else in battery tech. Tesla is having issues scaling up volume production of their new cell type.

The pro EV sites like insideev's, cleantecnica and electrak will confirm that fact.

Yes, I own an EV and am waiting for my second one to be delivered.

Do we think three weeks is reasonable for a fire to break out? Or do we think it had another little dink at some point while it was in the yard - Ted slapped it with the scoop a couple of days ago and that was the real trigger?

I guess fire fighters need to start carrying a tank of liquid nitrogen?

Well that was their mistake, water on a lithium fire, didn't any them go to school? Alkali metals react violently with water.