this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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I love electric cars. I drive one. Still, this idea that gas/diesel fires are more common needs to be put into perspective.
Yes, per mile driven, ICE cars catch fire more frequently. That much is true. BUT putting out a fire in an ICE car is almost trivial. I’ve extinguished two of them with just a handheld fire extinguisher.
The same absolutely can’t be said of EV fires. They burn much hotter and a many, many times more difficult to extinguish. Even when you think the fire is out, the energy in the battery cells can restart the thermal runaway and reignite the battery. That means you will almost always need a multi-truck response from the fire department and at least one truck will have to sit with the vehicle for hours after the fire is controlled. You can’t even tow or flatbed the thing until you’re reasonably sure it’s out. Even with all that, there have been a few cases of EV fires restarting in junkyards/impound lots.
TL;DR: EV fires are not comparable to ICE fires. They are much worse.
Sure, but I can’t douse you in a lithium ion battery.
This doesn’t make any sense. What are you trying to say?
That gas vehicles are dangerous because the gasoline can exit the tank, and the fire can spread that way. If the occupants are unfortunate enough to get soaked in that gasoline, a fire can be immediately deadly. It may be easier to extinguish, but it’s still more dangerous in an accident.
How often do you imagine people get “soaked in gasoline” during accidents? It’s so obvious that you have no point other than to derail the conversation when you invent these crazy scenarios.
Often enough that race car drivers wear fire retardant, self extinguishing suits for when that happens. There’s even a rating system for how long a suit will protect you from second (and thus, third) degree burns when engulfed in flames during a vehicle fire.
Obviously, you don’t have to be soaked in burning gasoline for it to kill you, but if you are soaked in it, you can’t run away from the fire once you exit the vehicle. You, yourself, have to be extinguished, because you are the thing that is on fire.
The fumes from lithium ion are much more harmful. They can affect people just in the vicinity. And not in some worst case scenario of gas somehow spreading to occupants of the vehicle.
Gas tanks are generally very well confined. And if one were to rupture. It is likely to spread to the ground, not spray some imaginary people.
Gas tanks, by design, are not confined. The fuel needs to get into the engine to do its job. In an ICE vehicle, there’s fuel in a lot more than just the tank.
68% of car fire deaths resulted from a fire first started by flammable/combustible liquid ignition (fuel), and 63% of car fire deaths happened after collision or overturn.
Source: https://content.nfpa.org/-/media/Project/Storefront/Catalog/Files/Research/NFPA-Research/US-Fire-Problem/osvehiclefires.pdf?rev=ce9308b1447140ef9bef693635a96d71
Surprisingly, the deaths counted in this study were not imaginary people. They were real people driving real cars, that really lost their lives.
You just aren’t trying hard enough.