Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire US Coast Guard and civilian vessels have rescued 22 sailors off the coast of Alaska after some of the electric cars they were transporting caught fire. The good ship Morning Midas - a roll-on, roll-off ferry that was delivering 3,000 vehicles from Yantai, China, to Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico - is currently around 304 miles south …
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As does a fire in a vehicle with a combustion engine! Saw a good blaze from a diesel van blocking three lanes a few weeks back...
Didn't see the "it took 40,000 gallons of water to put the fire out" this time though - which should really be "it took 40,000 gallons of water to keep the area cool until the fire burnt itself out".
When you run a static regen on the mondeo with FordScan, it tells you to a) be at least 1 metre away from another object and b) not have have a wall or fence behind you.
1) is due to the temp of the gasses, which might cause 2) to be set on fire, or the heat to be reflected and melt the bumper of the car doing the regen.
My exhaust has a slight turn down at the tip, so the ges stream hits the ground about 40cm behind the pipe.
to regen the Mk4 mondeo's DPF as a static regen is easy.
Instead of being up to temp, and maintaining over 50mph, all you need is:
1 laptop running fordscan, a ODB interface....
or a Ford Dealer diagnostic computer
As you can tell, this isn't something you accidentally!
Here you go: Diesel Particulate Filter - DPFs explained by the RAC
That's not cleaning it out, that's an overfueling issue.
The mk3 mondeo Puma's with their variable geometry turbos were "great" for it. Hit the accelerator, open the turbo, go into over boost.. and watch a puff of black behind you.
Extra points if you had someone tailgating you, and you managed to get the puff of smoke pulled into their cabin air intake... ;)
"That's not cleaning it out, that's an overfueling issue."
More commonly when you see this on the road it's worn injectors and the absence of a DPF (as on most pre-2009 diesels). As mileage goes up on a diesel, fuel droplet size increases because the injector nozzles wear, the larger droplets don't all combust completely, and very fine soot accumulates in the exhaust system. This is particularly pronounced if the normal driving style is sedate, and then when the right foot is applied and the turbo kicks in properly, wooosh, it all comes out in a cloud of smoke. I used to have an old model X-Trail turbo diesel, and as my driving style is gentle, gentle, gentle, ffaaasssttt I learned to master the skill of smoking other motorists (or entire cycling clubs).
You should have seen me, I was the King of Dirty Smoke, able to make huge volumes of smoke on command. People thought they'd been overtaken by a destroyer from the Battle of Jutland. Oh, happy days.
I had a slightly different "issue" going back a while ...
Driving "sedately" (especially at little over tickover power when green-laning in an old Land Rover) and the engine gets a bit cold in the cylinders. So all that oil coming up past the "very worn" rings and bores doesn't get burned off - and you get a bit "blue smokey", for some reason, my mates all made be bring up the tail end !
Then get back to the tarmac, floor it (but bear in mind, it only had 40hp/ton when new with an unworn engine, so rice pudding skins were safe), and all that accumulated oil burns off ...
Cue an effect not dissimilar to a warship making smoke, when I was definitely made to bring up the rear - no-one would drive behind me.
Not that many years later, I gave that engine away as part of a deal for some work on a more powerful (or less unpowerful) turbo engine. The guy complained that he had to bore the cylinders out +40thou to clear the wear step.
There are places that chemically clean the DPF, not as cheap as a bottle of additive but significantly cheaper than a replacement DPF. However, once your DPF gets to this stage ie. Not fully regenerating, the rest of the car is probably worn out.
Thanks for the link. I had no idea.
So, since diesel is more expensive than petrol (very much more so here in the US), diesel engines need turbochargers for performance and require these extra fittings and maintenance procedures, and given diesel cars seem more expensive than their petrol cousins, what is the advantage of the diesel engine in a car over a petrol power plant?
Not trolling. Genuine question. Genuine run-on question I guess. Sorry.
The prevalence of diseasels in European cars is mainly down to preferential tax rates on fuel and vehicles. In a car (ignoring certain German fiddling of the results) a diesel typically has slightly lower carbon emissions per km than petrol, which the EU (and UK) reward with lower taxes.
In the UK, tax is the same on both petrol and diesel, my local BP is currently charging £1.33 per litre for petrol and £1.38 for diesel. I wouldn't actually buy from there, supermarkets are generally cheaper, my latest PetrolPrices email says £1.28 for petrol.
In most European countries, tax is cheaper on diesel than on petrol.
Until the arrival of petrol direct injection engines in the last decade the fuel efficiency advantage of Diesel was quite significant. My Aygo shopping trolly* (1.0L petrol VVT) can barely get within 20mpg (UK) of my (15yr old) 2.0L TDI on a motorway run. In fact the Aygo is about par with my 1980s vintage 2.4td brick at 70mph.
*not only fits but can parallel park in a UK standard parking bay & doesn't have the DPF clogging issue that affects Diesels that have been used on short trips without a regular motorway blast.
Ref supermarket fuel being cheaper, it is at face value, but not necessarily in reality.
Case(s) in point:
My 1997 Volvo V90 (3L petrol il6 auto) is absolutely consistent in returning 10-15% worse fuel consumption on Asda (the local supermarket) petrol than on Esso. The effect is slightly increased if comparing to Shell or BP. Note that this is "ordinary" unleaded, not the higher octane "super." I've had the car for 23 years & this hasn't changed in all that time.
I used to use "super" for journeys at consistent high speed / load where I'd do an entire tankful on the trip, & the car would show another small increase in economy enough to offset the extra cost of the "super" fuel. That price differential has now opened up significantly (in the UK at least) & it no longer adds up.
My other half's previous car, a 1996 VW Golf mk3 manual with a 2L il4 petrol engine (essentially the then 8v Golf gti engine in a softly-suspended estate car) was completely indifferent to whatever fuel it was fed & returned absolutely consistent fuel figures across every fuel from Shell/BP super down to whatever watery piss came out of the cheapest supermarket for miles around.
YMMV is truer of this post than most!
@Steve, in the not too distant past, diesels were marketed as being a lot better in terms of grunt and power, because you could use heavier fuel oils. Petrol (or gasoline, in all y'all's parlance in the Leftpondian republic) requires lighter hydrocarbons which, if you have heavy crude oil, require some cracking (which adds to pollution). Light crude oil is easier to refine to petrol.
However, diesel comes with some drawbacks, as Mercedes and other diesel engine manufacturers discovered. Diesel you have to burn in one of two ways:
- You either have to burn diesel at a temperature that generates minimal nitric oxides (NOx), but that generates particulates of the PM10 and PM2.5 kind,
- Or you burn diesel at a high enough temperature that leaves no particulates, but you end up emitting a lot of NOx. Nitric oxides (i.e. NO, NO2, N2O, etc) are irritants and contribute to breathing difficulties.
Your general consumer diesel engine uses the first, because you can simply slap a DPF between the engine and the exhaust, which captures the sooty PM10 and PM2.5 particles, and leaves you with decent power and minimal NOx pollution. The engine doesn't have to burn at as high a temperature, which means it doesn't need an additive and a catalyser that deals with NOx.
For commercial/freight diesel engines, Mercedes, the inventor of AdBlue, suggested running the engines a lot hotter, but injecting a platinum catalyser with exactly measured urea compound (which is what AdBlue is) that will break down the nitric oxides into water, nitrogen and other, less irritating compounds. That takes care of having to clear/exchange the DPF often, but requires the additive instead.
I know AdBlue (and similar additives) have a bit of a bad reputation in the US, and the same with DPF (and I know a certain segment of society who actively modify their trucks to remove the DPF because 'I ain't lettin' some manufacturer tell me I can't have all the power I want from my truck').
The diesel engine scandal is related to this in that the manufacturers played with the Bosch injector controller to set it into a test mode that minimises the NOx output and passes emission tests, but then switches to a less... ahem, environmentally friendly mode once running at speeds that require more oomph. Cue a lot more NOx emissions from cars at 60+ mph (because the engine then burns hotter and gets rid of the particulates). Naughty manufacturers...
As pointed out in another comment, it's the Diesel Particulate filter.
A regen on one is when you burn off the carbon (as soot) in it. Normally you do this as a dynamic regen - you get the car to running temp by driving it and maintain a speed over (normally) 50mph.
However, if you have a fault (as my car did, a bent sensor making it think the DPF had more carbon built up than it actually did) you can do a static regen - ie: with the car not moving.
To staticly regen my mondeo you need an ODB reader to connect to the ECU, and connect that to a laptop. You then turn the ignition on, and run the control software ("fordscan").
You select static regen from the menu, and it gives you some warnings, like this is a diagnostic routine, do you _really_ need to run it? Don't park with in 1 metre of a wall/fence/another car, in fact, park as far from other objects as possible, and then you activate it.
It tells you to turn the ignition on and start the car.
With you sat in the drivers seat, it tells you to keep you feet off the pedals, and the engine idles for a bit (around 5 mins) as the laptop displays "warming up, waiting for temperature stabilising"
Then, when it's to temp and the laptop is happy... the revs jump to 4000 rpm (note the redline is starts at 4500) and you are sitting there in the drivers seat as the laptop revs the nuts off the engine for about 10 mins.
As sharply as it reved, suddenly the revs drop to normal idle (~900) and the laptop displays "complete".
There's a reason you need a tool to unlock this function, and you don't do it often.
In fact, since we found the sensor fault and replaced it, I haven't had to do a static regen, it's been handled properly while driving (as it should)
For anyone interested in this software and looking for it, its actually FORScan and not Fordscan.
Great bit of software, well developed with continuing support and development.
But for all you FOSS-fans, no native Linux release I'm afraid.
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John D Clark's boook "Ignition" covers the destruction of a thick cement floor slab by chlorine difluoride spillage during rocket propellant tests (basically it is such a strong oxidiser that it causes stuff to burn that has already burned.....). That would indeed be impressive, when viewed from a suitable distance...
From Ignition:
"It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals—steel, copper, aluminum, etc.—because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride that protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."
"For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."
Decent advice at the best of times. (And a hundred metre start. )
Given the ship was crossing the dateline - west of which is today and east yesterday - the vehicles on board computers might chucked a wobbly at the either the prospect of time travel or the likelihood of ending up the hands of an American driver.
In AU the US PBS (Lehrer) News Hour is always a day behind because it's always yesterday in America.
They must smart at the fact they didn't insist on the dateline being down the centre of the Atlantic.
Still Trump, to augment his annexation of the Gulf of America, might proclaim an American International Dateline so it's always tomorrow first in America. (More Alzheimeric Geriatric Announcements.)
Of course if the dateline follows 180° long. then the redefined prime meridian would pass through the middle of AU around Pine Gap I imagine.
"For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."
If you have reached the 'dealing with this situation' stage ... it is already TOO LATE !!!
'Running shoes' are not the issue ... it is being able to 'do' 0 - 60 MPH in very much less than 1 Sec and then maintaining the 'increasing' acceleration for another 20 seconds or so.
If you can do this and also dodge any flying 'ejecta' from the explosion that 'should be behind you' then you are doing well.
P.S. Superman may want to have a word as there can ONLY be 1 Superman !!!
:)
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time
"The compound also a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen itself, which also puts it into rare territory. That means that it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile."
I like that line. All of his 'things I won't work with' posts are good fun.
nono, that _trifloride_ in that story. Even worse. CIF3.. one death apparently, someone saw the container shift, start to fall, and started to run. They found the poor guy a few hundred feet away having tried to run so hard he had a heart attack.
Apart from Google's AI search summary, I can find no indication that chlorine difluoride actually exists, save perhaps as an ion. Such data as can be found in serious sources all seems to be computed, not measured. Of course I am happy to be corrected, but it looks as if ClF2 is an AI hallucination.
FOOF is supposedly available in bulk, FSVO bulk.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride
"I do note that if you run the structure through SciFinder, it comes out with a most unexpected icon that indicates a commercial supplier. That would be the Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company. They offer it in 100g, 500g, and 1 kilo amounts, which is interesting, because I don't think a kilo of dioxygen difluoride has ever existed."
(Making me feel old, that was published 15 years ago, so I'm guessing they are either no longer in the business of manufacturing FOOF, or, if anyone actually ordered a kilo of it, are no longer in existence at all.)
Also, I can't link to that article without quoting more of it:
"Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred."
"And he's just getting warmed up, if that's the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that's -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng's reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.
"Even Streng had to give up on some of the planned experiments, though (bonus dormitat Strengus?). Sulfur compounds defeated him, because the thermodynamics were just too titanic. Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens. . .and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost. The sulfur chemistry of FOOF remains unexplored, so if you feel like whipping up a batch of Satan's kimchi, go right ahead."
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You should see Phosphorus burn. Had fire fighting training in the Navy and Phosphorus was the one thing that we were told to not do anything.
It's so hot it will separate water molecules into hydrogen(fuel) and oxygen(oxidizer) just adding to the mess.
The only thing you could do was follow it as it burned through the deck plates and plug the holes with damage control plugs.
Visited a few bombing run sites in Vietnam where Phosphorus bombs were used, that shit will melt dirt!
Worked at a die-casting company back in the early '90s; most of our parts were innocuous, but we had one small machine that made magnesium parts. Safety training with that included the shop foreman taking some Mg shavings/scrap and lighting it on fire out in the car park. In winter he'd toss a snowball into the flames to demonstrate why you don't use water to put out the blaze.
It looked like he'd thrown raw alcohol into the fire as the magnesium reacted just like JWLong's phosphorus description above. Strips the O2 out of the water, leaving free H floating around to burn as well. Always fun to watch the expressions on the older "seen everything / done everything" workers who'd never worked Mg before.
"It's so hot it will separate water molecules into hydrogen(fuel) and oxygen(oxidizer) just adding to the mess."
So it must take the same amount of energy released by burning those two to split them, unless you're suggesting that the reaction is actually phosphorus burning with the water and releasing H2 as a byproduct (which can then react with the oxygen in whatever air is around)?
It depends on the type of phosphorous...
Phosphorous in P4 form does not immediately react with water and is therefore usually kept stored in water to isolate it from oxygen in the air. It's not that unstable that it will start a reaction with water, however once exposed to free oxygen and then re-introduced back into water the exothermic reaction gives it the energy to break apart water molecules and it's at this point that nasty stuff happens: phosphoric acid (nasty enough) and phosphene gas (just out-and-out deadly). This combination of effects is why it was used in bombs and once a suitable mass of phosphorous gets going, it's not going to stop until all the phosphorous is consumed. The acid will damage a lot of things, in particular flesh, the fire cannot be put out with water and anyone even trying to will be poisoned by phosphene gas unless they have suitable breathing equipment. It is almost a "good" thing that phosphene gas is highly flammable and explosive as this gets rid of it.
Other allotropes of phosphorous tend to be much more stable under normal conditions. For example the phosphorous component in matches/match box is stable until heated.
It's so hot it will separate water molecules into hydrogen(fuel) and oxygen(oxidizer) just adding to the mess.
If you could provide enough heat to separate H2O into 2H. + O., then the immediate reaction between those would provide you with H2O plus the exact same amount of heat you just put in.
What it might do (and I can't be bothered to check the actual chemistry), is strip the oxygen from water to provide phosphorus oxide* and elemental hydrogen. Obviously, that's not good if there's an excess of oxygen about, because a hydrogen fire on top of what you're already dealing with is never good, but if that was the case, then the phosphorus would almost certainly have reacted with it before the water.
*(Which would then react further with water to produce phosphoric acid)
chlorine trifluoride
There’s a report from the early 1950s of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks.
I’ll let the late John Clark describe the stuff, since he had first-hand experience in attempts to use it as rocket fuel. From his out-of-print classic Ignition! we have:
”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”
"Everyone knows firefighters use water to douse fires, and that the liquid surrounds ships at. So why was this fire so hard to stop?"
Same applies to ICE cars too.. Although granted they're probably not shipped with full tanks.
My question would be, were the risks and controls for shipping this type of material known and in place? I'm assuming the mitigation for lithium fires shouldn't be simply "abandon ship"
If you were on board a ship stacked with EVs, there was a fire, and you were surrounded by salt water, on crew wages, how long would you stick around?
Not sure many ports are going to welcome a giant floating time bomb. I wouldn't be surprised if they quietly assist with its sinking.
I dread to think how much it would cost to kit out a ship with mitigation to isolate all the EVs on board.
Maybe drivers will be more careful. If they drive irresponsibly, crash into an EV and the battery goes pop ... it wouldn't be a nice way to go.
Same applies to ICE cars too.
The difference here being the chemistry of the fuel in an ICE and the composition of the batteries in EVs.
Hydrocarbons won't burn underwater, although they will happily float on water and burn on top.
Lithium, meanwhile, will happily burn underwater, reacting with the water to produce hydrogen gas. This won't burn underwater, though, it'll float to the top and burn there. Invisibly in the visible spectrum, as it happens. I would imagine that's an additional hazard for firefighters, because there are only three ways to see a hydrogen fire: use an infrared camera to spot it, walk into it and start wondering why your clothing is suddenly so hot, or use the broom method.
Lithium doesn't actually contribute much to the problems of a Lithium Ion battery fire. There's not much there (relative to the battery size) and it's tied up as lithium hexaflurophosphate (might be close on the spelling).
Fortunate to be the case, because between the temperature and the process of electrolysis, being underwater is no barrier to burning hydrogen in a battery fire.
The potential energy of the battery is the big issue. If that starts turning to heat instead of running through a motor, it lights other stuff on fire. The heat also gets other chemical reactions going, like breaking down any plastic into hydrocarbons and some products into hydrogen (which then burn, prodicing more heat, etc.).
Never heard of a battery producing only H2 under fault conditions. If it's on fire, or even just entering thermal runaway, it's pretty obvious. Even in the Surprise Arizona stationary storage explosion, there were visual indicators of outgassing.
Lithium Iron Phosphate is supposed to have better stability when things go wrong. I don't have any first hand experience, but I know some automotive applications are moving that direction. LFP also (reduces? eliminates?) the use of Cobalt, which is both costly, and has issues with supply chain (slave labor, child labor, supporting warlords, etc.).
One nice feature of battery vs ICE fires: gasoline and diesel will flow downhill
Source: I have about 10 MWh of Li-Ion batteries over here, we've done a lot of work to keep our insurance agent, out corporate safety team, and our local fire chief happy with us.
Exactly this. And that's why the standard firefighting approach to electric vehicle fires is: disconnect the battery (to make it electrically safer), then get as much water as you can onto it.
The water is intended to cool things to the point of arresting the thermal runaway. Batteries are generally well enough sealed that you're not going to get water on the internal chemicals/plates anyway.
This is it. pour enough cold water on the conflagration and the temperature will drop sufficiently to stop the thermal runaway. That's the primary purpose of 'drowning' the battery with water (despite LiI-Ion batteries being sensitive to water). The shorting is less of an issue if the battery remains/returns to being cold enough to not go into thermal runaway.
It would be pretty stupid to ship EV's with fully charged batteries, as that will increase the energy that fuels a fire as well as increase the risk of a short. Ideally, the batteries should be uncharged and disconnected. Was that not the case here?
Thousands of cars takes a long while to unload.
Disconnecting the batteries on thousands of cars would mahoosivly complicate & extend the loading/unloading procedure, I've watched teams of drivers happily ragging cars half a mile around the car park next to the ship, every corner full racing line, inches from shiny new cars (they've had a lot of practise).
"Lithium, meanwhile, will happily burn underwater"
With the batteries, it's not pure Lithium metal, but Lithium oxide and not that much. What can allow them to burn happily away in water is that there is a fine metallic fuel with an oxidizer built in. Petrol needs oxygen from the air to combust.
"As does a fire in a vehicle with a combustion engine! Saw a good blaze from a diesel van blocking three lanes a few weeks back..."
Was it the fuel burning or an electrical fire? ICE's also suffer electrical fires, and hybrids can also suffer battery fires. But the diesel itself is a fumes fire: Not that intense and only spreads because the fuel itself is spreading. Water can stop the fire, as can sand. Don't use CO2 as that blows the fuel around, spreading the fire. May soften the tarmac but won't do much to concrete.
Doesn't need 40k gallons of water to extinguish and most fire fighting teams will have chemical extinguishers to smother the fire (foam is a good option there). And yes, water often tackles the heat of the fire but foam tackles the oxygen (need fuel, oxygen and heat for a fire - the infamous fire triangle). The difference with EV fires is water isn't that effective: It might slow the spread a bit by cooling, but it's no way up to the task of stopping the fire, even if you completely immerse the car in a tank of water. Car could still reignite the moment it's out of that water days after it went in.
And EV fires can melt concrete. They often produce an intense jet of flame meaning the fire can spread faster. They might not be as common as ICE fires, but they're a heck of a lot worse - at least until fire fighting tech and battery safety tech catches up (and yes, I know that's being worked on - it's interesting stuff but it's still in its infancy).
<......"ICE's also suffer electrical fires".....>
I would think that the vast majority of fires in petrol/diesel fueled vehicles are initially caused by an electrical fault (probably chafed wiring causing a short/spark which sets off the insulation burning, and it then spreads). The number of fires caused by combustion of leaking fuel is likely to be a very small proportion of the total - it is rare for the fuel in a combustion engined car to burst into flames/explode even in a serious impact/collision, despite the impression that Hollywood has given over the decades.
Back in the early 90s I drove a ratty Holden Commodore between cities (about 150 miles) for a friend
When we got to the destination it wouldn't crank, so opened the bonnet - to see the carburettor had been leaking copious quantities of fuel (nice puddle of it beside the carb body)
Got it started (trashed battery), handed it over and suggested to the recipient that they sort the fuel system as a matter of urgency
Engine bay fires happen, but even with fuel around they're fairly rare
"The difference with EV fires is water isn't that effective: It might slow the spread a bit by cooling, but it's no way up to the task of stopping the fire"
If the battery is supplying its own oxidizer, the only way to put the fire out is to take away heat. Fuel/Oxidizer/Heat, the old fire triangle. The fuel and oxidizer are built in so heat is all that's left to attack. It will certainly keep other cells from going into thermal runaway and adding to the mess.
Whilst you are of course correct, by the time one (or a few cells) in a battery pack are in runaway then there's no chance of cooling the battery fast enough to stop it spreading.
The speed of spread of a Li-ion battery pack fire is unbelievable. I work in the UK's product safety system, and these batteries are giving us serious grief at the moment, almost entirely from e-bikes and e-scooters. For those that care there's a link to research on this topic below. Multiple serious fires, multiple fatalities, and occurring so fast that by the time the fire brigade get there it's often too late to do anything other than damp down and scrape up the wreckage. I'll also post a link to BBC News website video, from a doorbell camera that shows an e-bike battery fire. From first appearance of light from flames, to an explosion that blows the windows out is about 12 seconds.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c623938dq6no
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/personal-light-electric-vehicle-plev-battery-safety-research
"hot days in Vegas/Phoenix can practically do that on their own! Bit harder if it is concrete."
Even here in "sunny" UK, during a hot summer it becomes pliable enough that heavy HGVs running up and down the motorways leave "furrows" in the road surface. I would imagine there are different formulations for various climates and the stuff we use would probably run like water in the sort of temperatures Arizona et al sometimes get :-)
"Didn't see the "it took 40,000 gallons of water to put the fire out" this time though"
There's a difference between how much water it might take and how much they used. They should say they used 40,000 gallons of water with most of it doing little to nothing.
I think that fire brigades need some sort of collar they can put around an EV with a battery fire so water is kept in. That and a way to hook the car and drag it away from other things that might be set ablaze if the only thing to do is let it burn out. Effectively cooling the pack is the only way to keep the blaze from running away. If adjacent cells aren't being baked, they won't catch fire.
When the Lotus Elan was a new, and wonderful, thing; one caught fire near our house. The fire station was a couple of miles away, and by the time they arrived the fire was pretty much out. About all that was left was the engine, gearbox, ladder chassis, and wheels. The rest had burned, including charring and melting the road surface. No one was hurt.
The story my father got from our neighbour, the village constable, was that it was one of the kit versions, and the new owner may not have constructed it properly. Apparently the fire started in the engine compartment, the engine stopped, and the car came to rest by a pedestrian island, blocking the road.
Why would that be surprising? There are lots of shipping companies in the UK, although many of their ships are flagged elsewhere.
Maritime insurance is a rats nest. When moving from UK to US I took out standard shipping insurance for all my goods. However I was unaware of the insurance of the actual shipping cost in case of total loss. When my Hi-Fi system got trashed in the move I was able to claim for the new cost of the items (after much wrangling, and many months), but I was unable to claim for the postage and packing for the the replacements because the original shipping cost wasn't covered.
I have not been in that industry for many years, so my comments may be off:
Fixed firefighting (people with hoses is last resort) is by CO2 or water sprinklers creating a mist, that then is heated to steam. Either way displacing oxygen.
There is not enough water to cool and constrain a battery fire.
I guess newer PCCs and RoRos will be build with higher water flow, but the big problem is continuously getting the water overboard.
Exactly, battery chemistry is essentially a controlled redox reaction; a fire is an uncontrolled redox reaction. The battery wouldn't work if it didn't contain a balanced stoichiometric amount of the reductant and the oxidant.
As energy densities in batteries get higher, then the amount of stored energy that can accidentally be "released too rapidly" also increases. At least with conventional ICE engines, you need to supply the oxidant (air) to release the stored chemical energy in the fuel. It's a bit harder to make a high energy-density battery that can be split apart in this way, although things like much larger high-energy batteries can be made much more safely (such as flow batteries, where the electrolyte has one tank for the oxidised state, and one for the reduced state).
"As energy densities in batteries get higher, then the amount of stored energy that can accidentally be "released too rapidly" also increases. "
I don't know if they do, but it's a good idea to ship the batteries with just above a maintenance charge rather than 80-100%. Less potential energy in the pack.
Flow batteries are interesting, but far under the energy density needed for automobiles.
A lithium fire doesn't need oxygen to burn, water will do quite nicely, thank you. The same applies to most metal fires, for example, aluminium will burn quite happily underwater if you can get it hot enough to melt the oxide layer that stops it from spontaneously igniting in air. I've seen the remains of a fume hood where a few grams of finely powdered pure aluminium without the oxide layer were accidentally exposed to air.
"I've seen the remains of a fume hood where a few grams of finely powdered pure aluminium without the oxide layer were accidentally exposed to air."
The firework in shows that has a bright flash and a loud bang is called a "Titanium Salute". Titanium is the fuel. Powdered Aluminum is a common ingredient in fireworks and solid rocket fuel.
Doesn't everything need oxygen to burn... that being the definition of burning?
Of course it doesn't have to get the oxygen from air, it can contain the oxygen itself or get it from being so hot that it breaks down something else in proximity with it that releases oxygen.
GCSE Chemistry was a long time ago for me but IIRC the problem with metal fires is the temperature is so high it can breakdown water into hydrogen gas. It can even potentially breakdown CO2 and get oxygen from that. There's also the problem of the steam explosion you'd get by putting water on something so hot.
Anyhow, skimming thought this paper on lithium battery fires suggest the main problem with a lithium battery fire isn't the lithium itself but the flammable electrolyte and the cathode releasing O2 when it gets too hot.
"Experimental Study on Fire and Explosion Suppression of Self-
ignition of Lithium Ion Battery
Rong-jun SI*, De-qi LIU, Shao-qian XUE" (I would post a link but it's a million characters long and I can't be arsed to use a url shortener.)
The lithium doesn't become a problem until the battery already burning uncontrollably as there isn't any lithium metal to burn until after the cathode has decomposed.
"There's also the problem of the steam explosion you'd get by putting water on something so hot."
The volume increase with water going from liquid to steam is ~1,000:1. It's a big concern with PWR's since all of the water is well over boiling temperature at ambient pressure so if there is a breech in the containment, you can get a big explosion that can do lots of damage. Water sprayed on something really hot flashes to steam, but not rapidly enough to damage if there's no containment. It just sizzles and dances on the surface with the liquid>gas interface creating a bit of space. The same thing happens when I quickly dunk my hand in liquid Nitrogen. That freaks people out just like putting dry ice in my mouth.
It's the only way to deal with a fire of this type on a Ro-Ro ferry.
Have a bulldozer on each deck (or 3 per deck, one a each end and a central one) and just push the burning cars overside.
Yes I know it's an environmental issue, but less of an evil than letting the whole ship burn with the associated 1000's of cars, heavy fuel oil etc. etc. etc. all going pop.
I wouldn't want to share a RORO deck with burning cars...
I once read of a RORO that was carrying some large pieces of heavy machinery alongside the usual cargo of hundreds of cars. The vessel struck rough seas, the heavy machinery broke loose and at the end of the day, there wasn't much left.
I was on that ship. It was a trip across the Bay of Biscay. The ship hit a big storm and a crane snapped it's chains and tipped onto several cars. Our Volvo 145 was pancaked and we only managed to get our suitcases out after they cut the roof off with angle-grinders. I don't remember much of the voyage apart from puking my soul out. I was 10 or 11 years old.
"Have a bulldozer on each deck (or 3 per deck, one a each end and a central one) and just push the burning cars overside."
I suspect you are thinking of passenger ferries with car/vehicle decks. Car transporter ships pack those cars in VERY tightly. You can't walk between them. Every bit of open space on the deck is lost cargo fees. If one catches fire, you can't get to it. At best, you would sacrificing an entire deck of cars to save the rest. And that's assuming they have full width doors at one or the other ends which can be opened, which is not necessarily the case. Just do an image search on car carrier ships for views of various "solutions" on how to load/unload cars in different types of berths.
The brand which currently imports the largest number of Chinese built cars into Mexico is General Motors who are the second biggest selling brand in Mexico after Nissan.
Over the last few years, GM have replaced almost all of their Mexico built models for the Mexican market with new models built by SAIC in China.
SAIC's own MG Motor is also active in Mexico, as are the other notable Chinese brands, but the China built sales by GM dwarf their market shares.
currently resides at the bottom of the Atlantic any "allegations" that its fire was started by an EV are pure speculation. It was also alleged that the Fremantle Highway and Luton Airport fires were caused by EVs and those allegations turned out to be baseless. So maybe a little less speculation and a little more scepticism is called for.
It was certainly a fire that included EVs... the cause is as yet unreported, so of course there is a part of the population who will confidently proclaim that the bogey man of the day is to blame.
It must have been an illegal immigrant in a small boat who used a brick from their council house to cause a heatpump to draw more power than an oil refinery and the EV spontaneously combusted in sympathy. < /s>
You think it was one burning car?
Rather suspect it was more than one by the time anyone got to lay eyes on it.
And note also that I didn't say the crew should have investigated and conclusively determined the exact source and cause of the fire before they called it in - I said that the cause hasn't been reported.
Irrespective of what may or may not have initially started the fire on Felicity Ace, once the fire had taken hold and spread to electric vehicles with lithium batteries, the fire would have very rapidly progressed from one that could potentially be arrested and controlled by available means, to one which would have been beyond any reasonable prospect of being controlled with any of the available fire fighting provisions available on board (or indeed, any fire fighting equipment that could be brought to it).
As far as the Morning Midas is concerned, I think that the statement from the ships owners "Zodiac Marine told The Register. "Smoke was initially seen emanating from a deck carrying electric vehicles."" is a pretty good circumstancial indication of the probable cause.
I know that won't go down well with some of the more evangelical EV proponents on these boards, some of whom seem unable to allow anyone to say anything negative whatsoever about them, but sometimes you have to grow some and accept that there are downsides to almost everything. Every new solution breeds new problems etc.
The establishment the fire brigades use for research compared burning ICEVs and EVs.
They measured similar power outputs from each, peaking as I recall at 6MW
That's on of the two methods of lighting more cars.
The other is burning liquid fuel running downhill.
As to the logic of "the deck contained* EVs therefore the fire came from an EV", I hope the poster is not a programmer. A cause remains to be established.
* I noticed the report didn't say "only".
<......."As to the logic of "the deck contained* EVs therefore the fire came from an EV"...."....>
It is very likely that the deck in question contained <only> EVs.- they don't generally load these vessels randomly.
As I said, some EV fanatics just can't cope with the merest suggestion that their beloved electric cars may not be perfect in every way ;)
It's interesting that the Felicity Ace's owners initiated legal action against VW group in 2024, alleging that the fire started in a Porsche vehicle. Whilst there were a lot of Porsche vehicles on board, there were also a lot of other makes, so it is quite a specific claim, and one has to assume that they wouldn't be taking that to a court, and especially a German court unless they were confident they could prove it. That isn't suggesting court bias in favour of the local company, it is suggesting that a German court would be scrupulously fair and would thoroughly test any accusations of fault.
Those legal actions appear to have quietly been parked whilst settlement negotiations went on, so we won't know, but if VW were confident it wasn't their fault then I'd assume it would be a case of "see you in court" rather than "what do we need to do to make this pesky claim go away?"
>> they don't generally load these vessels randomly.
Cargo ships can't (shouldn't) load randomly and unless the captain can certify that his vessel is loaded correctly he can't (shouldn't be able to) leave port.
There are careers to be made in the art & science of loading a ship - not only behind desks in Lloyd's Register (other registration authorities are available; all have similar departments) but on the decks of the vessels which enable our lives to proceed in the manner to which we have become accustomed.
/mine's the one with the LR Christmas card in the pocket.
""Smoke was initially seen emanating from a deck carrying electric vehicles."" is a pretty good circumstancial indication of the probable cause."
Hope you never have to serve on a Jury.
That's not evidence of anything other than there were EVs on that deck... there may well have been EVs on every deck, I have no idea.
But you really need to consider that correlation isn't causation, and you haven't even established correlation.
I suggest you have a read up on the codes of practice and rules and regulations governing the loading of EVs onto these car carriers. If there were EVs on that deck, it is very likely that there were <only> EVs on that deck.
There should also have been cctv monitoring, meaning that it is very likely that the member of the crew monitoring the cargo at the point the fire statrted actually saw where it began and would have triggered the internal fire suppression for that compartment immediately. The fact that they have stated that the suppression system was unable to hold the fire back also suggests it was already something more than a simple carbon based fire early on.
Yes, we don't have definite proof of the actual cause, but the circumstantial evidence is a very strong indicator.
The crew on a boat like this aren't watching the cctv monitor, or the radar, or anything else. They're watching a box set on an iPad, and will look up when the alarm goes off. As evidence I cite recent news and a million yachtsmans anecdotes - when you're on watch at night, you look for their lights and you stay well out of their way, because they're not looking for you.
No doubt you're correct about the loading, I don't know. But I do know LiFePo4 cells don't just spontaneously combust without an external energy source, although I'm sure they make a spectacular fuel source once the fire takes hold. Clearly something started it, but any evidence to what is at the bottom of the sea.
> currently resides at the bottom of the Atlantic any "allegations" that its fire was started by an EV are pure speculation.
Car-carriers are designed in such a way that each deck can be isolated form other decks and within the decks are compartments to isolate parts of the deck. They carry CO2 with which to flood such isolated decks in the case of a fire (though not enough to flood all compartments, but several of them),
If the fire was from a hydro-carbon-based source, then isolating the compartment with the fire and the ones around it and flooding those with CO2 should put out the fire.
The fact that this tactic didn't work is pretty good evidence that the fire was a fire that produces its own oxygen, and the most likely source for that is an EV battery fire. Therefore it is less speculation and more deduction that it was caused by an EV fire.
Included != Caused
We don't know the cause, nobody does (yet).
There's a lot of stuff on a ship, and it's likely that some decks have a mix of vehicles, simply because they pack them as tight as they can.
However, once big batteries are burning by any cause they're in trouble if they're not equipped to handle it.
CO2 alone won't actually put any fire out, it's merely suppression. If the stuff stays hot it'll reignite as soon as the CO2 dissipates - you have to cool it as well. That was a fun demo!
<......".....and it's likely that some decks have a mix of vehicles, simply because they pack them as tight as they can......"....>
Very,very unlikely.
The decks on these specialised car carriers are sectioned off with fireproof bulkheads and nowadays mostly have fire suppression systems that can be deployed on a compartment by compartment basis. The maritime codes of practice for shipping potentially dangerous cargoes mostly say that electric vehicles should be contained in a designated area, and not interspersed with other vehicles. There should also be remote cctv monitoring installed in that area. Maritime insurance companies have already been making such requirements a condition of their policies, so I think the idea that these specialist car carriers are mixing EVs and ICE vehicles on the same deck, let alone in the same compartment is erroneous.
Reports about the Midas fire are saying that the crew deployed the onboard fire fighting and suppression system, but that the fire proved uncontrollable. That suggests strongly that batteries were involved early on in the fire, and if the EVs were all segregated as per the codes of practice, a fire starting among ICE vehicles (or a fire elsewhere in the ship) would have been detected well before it reached a point beyond which the fire suppression system would have been unable to quell it.
These generate their own oxygen after ignition, so starving the fire of oxygen (foam type firefighting) is not really going to achieve anything.
In this case, it really doesn't matter where the fire started (although my view is was probably a Li+ battery in one of the said EVs as there shouldn't be much fuel in the other types although that remains a possibility) as once the fire gets going there is little that can be done. For very small fires, they can be dealt with by using Aqueous Vermiculite Dispersion (AVD),. Source: FPA
Lots of distilled water would help (cooling only) as that is an insulator but most water on the planet contains some salts (the level depends on a lot of factors).
There are a lot of reasons Li+ can catch fire and although the rate is low, the consequences can be somewhat brutal.
In some older gas turbine engines that used cartridge start, the fuel used generated its own oxygen so it isn't as if we don't know the risk.
Yup. Any fire requires fuel, oxygen and heat to start.
Let's first deal with the difference of ICE fires vs EV.
ICE fires require external oxygen, so covering it with water or foam works as you can starve the fire so you have a means of controlling it, provided you get to it fast enough. Not that it gives the tiny mandatory fire extinguisher in the car much purchase, consider that more a tool to help someone escape before the fire takes hold properly. If I recall correctly, you're dealing with 700-800ºC once the party gets going.
A Lithium fire creates its own oxygen, so blanketing it can only assist in preventing the fire to heat up its surroundings, and that's only temporarily because once it gets going (and thermal runaway is really, really fast) you're looking at a solid 1200ºC. What's worse is that that fire in a box that is made to withstand heat because it has to stay below about 65ºC for the battery not to start self igniting. Evidence that that box does the job is the fact that in EVs that got on fire through external causes, the battery actually tends to survive totally unscathed.
I've recently seen fire brigade exercises where they deliberately set a fully charged EV on fire as research on what to do, and the sequence is:
- short circuit (they used a nailgun in a weakened spot)
- white smoke
- black smoke <= that's the combustible mix of fuel and oxygen
- ignition and/or explosions, even later (a massive hazard to firemen, btw, I've seen one sample which blew a car door clean out for some 10m flight)
- fire with heat up to 1200ºC
Fire brigades throw water at this at a rate of about 500l/minute per hose but all they can do is cool the exterior. There is now a lance which can cut a hole in the pack so the water gets inside and there are packs which have a connector, but it's a drop of water on a hot plate (sorry), it only helps a bit.
In the exercise, the test vehicle went from deliberate short circut to fully burned out molten wreckage in a shockingly short timespan of 3 minutes, so if you have ANY suspicion that you have a fire starting (white smoke is a good hint), GET OUT IMMEDIATELY. Oh, and look in your manual right now for the mechanical door opener if you have fancy buttons, because your electrics are likely not going to work (Tesla owners, take note as especially the rear mechanics are not obvious to find, certainly not in a panic). Note: any door handles sink into the door may also work, depriving anyone outside trying to help from the means to open the door. Add to that the auto-lock that most cars now have to prevent thieves from stealing things when you're waiting at a traffic light and it's not a good mix from an external emergency response perspective.
The average time for the fire brigade to arrive is about 8 minutes. Translated: by the time they get there, all they can do is control what's left. If there were any people stuck inside, they will have perished already.
EV fires thus have a herd of interesting side effects that ICE fires do not have:
1 - they are nigh impossible to put out
2 - they are extremely dangerous to firemen who use thermal scanning before they go even near a wreck, even when it seems under control (re-ignition is a real risk, as described by many posters already)
3 - they are incredibly polluting - the runoff water from the fire cannot be prevented from flowing away, and any water used in a holding container must be treated before it can be flushed. I'll get back to that in a minute, because there too is a side effect.
4 - if it happens in an underground parking garage, there is a very high risk of structural damage to the foundations (plus, fire brigades can't get to it easily).
There are a couple of other points to make here.
- If you have an EV, you may want to check with your insurance what is actually covered if it goes on fire. I know of an instance where a car ignited in total 4 times (the first container bath it got it actually vapourised all the water!), and it turned out only the first fire brigade callout was covered. Total extra uninsured cost was more than EUR 10K. Yes, THOUSANDS. Fire brigade callout, container hire, location hire, filtration of the waste water - over EUR 10K. And yes, I said IF, not WHEN it goes on fire - keep reading.
- Practice exit with your family because you will not think of all if this when the panic hits
- Make sure you carry a window hammer and seatbelt cutter. You really do not have the time to mess about
- An EV on fire in an underground garage cannot be moved unless you have specialised equipment. The company I work for has a couple of these and they are in constant use, not just for fires (it's also an excellent way to transport a car without affecting forensics). They can lift an EV even while it's on fire and the lift trailer is low enough to get under the vehicle when the tires have blown due to the heat, and the robot is remote controlled so the operator does not have to be in the very toxic fumes that an EV fire generates. It has enough power and traction to pull a heavy EV uphill out of a car park.
However, EV batteries are, for obvious reasons, very well protected. There are only two ways to get an EV battery to, err, spark:
- chemically through charge failures
- mechanically, typically after a large collision or doing something very stupid (or both) which jars the contents out of place.
You cannot do much about the latter, but the former can now be tested. The manufacturer may tell you that your battery is healthy, but there is now a test made in Germany which can verify each element in a pack via the CANbus connector and show you that your 80% health is actually a pack at 90%, but with one element about to die. Personally I think that should become part of an annual MOT. It's also good news for pack recycling, because you can just fix that element, balance it out and you have a pack that can do service a lot longer.
Statistically, it's also a rare event. Not much help if you are the statistic, but you have to pay attention to our bias to focus on negative news. I can't recall the statistic itself, but the 6000 fires in one year one country (I think it was The Netherlands) represented something like 0,0005% of the total volume of EVs on the road. I may be a factor out, but it was a low number.
I am personally not a huge fan of EVs as I think our infrastructure wasn't ready to supply that much power (one EV charge takes enough power for a couple of households for a week) and it's a total swine to travel with one long distance, but I'm also a realist. I see them as a transition. Not a very smart and rather hasty one rammed down our throats, but at least we started reacting instead of leaving the problem for tomorrow. I think it will leave a mess, but as always, the moment we as humans finally start to pay attention we start experimenting.
So there. I hope this has been a little bit informative :)
There is no evidence to suggest it was caused by an EV battery.
As you say, they are pretty well protected.
So assuming 25knots, a thousand miles is ~40 hours, so what would have triggered a fire two days into a long voyage?
The same question can be asked of the other vehicles on board - maybe a vapour buildup?
In the UK our grid is providing less energy year on year, and has been for many years... this is because of energy savings on all sorts of trivial things, like light bulbs, fridges, TVs...
The amount it supplied twenty years ago is sufficiently more than it provided last year to run every car on the road as an EV.
As for long journeys - they're no more of a pain than any other vehicle. I have to stop when the people in the car need a break for the loo, food, drink, or for the dog to have a short walk.
In that stop the car gets topped up, and is ready to carry on before the people are. Now obviously people will come in talking about driving a thousand miles each way every weekend uphill both ways whilst towing a supertanker, and managing to do that without ever stopping for the loo - but that's not how the vast majority of driving works.
The important thing here is to have a vehicle that can charge at high rates, less important than the capacity.
And of course home/destination charging - that's the real benefit. Simple plain AC chargers at any location you spend more than half an hour... They don't cost much to install/run...
The amount it supplied twenty years ago is sufficiently more than it provided last year to run every car on the road as an EV.
Grids in Belgium and The Netherlands had to stop accepting new companies hooking up because they were not planned for this load, and adjusting that is not an overnight exercise, it takes years.
As for long journeys - they're no more of a pain than any other vehicle. I have to stop when the people in the car need a break for the loo, food, drink, or for the dog to have a short walk.
In that stop the car gets topped up, and is ready to carry on before the people are. Now obviously people will come in talking about driving a thousand miles each way every weekend uphill both ways whilst towing a supertanker, and managing to do that without ever stopping for the loo - but that's not how the vast majority of driving works.
I'm on my own, and occasionally do long runs, internationally. The diesel I had I filled up in 10 minutes max and I could do a 600km or more run without any issues, with stops that *I* planned at locations that were interesting, not being forced to start hunting down a working socket every 2 hours or so (as range is also a lie because you don't charge to 100% and you don't deplete to 0%). And yes, 'hunting down' because even in car friendly Germany I quickly learned to totally ignore the Google GPS in the car which had me drain to 25% or so before recharging as location 1 was only two sockets on a charger that was clearly running Windows as it was stuck in a loop, the second one had 4 out of the 8 available broken and the rest recently was occupied (judging by the charge displays - yes, I checked), and only the next one had one that was free because the previous user just drove away. I started that hunt at 30% - I was now down to 15% (my usual go to is than to bail off the motorway as it's easier to find decent parks there). Oh, and Google will happily lead you to a place where you can start that fun, fun game of 'spot the charger' because some are so well hidden that it is clear that the usual installation with the display towards the sun so that they're impossible to read wasn't enough misery. And then comes the next fun bit: will your RFID card work, do you have to install Yet Another App or does it take at least a credit card (and God forbid they will have to display their charges, a suggestion that apparently would be blasphemous for the shareholders).
Thus, an 8 hour journey can easily add two or more hours for charging, including the mandatory not-pleasure hunts for actual working devices. Personally, I think whoever came up with this without thinking it through should be hung by his testicles for a few days and then be convicted to never ever drive anything else but an EV for five years, because it's clear this was dreamt up by someone who either only uses a bicycle or is chauffeured to work and thus never had to face the consequences themselves for their ineptitude.
While I'm at it, ditto for the dipswitch who came up with making lane assist reset mandatory because it's real fun to have to kill it off every time you're about to drive a mountain road with about 30cm between where the tarmac ends and a 45 degree drop into nowhere without any roadside barriers, because otherwise you'll have this thing jerk at your steering wheel at the wrong time. Been there, done that and if that person would have been present I'm not sure I would not have kicked him into that valley once I had my heart rate back within an acceptable range. Is now everyone doing the Microsoft thing of not checking things properly before they're let loose on a large part of the population?
If your daily drive is within one battery charge, fine, it's a perfect use case, especially so if you have a home charger. If not, it sucks, badly. Not an assumption, I literally returned yesterday from such a trip. It's one more year before the lease is up and then I'm going to get a modern diesel hybrid and use TomTom. The hybrid bit is less likely to turn toast because the battery is less exercised, and the ICE bit ensures I don't have to worry about range, and even if I do I can stick a jerrycan of fuel in the back. And Tomtom is far more usable than the Google rubbish which also routes badly and needs to be online for it to work. Not your use case, fine, but it is mine.
"If your daily drive is within one battery charge, fine, it's a perfect use case, especially so if you have a home charger."
For a very large proportion of the population, yes, it is. But, like you, I don't fall into that grouping either, most of my driving is work related and while with a modern medium to high range EV I could mostly get where I'm going without a top-up, I'd need to charge before setting off back home. And sometimes, that long trip might end up only being on-site for 30-60 minutes and probably not a high chance of a fast charger near the destination. A hybrid would be only real next option if ICE sales were banned today. AIUI, new ICE sales ban is coming in (in the UK) from 2030 and even new hybrids will be banned from sale after 2035. I will be retired by then, so will be unlikely to be doing any regular long trips so pretty much any car will do me by then, even a cheap second-hand EV with only 50 miles or so of range left.
" and probably not a high chance of a fast charger near the destination. "
You could probably make it work with some of the EV's that can charge super fast. It's not hard to do 600 miles in a single day with one of those. The selection isn't that varied so one would have to fit your needs.
Absolutely that would be possible, mostly I could easily do a full round trip with a car with that sort of range, but I can't find any with a range above 500 miles. But they are far out of my price range and the current longest range car seems to have a range of about 480 miles. Of the top 10 by range available in the UK, I could possible manage a Peugeot E-3008, a VW ID7 or tesla Model 3, all of which have claimed max. range of about 430 miles.
Curiously, the stated ranges above came from Carwow while ranges on the same models seem to be about 25% lower at EV Database. I can't be bothered to go check, but assume Carwow is quoting ideal, perfect conditions, brand new battery, while EV Database is quoting real world average ranges. This means the best available range EV I can afford would be just fine for the vast majority, but inconvenient at best for people like me who frequently drive 300+ miles on an almost daily basis. I've drive EVs and Hybrids and liked both, but an EV is just not practical for me. And no, adding on 20-30 mins charging, possibly in both directions on a day that might already be 12 hours long is NOT something I'd be happy with. There's already enough delays on the roads without adding to them.
So, final conclusion, I thoroughly approve of the switch to EVs and look forward to the day I can switch, but that day is not, for me, today. And since I only recently replaced my car, won't be for at least another 3-5 years. By then, things may have changed or I may even have retired, in which case all of my previous caveats will go away for me anyway :-)
"Thus, an 8 hour journey can easily add two or more hours for charging, including the mandatory not-pleasure hunts for actual working devices. Personally, I think whoever came up with this without thinking it through should be hung by his testicles for a few days and then be convicted to never ever drive anything else but an EV for five years, because it's clear this was dreamt up by someone who either only uses a bicycle or is chauffeured to work and thus never had to face the consequences themselves for their ineptitude."
Well over five years of driving an EV exclusively and I've never had that much trouble.
I have had exactly one journey where I had to play hunt the charger, and that was in my first year with an EV, and entirely my fault. Additionally the charging infrastructure has been improving significantly over the last decade, and continues to improve at a very significant rate.
I've also never managed to add 2 hours onto an 8 hour journey. Let's be conservative and assume 20kW for 70mph... In 8 hours you'd use 160kWh. To replace *all* of that on a plain 150kW charger would take 1 hour, and you don't need to replace it all during the journey - and of course chargers go up to 350kW.
If you are doing long journeys then you probably want a vehicle with ~80kWh of battery, so that's only 80 you need to top up with en route, add another 20 for comfort, that's 100kWh of charging during your 8 hour drive.
But you're driving alot, so again you'll be getting a vehicle with a decent charge rate.. Various cars do over 250kW, the Taycan (fastest charge I'm currently aware of) does 320kW... CCS chargers are specced up to 350kW already.
That's 20 minutes of charging for your 8 hour journey, not two hours. And in an eight hour journey I'm pretty sure I'd need the loo at least once, quite probably more.
And I'd be looking at the regulations for breaks for HGV drivers, which would mandate 45 minutes of break for 4.5 hours of driving, so the sensible break is already twice as long as the charge.
Or for taxi drivers, a 30 minute break after 5.5 hours, or 45 minutes off in an 8.5 hour shift. So again - twice as long as the charge is taking.
Let's be conservative and assume 20kW for 70mph... In 8 hours you'd use 160kWh
80kWh capacity is pretty typical for larger EVs. Are you seriously suggesting that you could drive for 4 hours at 70MPH (280 miles) on one charge? I doubt that very much, at a steady 70 I think most EVs would be lucky to make 160-180 miles.
70mph at 20kW is only 3.5m/kWh - have to get down to 2.8m/kWh to hit 25kW, which would still be over three hours (plenty of time between a break).
It'll be a while before I need to hit a motorway again to be able to monitor the usage, but the Enyaq is about as aerodynamic as a brick, so it might take a shade more, but I know it's not much more.
I also know that I can easily get 300 miles out of my car, though I have a fair bit of a-roads either side of the motorway on the main "long route" I do (though it does include going over all the hills in Cornwall and Devon).
More efficient shapes can easily do way better than that:
The various versions of the model 3 used between 206 and 265 Wh/m (3.8 - 4.9 m/kWh) on a bunch of 70mph tests (Out Of Spec Reviews: jumps straight to results, then a little method discussion, then the actual range). That'll take a hit in a storm, but there is plenty of wiggle room.
"I think most EVs would be lucky to make 160-180 miles."
That phrase rather suggests that it's not something you've actually any experience of.
While there are some expensive EVs that can charge at that rate, finding a public charger that says it will deliver that rate can be a challenge.
Finding a public charger that actually delivers at that rate is even harder. You might get that rate if you're the only one charging at that location, and if the grid is able to deliver that much at the time.
Most times in many places, that nameplate rate has been proven to be shared across however many cars are charging at that location. What Car published an article in the last few months about exactly this.
So, the cars might be ready, if you can afford one, but as usual the UK's infrastructure is lagging badly behind. Government should have made sure that there is sufficient charging capacity and convenience available before kicking off the aggressive EV mandates.
More and more manufacturers are realising that charge rate trumps battery capacity on long trips.
150kW+ is now pretty common - and if you're someone who does a lot of long trips, then it's obviously something you'd factor in when choosing a car.
350kW chargers are common - there are more chargers which supply 150kW or more than there are petrol stations (yes, I know one of those is chargers the other is locations) - that's actually more common than chargers between 50kW and 150kW (basically the rest of the DC chargers).
"Government should have made sure that there is sufficient charging capacity and convenience available before kicking off the aggressive EV mandates."
In the same way that petrol stations were mandated before cars needed them?
There is plenty of capacity at the moment, and as more EVs hit the roads that capacity is scaling (in fact its scaling faster than the EVs)
<......"....In the same way that petrol stations were mandated before cars needed them?...."....>
Petrol stations grew up as the demand increased - and that demand increased at a very slow rate over several decades before the explosion in car ownership from the 1950s on, and most of that increase in ownership came in the 60s and 70s. By then there were small petrol stations all over the place (probably more than there are now) because there were a lot in towns that were associated with a shop as well as at car dealers and garages (how many dealerships serve fuel nowadays?). I remember the ironmongers in a town nearby to where I grew up in the 60s/70s (Caistor) had a single pump (at the kerbside) and the storage tank was under the shop; ditto the Austin dealer in Market Rasen where the kerbside pump was served by a storage tank beneath the adjacent showroom which was within a line of shops in the main street (and so small it would only hold one car!).
By contrast, due to the mandating of the end of sales of new petrol/diesel cars in not many years time, the growth of EVs needs to be far more rapid than than the growth of petrol/diesel cars ever was, That is why it needs Government action to force the rapid expansion of EV charging infrastructure because without it, the expansion of the infrastructure simply isn't going to keep up with the speed at which EV ownership is being required to expand, and despite what some people keep trying to pretend, it is one of the major factors holding back EV uptake.
Well if you want to count all the places a vehicle can charge then there are already tens of millions.
A 13A socket is all you actually need, at 10A that's well within it's thermal constraints and it supplies more than a couple of kW. Let's say it's down at 2kW charge rate, that's 2.5 hours of charging a day needed for the average car in the UK.
There are substantially more 13A sockets in the country than there are petrol stations.
More and more manufacturers are realising that charge rate trumps battery capacity on long trips.
No. Lower battery capacity means even more stops. It doesn't matter how short the stop is, it. is. a. stop.
150kW+ is now pretty common - and if you're someone who does a lot of long trips, then it's obviously something you'd factor in when choosing a car.
Assuming you have the choice. If I have to choose an EV again it will most certainly not be another Volvo as it's by some distance the worst vehicle I have ever used in the decades I have been driving, and not just because it's a 400V EV (so yes, not an 800V which would at least reduce charging time), if it has to be an EV it'll be a KIA EV6 or something. The reason is the frankly spectacularly bad UI in that car, even Microsoft would look at this and say "OK, we can't make this any worse". Add to that Google for navigation which seems to occasionally decide to pick the scenic route (detected because there are places where I know the best route myself) and that it doesn't work if the tell-all SIM decides that roaming isn't something it isn't interested in for the day (yes, seriously, it has done this), and the hallucinations of the emergency stop system which means it alerts for things that don't exist and even jerked so hard at the steering wheel that I ended up in another lane on the motorway with absolutely nothing identifyable as a 'collision avoidance' cause (said motorway was empty!) and no, never, ever again. The worst of this is that they then hide behind "oh it needs a software update" - which isn't done (I checked) or helps (I noticed). Oh, and it has a speeding nagger - which does not work at all, unless 120km/h is the new standard near schools.
I'm toying with the idea to ask for a Right To Be Forgotten withdrawal of my details from the SIM activation. By law it can then no longer transmit to Google and all the other data milkers hanging off it, and they can't tell me I cannot do that because they failed to make it clear in the advertising that I would have to supply three sets of privacy busting logins for the advertised vehicle functions to work. I'm perfectly happy using my own phone with TomTom for navigation.
Hmm, I must talk to the Data Protection officials about this - could prove very, very entertaining indeed to just try that for a while.
"No. Lower battery capacity means even more stops. It doesn't matter how short the stop is, it. is. a. stop."
Bladders mean stops as well.
Fatigue means stops.
Safe driving means stopping every so often - my car can easily outdrive me, and get charged faster than I can take a break.
All of your complaints there are about car safety tech, nothing to do with the vehicle being an EV, maybe you'd rather ride a bike?
"350kW chargers are common - there are more chargers which supply 150kW or more than there are petrol stations"
For a long trip, 150kW may be better value than paying a premium for a 350kW charger. If the car charges from 10-80% in 18 minutes, you'd have to gobble your lunch very quickly to avoid idling charges or eat in the car so you can monitor when to unhook. At 150kW, you get some more time to do the things you need to do on a travel stop and still have the car sufficiently charged for the next leg. The high speed option is quite welcome for those times when a quick trip to the loo and some electrons is all you need.
Capacity is becoming less of an issue as stations add some battery storage to offset getting hit with demand charges from the power company. Some big stations are going all in with solar canopies. While those aren't likely to supply enough to support the station entirely when its busy, it can be very useful. There's a big Supercharger station near me that's never that busy and could use a canopy with PV on top. (It's 4 stations with 3 in the same shopping center parking lot and another 1/2 mile down the road, extremely overbuilt for the area). Trickle charging on-site storage can be done when there isn't much demand such as overnight. It's these sorts of problem solving that's important. Running new power lines all over the place to supply power on demand would take a lot of metal and lots of investment. The issue isn't generation, it's distribution. It can take as much or more leccy to refine petroleum fuels and each EV ideally replaces an ICEV. I don't hear screaming about how much power refineries consume (and no, they don't generate their own power except a a few sites). California is going to lose at least a couple of refineries in the next 2 years so that should free up capacity.
" I have to stop when the people in the car need a break for the loo, food, drink, or for the dog to have a short walk."
In my younger years with only me and a mate, road trips were a bladder competition. Neither of us was going to whine about needing a stop before the other or the car. This was before the advent of the pony keg sized drinks cups. These days, for me, it's more about bladder anxiety and I'm not in so much of a hurry that I'll try to tough it out. I'll also stop for all of the crazy road-side attractions since there are so few of them these days. On the trip home from the 2017 total eclipse (awesome), I spent an hour at a lay by photographing a wicked thunderstorm in the valley below.
I gauge a good amount of range as being around 2-4 hours. After two I probably need a stretch and after 4, a meal. To be able to not have to visit the petrol station most days of the year is great. I just got back from filling up my petrol tank since I have a field job 110 miles away in the morning and need to get there and get back before traffic is too horrible. Most EV's would get me there and back, no itch and I'd have been topped up anyway since I haven't needed to go anywhere for the last couple of days.
"To be able to not have to visit the petrol station most days of the year is great. I just got back from filling up my petrol tank..."
I agree - horrible smelly places petrol forecourts.
The advantage of basically never having to go anywhere special to top up is something that people who haven't made the move generally don't appreciate.
<......"The advantage of basically never having to go anywhere special to top up is something that people who haven't made the move generally don't appreciate.".....>
Apart from the people (mainly in older terraced housing stock on narrow streets in many towns and cities) who have neither a driveway nor the opportunity to park near their houise most of the time, and therefore WOULD have to "go somewhere special" to top up an EV. The are very much in the minority, but a significant minority nonetheless.
That is something that YOU don't seem to appreciate, no matter how often other people point it out to you ;)
"That is something that YOU don't seem to appreciate, no matter how often other people point it out to you ;)"
If you rent a flat, you may be prohibited from owning a dog. Just because that can be the case with rented accommodations doesn't mean that nobody should be allowed to own a dog. If you don't have off-street parking and more probably a garage, you won't do well to have an expensive sports car. You may not be able to have a car at all in some places. In my younger days, I had friends that lived in areas with lots of apartments and there was no parking for miles around between 5pm and 6am. One friend that moved to San Francisco had to sell her car and get a scooter since housing with any sort of assigned parking or paying for parking was incredibly expensive. She stuck it out for a year and finally had to agree that it wasn't as great of a place to live as she thought it would be. Getting around was slow and tedious on public transportation and moving closer to work was a lost cause although she tried and tried to find something she could afford on her salary if something came up.
Amazingly enough I have lived in places without dedicated parking, and indeed live on a road where there half the road is a terrace with on street parking.
Yes, these are the hardest people to have plugging in at home - but that's only one of the places to plug in, and they're in a minority. Moreover, that minority is more likely to not own car than the general population - whether through financial hardship or the fact that quite a bit of our densest housing is well served by public transport in cities.
You seem to ignore that I am continuously banging on about having AC chargers deployed everywhere.
Most journeys have one end at a car park of some sort - that's where you charge.
Ideally vehicles would be plugged in for as many of the 23 hours a day they aren't moving as is possible. Plug in at work, plug in at the shops, when you go out for a meal, when you go to the cinema, the theatre, whatever, wherever, whenever.
There are a few things we need to get right here...
- AC chargers should be cheaper than they are, they aren't particularly sophisticated bits of kit after all.
- EV's should be required to have bidirectional inverters.
- We need a robust integrated billing mechanism that's industry wide... Tesla do it, VAG do it with some networks, but it's not standard. Being able to just plug in, and have the car charge/discharge for profit is going to significantly increase participation in the market.
Let's assume this is a problem for 25% of the cars in the UK (which I suspect is generous). That's 71% away... it's an issue which we need to address, but it is absolutely not insurmountable.
You only need to "go somewhere special" on a long journey, when you're topping up en route. The rest of the time you charge at a destination - whatever shape that destination is.
You will also need a Godawful amount of chargers to support what you're proposing (being connected 23h).
One of the key issues is that it takes time to charge a vehicle, and during that time the charger is not usable for anyone else. A petrol station can serve FAR more vehicles per hour than a charger.
The other point EV fans keep making is that you have to stop anyway - well yes, but I prefer to stop at places where that is interesting, not because I have to play the mandatory game of find-where-they-placed-the-chargers-and-hopefully-one-is-free - which ADDS to my stress, not lessens it. What an EV takes away even more than mobility is choice, and it is another example of yet again deeming personal time not having any value. Basically the same basis as surveys which want your time for free, despite not having offered you the associated goods for free.
"The other point EV fans keep making is that you have to stop anyway - well yes, but I prefer to stop at places where that is interesting, not because I have to play the mandatory game of find-where-they-placed-the-chargers-and-hopefully-one-is-free"
That's not been a thing for a long time.
I know before I stop that there is a charger free, and I stop at a place of my choosing... Generally it only applies to long journeys, so it's wherever is en route. There are hundreds along my most common route, but I tend to stick to just a small handful of those.
"You will also need a Godawful amount of chargers to support what you're proposing (being connected 23h)."
About 30-35 million... but remember these aren't expensive, or rare, they can literally be 13A sockets. There are *already* orders of magnitude more charge points than we could ever need... (though obviously not all the sockets in my house could be used at once for this, I'd be limited to two per ring circuit.)
Now, is it better in various places to have more than 2kW available - yes, of course... I don't expect every vehicle to be limited to 2kW all the time, but the suggestion that all chargers need to be 150+kW is also ridiculous.
"One of the key issues is that it takes time to charge a vehicle, and during that time the charger is not usable for anyone else. A petrol station can serve FAR more vehicles per hour than a charger."
But a petrol station also has to serve more vehicles per hour, because you can't fill up with petrol anywhere else, so they have to service all the needs of all the vehicles in the area.
Public DC charging is never going to be the dominant energy source for EVs.
The dominant source is going to be charging at home/work/stations/hotels/... and those can be supplied at 1.4 kW (the minimum) charging rate per space (in fact that's nearly twice what they'd need assuming uk averages etc)... the vehicle is going to be sat in those places for several hours at a time whilst the driver is off doing something else.
The secondary source will be shorter stops at retail/entertainment/leisure/hospitality/... where the vehicle will again be left alone for an extended period of time - but substantially shorter than the above. These would benefit from the 7-22kW range of AC charging, depending on the expected visit duration. Maybe hotels fit in here, with people obviously far enough from home to need a room overnight?
DC charging comes in a very distant third, and is primarily of interest for the second and subsequent legs of long journeys, which make up a very small fraction of journeys - so yes, we need much faster chargers and better grid connections on service stations on trunk roads, and whilst they do need to deal with peak vehicle throughput, it represents a small fraction of the energy needs of an EV.
The challenge is when we all decide to go on a long journey at the same time on the same day, but even on very busy days, I still don't play hunt the charger... because navigation software talks to the charger networks and knows which are free...
"What an EV takes away even more than mobility is choice"
Utter tosh, on both counts.
"I agree - horrible smelly places petrol forecourts."
There's that, but also needing to factor that into my schedule. If I get a call in the evening for work the next day and own an EV, I can make sure the car is set to charge so I have the range I need. I'd likely want to stay within off-peak rates, but if I had to, I'd start earlier to be sure. The majority of the time I'd have a reasonable charge in the pack so if I were to need to go someplace right away, I could just jump in the EV and go. I don't always maintain more than a half tank of petrol in the car if there's nothing planned and will often run it lower to reduce the number of visits to the petrol station if I don't have any needs. How lazy would I have to be to not take 30 seconds to plug in the car? This is the major benefit of an EV that I see. If you can't charge at home, it's like all of the things you can't do to save money like you could if you were much more wealthy.
"If you can't charge at home, it's like all of the things you can't do to save money like you could if you were much more wealthy."
Early adopters of all new tech are inevitable the wealthier.
But the point is that you don't need to be able to charge at home to make it worthwhile, you just don't charge at DC chargers if you can possibly avoid it, because they are extortionately expensive, about as much as petrol...
Despite my feelings about the politics of a certain species of rat, his charging network provides the best value electrons - even to non members without that brand of vehicle.
Some of the other operators really are taking the mick... and particularly AC charging should be <45p (about to install a public charger at a commercial building, and that will be set at ~35p/kWh I reckon, possibly lower at off peak times if I can).
Home charging is a massive financial benefit, but all the other benefits of owning an EV still apply (and not having to go to petrol stations definitely counts in that list).
I was trying to keep it simple, but pedantically it needs a few caveats.
You could have opened with "Most fires" instead of "Any fire". That would have only required 2 more letters, and would not have made your statement technically incorrect. Or maybe even just drop the "Any".
While we're being pedantic, the fire triangle generalises to "a fuel, an oxidiser and a source of heat".
Note that "a source of heat" doesn't mean "hot"; it means that the activation energy of the chemical reaction must be exceeded. Your hypergolic propellants still require a minimum temperature for the reaction to initiate, it just happens to be lower than the temperature at which they're stored.
It is a bit informative.
Also a bit misinformation.
But first, you are not generally being asked to buy operate or use an EV. You are however being asked to stop using ICEVs, not all at once, but soonish, in order for the planetary ecology to survive in forms useful to us.
The UK Grid: total power demand is still well below its peak of some decades ago, so we are not going to overtax it;
BEVS predominantly charged overnight, when there is lots, and sometimes excess, of capacity. Not a problem (or rather a collection of problems easily solved over reasonable time).
Super gadget for taking one burning car out of a parking structure. Perhaps it could have taken the burning ICEV out of the airport park recently? Before there was running burning petrol from the others, which as with the Liverpool structure fire was a mechanism of spread, and I'd think a difficult environment for a robot.
"BEVS predominantly charged overnight, when there is lots, and sometimes excess, of capacity. "
That depends on your definition of capacity. As of 02:00 this morning, the UK grid still needed to import a net 5.5 GW or so mostly from France, and was choosing to run about the same of UK thermal plant. If you're reliant on excess capacity in another country then that's not reliable capacity in my book, and if you're running thermal plant to charge EVs then the net emissions won't be much different to an ICE.
The whole model of excess capacity overnight and low prices is a hangover from the days when we produced most of our leccy from coal, and the only overnight use were a few (mostly poor) people who could have electric storage heating forced on them in social housing. As policy pushes people to EVs and heat pumps, and wantonly fritters money on erratic renewables, the whole balance of demand and supply (generation) is changing pretty quickly, and the concept of "surplus" power and off peak will start to have no real meaning.
That's probably more the economics of the broken wholesale market. If its cheaper to buy French nuclear or Norwegian hydro then that's what the market will do. I don't know whether we could satisfy internal demand without the interconnects. The wholesale price would certainly be "interesting" if we ever had to.
Arguments about how we use less electricity now that X years ago are a bit spurious. We use it (or plan to use it) in different ways and in different places so the grid of X years ago is unsuitable for that as evidenced by the plans to build new lines and the wait times for connections.
" I don't know whether we could satisfy internal demand without the interconnects."
The majority of the time, day and night we're pulling a net 3-7GW through international connectors, but on very rare occasions UK demand dips when wind and solar are performing to a level where our net imports are near enough nil. Morning of 25 and 26 May were one of those very rare occasions. Look at Gridwatch on the link below, and the chart "Last Month Hourly Averages". If either the light blue or yellow areas are at the top of the plot, then we're not importing. Slightly confuddled by exports to Eire and the fact that not all interconnectors will be running the same way.
I don't think there's now despatchable plant in the UK that could cover peak demand, we're reliant on wind, interconnectors, diesel farms and demand reduction. If sufficient interconnector capacity is unavailable, then you have to hope the wind keeps blowing. There have been some squeaky bum moments this winter eg 8 Jan, but we got through by paying around £20m in one afternoon to some industrial customers to cut energy use and last resort generators*, and having about 5-6GW of wind. If we'd had dunkelflaute around 8 Jan, then we'd probably have seen power cuts.
* Last resort power generators isn't the terminology NESO** or the industry use, but that's a fair label
** National Electricity System Operator. the UK's state owned grid operator, with this function taken off of National Grid.
"Morning of 25 and 26 May were one of those very rare occasions. Look at Gridwatch on the link below, and the chart "Last Month Hourly Averages". If either the light blue or yellow areas are at the top of the plot, then we're not importing."
It might be a question of economics that clouds what could be dispatched in the UK at any given time. If France is flush with wind/solar, they'll have lots of excess to export so the price goes down. If the price is below what domestic generators will offer, guess who gets the sale.
For EV's, having TOU pricing in 15min intervals could help manage the grid. When prices dip due to lots of wind generation, EV's that can see the low price and are plugged in could switch on and take advantage of the low price. Conversely, a person might program their car to normally not charge when rates are high if the pack is at or over a certain capacity (overridable). A notice could be sent to let people know when charging will not take place due to price when the car would normally charge up during off-peak hours if they happened to not be off-peak at the usual time. A person that doesn't do a lot of driving might be able to do most of their charging when prices are super low. If price < 0.05, then charge to a max of 80%. That should solve the issue of EV's charging when supply is low and taking up load when supply is high.
"For EV's, having TOU pricing in 15min intervals could help manage the grid. When prices dip due to lots of wind generation, EV's that can see the low price and are plugged in could switch on and take advantage of the low price."
We already have this in 30 minute intervals (since that's what the grid settlement period is).
Though actually - Octopus control my charging and it's rarely aligned with those 30 minute boundaries, it picks whatever times are best for them, whilst guaranteeing the charge I need.
I'd happily let them have the freedom to do less one night and more the next (or vice-versa), so that over a week or ten days I get the same charge, but "lumpier". As it is I use their "greener day" predictions to determine when to plug in.
This would benefit from having better communications between car and charger (see my other post earlier this evening).
"I don't think there's now despatchable plant in the UK that could cover peak demand, we're reliant on wind, interconnectors, diesel farms and demand reduction. If sufficient interconnector capacity is unavailable, then you have to hope the wind keeps blowing. There have been some squeaky bum moments this winter eg 8 Jan, but we got through by paying around £20m in one afternoon to some industrial customers to cut energy use and last resort generators*, and having about 5-6GW of wind. If we'd had dunkelflaute around 8 Jan, then we'd probably have seen power cuts.
"
You'll hate to hear what we pay each year to turn down wind farms and fire up fossil fuel plants at the same time.
Regional pricing can't come soon enough - move some investment in power hungry industries (like computerised hallucinations) away from London, that would do the economy of the country no end of good.
<...."As of 02:00 this morning, the UK grid still needed to import a net 5.5 GW or so mostly from France, and was choosing to run about the same of UK thermal plant."....>
As others have said, this will be down to economics. At that time of night when the total demand is lower, and other European countries have a surplus of wind or nuclear, both of which are cheaper than burning gas, it makes sense to import the surplus at a lower cost and shut down the CCGT generators over here. It isn't that we were dependant on importing energy at that point as we had the capacity but chose to shut it down because it is expensive to run.
The trouble is that such action doesn't actually make the UK electricity price any lower because it is tied to the price of gas - an electricity pricing policy which goes back a few decades to when gas was actually cheap, and generation from gas was the cheapest form of electricity at the time. It is a pricing policy that desperately needs to be revised, but whilst vested interests are making a lot of money out of it, there is no inclination on their part to change it.
Oh no, it's completely impossible to build new capacity. whatever will we do? < /s>
Built capacity has fallen along with demand, the likelihood is that demand is going to increase, and we'll be scaling up generation as that happens.
EVs are a great load for this, because they can act as a significant part of the grid balancing system.
"EVs are a great load for this, because they can act as a significant part of the grid balancing system"
They can, and what research there is says that use in a smart grid support system actually improves the overall battery life. However, because of charge/discharge losses are around 15% the grid needs to generate that much more energy than is time shifted. A further complication is that there's times when much of the car fleet will be in use or needing to charge up, so that the despatchable capacity may be very low, and those periods of low availability are likely to coincide with times of high system demand.
"However, because of charge/discharge losses are around 15% the grid needs to generate that much more energy than is time shifted"
Looking at my (home) battery efficiency I don't think the losses are that high, they are about 10% over reasonable time periods (in Q1 this year I put in 1.06MWh, and pulled out .94MWh, that's 12% losses in winter, last summer was under 5% losses)
"A further complication is that there's times when much of the car fleet will be in use or needing to charge up"
The vast majority of the car fleet won't need to charge very often... but there will be times when much of the fleet is in use, but with widespread AC chargers at places like train stations and other car parks along with the much higher proportion of people working at least partly from home that's not as much of an issue as it used to be. Of course there are also those who don't need to be out and about at peak hours, whether through retirement, shift work, more flexible work hours...
"so that the dispatchable capacity may be very low, and those periods of low availability are likely to coincide with times of high system demand"
That demand is what we shift to the times when generation is high... that's the point of having a smarter grid, we don't need to adapt generation to demand if that demand follows the generation.
Are you assuming that all cars are going to need a full charge every night? Because with a UK average milage of 20 miles a day many vehicles will easily do a couple of weeks between charges (note of course that what's more likely is repeated smaller charges as there is a surplus of energy on the grid, but on average they only need ~5kWh/day to operate as a car).
"Which is more or less irrelevant because transfer loss is a significant part of consumption. 15% for that alone is more or less realistic and the losses to/from battery come on top of that."
That makes no sense. Overall grid transmission losses are at about 8%, and one of benefits of distributed generation/storage is that it's used locally. Even when I'm exporting energy to "the grid" it's actually being used by my neighbours.
Not only does that come with absolutely negligible transmission losses, but is also reduces losses that would have been incurred had their electricity been imported from a distant power station.
Grid storage batteries are being colocated with generation/import facilities, so that the energy doesn't have to navigate the grid multiple times. You could say that Dinorwig power has to go over the grid twice, and could suggest that means it would get double transmission losses - but even that's on the high voltage side, so the losses are more like 1.5% each way (i.e. you're adding 1.5% to the RTE losses when importing energy)
"Of course there are also those who don't need to be out and about at peak hours, whether through retirement, shift work, more flexible work hours..."
They can be out and about, just not charging. Many EV's are in the 250mi range category and people often don't drive nearly that far so charging can be shifted to whenever the car isn't in use if it can be plugged in and is given pricing information. I'm writing about L2 charging, not DCFC. AC charging is much cheaper to deploy and the more of it there is in places where people will be for good lengths of time, the easier it is to ABC (Always Be Charging) or always ready to charge if prices are good.
"That demand is what we shift to the times when generation is high... that's the point of having a smarter grid"
The grid doesn't even need to be very smart for EV charging. Just tell the car what the current price is and leave it at that. That could vary by substation so if the branch sees that it's near the top end of its capacity, the price will be high. If the branch is way under limits and the feed to the substation is loaded, price can be cheap.
I can see where being too hasty about putting some implementation in before considering things a few upgrades down the path might be a waste. Putting unused fields in a data stream for future use could fix that. When designing avionics for rockets, I left spare lines (hardware) so sensors could be added and control lines sent out. It was only when I was running up against space limitations that I had to insist on more buy-in from everybody on the current design or I'd need to shift to all surface mount componentry where the cost and lead time would go up. It was easy to bodge things with standard through-hole parts so I liked doing it that way if I could.
"You are however being asked to stop using ICEVs, not all at once, but soonish, in order for the planetary ecology to survive in forms useful to us."
Which is also BS. Not a single thing in EV is 'ecological' and the manufacturing of it alone produces two times the CO2 than ordinary car. Several hundred kilos of toxic waste at the other end too. Pure 'Kick the poor people to the head' -*politics*, by rich people and bunch of useful idiots.
Local technical university actually made a lifetime analysis of emissions and waste produced and ordinary cars have same CO2 emissions as EVs, after 20 years of use.
A number no-one wants to show or even acknowledge. The reality is that EVs are *not* saving the planet. On the contrary: Someone has to make all of that electricity, like, for example, burning coal. Brilliant. *Those* emissions do not exist in *any* "EV-efficiency" calculations. Funny that.
But selling £30k cars instead of £15k cars ... of course *everyone* in business (including government) loves the former: It's *all* about profit and *more* profit.
"But first, you are not generally being asked to buy operate or use an EV. You are however being asked to stop using ICEVs, not all at once, but soonish, in order for the planetary ecology to survive in forms useful to us."
It's also something they can ask and not be drummed out of town in tar and feathers. It would be just as useful to slow/reverse population growth since fewer people trying to climb the lifestyle ladder would help too. Of course, They® can't say that. Instead, politicians are clamoring for people to start reproducing at greater rates again so they don't have to abandon their "infinite growth" models that will make their savings/investments keep growing so they can retire in a walled compound in some tropical country (with good AC).
I don't see EV mandates and the banning of ICEV's as being necessary. All government needs to do is simplify the processes that gets EV charging in all forms easier to get done. Where EV's make sense, people will buy them. If they don't make sense for somebody, those people won't buy them. Over time, I expect the number of choices for an EV will exceed the choices for ICEV's until it's down to particularly niche cases where somebody will choose the ICEV.
It depends what map projection you look at. The map in the article appears to be a standard Mercator projection, which simply flattens the globe out, resulting in east-west distances being increasingly stretched the further from the equator that you look, which in turn is what causes straight east-west lines on the globe to become seriously curved on the flattened projection.
I suspect if you looked at the position of the ship on a globe, you would find that it is on an almost direct straight line between Yantai and Lazaro Cardenas. (Edit - as the link in Headley_Grange's post pretty much shows)
"standard Mercator projection, which simply flattens the globe out,"
Literally the definition of a projection...
Mercator preserves angles and is therefore useful for navigation, but bloody awful for most other things you might want a map to show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
It's really interesting to look at a transverse mercator projection and compare.
The Gall-Peterson projection preserves area, but not angles, making it useless for navigation, but much more honest about relative sizes of countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall–Peters_projection
The other issue is energy density. Range is a real issue with EVs, which is why we presently use the option that has proved a tad too enthusiastic in occasionally turning into a raging fire.
Whoever comes up with a solution that combines more rnage with less risk will have a winner (hence lots of research in it), but I've also seen developments again in hydrogen.
The fun part of hydrogen is that you can shunt 5kg worth of hydrogen into a car in very little time, and it has the same energy as about 50l worth of fuel, and someone has discovered a way to use like 10-20% of the previous volume of catalyst in fuel cells which makes them both more efficient and powerful. If we could produce that in an economic way that doesn't use fossil fuels (and I think that's on its way), and use the newer, more efficient electric motors that for instance Mercedes and Volkswagen are now making and we could again do proper distances. That said, the VW ID7 does again manage some 400km on a single charge which is at least better, also because it charges at 200kWh speeds.
There is a huge market in the US for second cars, and range is mostly not an issue for a second car you'll be using for commuting. You'll still have the primary car you can take road trips with etc. but a car with 150 to 200 miles of range is plenty for most commutes / errands if you can charge at home or at work.
Some of those Chinese LFP cars have some really impressive range. Those batteries being cheaper (and lighter) means they can put more of them in the car to make up for the reduced energy density.
No one in the US is making an entry level EV, meanwhile China has mastered that art and even if the US erects tariff barriers to keep them out here the writing is already on the wall that China is going to dominate EV sales in just about every country but the US and a few others with their own auto industries to protect like Germany.
"a second car you'll be using for commuting"
In most cases the "second car" should be the one used twice a year for that trip to the lake with a boat in tow, etc.
It's cheaper to rent one when needed but that's not how human nature works - we buy cars with our emotions, not logic
It's worth noting that virtually all German car makers are building their lower end EVs in China and shipping them to the EU. This is one of the reasons they're ALL opposed to the EU putting tariffs on Chinese cars (which haven't been subsidised for several years. The Chinese government decided that the market had been kickstarted and is now self-sustaining - bear in mind that China's domestic market saw 32 million cars sold in 2024 - vs 3.2 million in the USA(*) and 10 million in the EU)
(*) 15 million total sales but the rest were pickups/SUVs/Light trucks. The other markets are predominantly cars
Actually, rental companies have also been pressured to abandon ICE vehicles.
In the Netherlands it started a couple of years back with a diktat of maximum engine capacity. You try driving up- and downhill in something that only has a 1l engine and a stupid amount of gears to hide that fact - especially the downhill is fun because an engine that small has zip braking ability so you may have brightly glowing brake by the time you get downhill..
Yes, hydrogen is a great fuel
The problem is MAKING and transporting that hydrogen. As soon as you get into "green" hydrogen you're looking at 2-3 times the price per joule vs electricity and if it's compressed or liquified for transport then you're looking at 3-6 times THAT price
This is the achilles heel of hydrogen. The same economic are why it will never be a viable replacement for piped natural gas (essentially: a minimum of 10x the per-joule retail price of natural gas. Nobody's going to buy that when electricity is half the price - and will remain half the price no matter how much the per-joule rate is, thanks to that fixed relationship when you're making "green" hydrogen)
For road use, hydrogen is a disaster movie in the making. Sooner or later one of those COPVs will let go either due to the constant stress cycling or because a HGV hits a car in just the wrong spot (There are plenty of videos of CNG tank failures, they're....educational) - this is quite apart from the safety issues inherent in hydrogen handling in the supply chain. Embrittlement issues are a particularly thorny problem
On the hydrogen making front there's incoming improvement, not only in better catalysts but also the energy source. I am thus not yet prepared to rule it out as a future.
That said, I agree that H2 is a swine to transport and store. It's not impossible but it's indeed hard work..
"For road use, hydrogen is a disaster movie in the making."
Yes. And it's *not* because hydrogen explodes, no. It's because the hydrogen tank with >100 bar pressure in it, explodes. Truck tyres have only 10 bars or so and explosions of those literally kill people working on them.
Bonus case: You get basically invisible hydrogen fire when tank ruptures.
"The fun part of hydrogen is that you can shunt 5kg worth of hydrogen into a car in very little time, and it has the same energy as about 50l worth of fuel,"
Yes, and with a density of 0,08988 g/L it has a volume of 55 600 liters (55m^3) in same conditions as fuel. Funny you don't mention any of that. Why?
*Really* handy stuff. The reason no-one uses hydrogen unless they can connect generation and consumption with a pipe and a pump.
Not how the batteries are built or installed.
A marginally plausible approach if the battery swap method* of quick recharging caught on would be to ship them separately, but the batteries are going to be interesting cargo containers.
As would be loading.
The state of charge could be kept low, say 50%, but they are probably made and tested at over 80%, so that'd be quite a faff.
* Works well for scooters, with I gather 2 battery slots, and perhaps a convenient weight for hand-carrying.
For cars or trucks you pull up and a robot whips out your partly discharged leased battery, and inserts a charged one. Rather quicker than a tank of petrol, I gather. Not popular though.
The gasoline model of "fill up when you're almost empty" is what drove these ideas of battery swaps, but that's ignoring the inherent advantage of EVs - everywhere you park that has an outlet is a place where you can top up so you don't wait until you're near empty before "filling up".
Even people who live somewhere they don't have a private garage/driveway to charge at home might be able to charge at work or at the grocery store. If not today maybe in a few years. As that "top up" infrastructure is slowly built up in the places you are likely to leave your car the need for home charging will lessen as will the thought process of people thinking about EVs the way they think about gasoline vehicles as far as "fill up from empty" mentality.
What I think we need to get ourselves there is the EV charging equivalent of an ethernet switch. That is being able to have a small number of chargers that are connected to charging cords at a larger number of parking spots. At work if you have a parking lot with 100 spaces marked "reserved for EVs" and have a cord you might need only 3 or 4 actual chargers. When you arrive at work you plug in, and your car and everyone else's car negotiates with the chargers and the four chargers start charging the four cars with the lowest battery, once they reach a certain level and are no longer the lowest charged it switches and charges some other car for a bit and so on. It could also time things based on the office load and overall grid load, doing more charging in the morning and little or none in the afternoon.
You could add a few bells and whistles like owners could have their car tell the charging switch "this car will be leaving at noon" or "this car doesn't have a way to charge at home" so they gain a little bit of priority but even the naive "charge everyone equally" would work pretty well. You could have the same at places like grocery stores - a 20 minute visit would be enough to get to 80% at faster charging speeds - you might pay a higher rate for priority over other cars that are trickle charging but are already fairly full.
"everywhere you park that has an outlet "
In what country exactly? I've never seen an outlet by the street and even less outlets for anyone to use.
If you mean special charging stations, they are *not* "everywhere you park", you specifially go to there to get a battery full: Wasted trip and wasted time.
You get I'm talking about a few years down the road when the infrastructure is more built out, right? I would have thought talking about the need to develop an "ethernet switch for car charging" to make that possible (i.e. you don't have a charger in every parking space but it would make it quite practical to have a lot more parking spaces that have charging capability since they'd only need the cord) would have been a hint, but I guess some people only read the first few words and reply based on that.
"might be able to charge at work or at the grocery store"
*might* yea, right. Wishful thinking and of course it's paid by people who don't own EVs, the majority.
Also: At what cost? Here in North 'grocery store' charges from 20c (eurocents) to 90c/kWh. The latter is basically the same cost as gasoline.
"At work if you have a parking lot with 100 spaces marked "reserved for EVs" and have a cord you might need only 3 or 4 actual chargers."
The chargers are built into the cars for AC charging. The "charger" that goes on the wall of a home is a fancy switch box with a safety circuit to monitor grounding and it also tells the car what the circuit is capable of providing. In a car park, lots of cars can plug in and a management system will allow charging on some sort of priority basis and can also lower what each car is allowed to draw based on the total load allocated. There isn't a way to detect the pack's state of charge with the standard CCS/J3400 protocol when AC charging but if people needed to badge in to use the charger at work, there can be a maximum allocation and when that's reached, the power will switch off and be rerouted to somebody else. That can be used to prioritize vehicles as well so a company provided car that a salesperson might check out gets first dibs. A company may also want to charge employees for EV charging vs. providing it as a free benefit and use the money to keep the system maintained.
High speed charging at a grocery store isn't a great use. There will only be so much power that can be provided to the location so to use it all to allow a couple of people to charge is less useful than limiting power so more people can plug in at one time. I often spend more than 20 minutes on a big shop so that situation would have me hogging the space or needing to rush out and move the car, leaving my trolley someplace while I do that. If an employee notices that I've gone out and left a trolley full of groceries, the store might be upset about that. There are some things they can't put back such as frozen, meats, etc since they can't be certain how long they've been left to warm up if they decided that I've abandoned my shopping as I rush out and climb in my car and drive.
There isn't a way to detect the pack's state of charge with the standard CCS/J3400 protocol
Well that seems like a pretty big oversight that ought to be corrected before there are so many EVs that we're forever stuck with a shitty standard with such obvious missing functionality!
Seriously, how does anyone overlook the need to pass data across a standard charging socket to allow for priority to be given to cars more in need, as well as for billing purposes, and probably a lot of other useful things I'm overlooking?
Couldn't technology similar to powerline networking be used so that at least the socket could remain the same? There wouldn't be a need to a high data rate, but this is something that pretty obviously will work much better it is directly connected rather than with communication happening wirelessly. Heck just doing some sort ID exchange over the cable would allow the rest of the communication to happen wirelessly without issue since you'd now have established for certain who is who.
"Wouldn't it make more sense to ship the vehicles with absolute bare minimum batteries installed and then then install the batteries at the destination?"
The pack is a massive chunk of the vehicle to be taking out and putting back and many of them aren't particularly modular. Elon was talking about making the battery pack case a structural element of the car which really complicates things. If the pack needs to come out, the car needs to be fixed to a rigid frame so it doesn't get warped. They are also not designed in most EV's to be frequently R&R'd.
"battery pack case a structural element of the car which really complicates things."
Which is a brilliant idea for manufacturer: When the pack is damaged (remember that it's the bottommost part and thus easily damaged) you need to scrap whole car because swapping it is too difficult and costs too much.
For the poor owner it's not so good idea.
Many insurers won't insure EVs for battery damage anymore: Too many damaged ones. Those who do, ask a lot of money for it and prices are climbing fast as more damaged batteries arise.
One thing that's rarely mentioned in articles about ship fires is the possibility of pumping enough water into the hull to upset the ship's stability and foundering/sinking it.
I did a ship firefighting course in Hull when I was in the merch and the instructors said the fires they dreaded most were ship fires in the docks.
Came here to say pretty much the same thing. Ship fires are INTENSE (especially on a Ro-Ro ship) and putting water on them rarely has an effect much beyond just making the compartment the fire is in a source of super-heated steam that makes it impossible for anyone to make it into any space even close to the fire and stay alive. On top of that pumping enough water into a ship to affect a fire is likely going to affect ship stability. Unless the fire is small and contained enough to have a crew onboard managing the bilge tanks and bilge pumps to get the water back out, you don't need all that much water to destabilize a ship significantly and if a Ro-Ro starts to list there's a critical angle where the lashings (especially those affected by the fire and heat are going to release the vehicles, all of them slide to the low side and the ship goes belly up (and then under). Firefighting measures on these ships consist of closing any and all vents into the affected space and blowing inert gas (usually CO2 sometimes Nitrogen) into the space in the hopes of suppressing any active flame/fire. The idea is that by starving the fire of oxygen only the thermal transfer becomes the issue and if they can keep things suppressed long enough they might smolder themselves out. It's also one of the main lessons that land based fire fighters have to learn when coming to fight a ship fire in a harbour, that opening up such a space might re-introduce oxygen and cause things to go from very bad to oh so much worse.
For those interested in this sort of thing I can highly recommend the videos made by Sal Mercagliano of the Youtube channel "Whats going on with shipping" about Ro-Ro fires, including his most recent video on this very ship fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFhhvr_afws
Another good one: A tale of two ship fires: https://youtu.be/pFyA6dhYIX8
A lithium battery develops internal structures that short the cells when overcharged or over-discharged.
Then, to quote a manufacturer's datasheet, "Venting with flame can occur". My absolute favourite dry wording of a hazard.
You have to charge them carefully too, using specialized chargers that can balance the charge across cells and know when to shut down.
You can't apply lead-acid thinking to these batteries.
But what are the chances of a fault that can cause a fire based on various charge levels? My instinct would be that the lower the charge, the less likely a faulty battery is to spontaneously combust, but happy to be corrected. My only real knowledge is from a Youtuber who demonstrated hammered a nail through various laptop batteries at various levels of charge. I would assume that the cell packing and density in an EV might mean heat well inside the mass might increase more even from a very low charged battery where a laptop battery will only have a single layer of cells.
For catastrophic damage it's basically "The more charge, the more energetic the breakdown and conflegration. However, when it comes to spontaneous/auto-immolation through thermal runaway as caused by cell damage it can occur due to either overcharging (which is likely to be VERY energetic and fast developing) or through over-charging followed by over-discharging causing dendrite growth, thus creating an internal short. So an over discharged cell is less likely to go from "perfectly fine to explosively on fire" in seconds, but can take hours or days to heat up and reach the tipping point of going from "hot but contained" to "obviously on fire". At that point the physics of (lithium-)metal fires takes over and the charge level of the cell matters a whole lot less.
"My only real knowledge is from a Youtuber who demonstrated hammered a nail through various laptop batteries at various levels of charge."
The thing that lead to GM replacing all of the packs in early Bolts was that LG had a manufacturing defect in the cells. Every so often, a separator/insulator in a cell would have it's corner folded over and could lead to a short over time. To scan every cell in a pack would be so labor intensive that it made more sense to supply new packs and scrap the old ones. Of course, the production line was modified to prevent the problem from happening again and more checks were put in to catch it if it did. It was a very low rate of occurrence so finding the issue was a chore.
The danger of lithium batteries comes from chemicals inside those batteries that create violent combustion when they meet. This is independent of the charge.
It just need a tiny leakage inside the cells to start a catastrophe.
Lovely to see lady shaves on wheels get hot :).
"The ship is now likely to continue burning until specialized fire-fighting crews arrive and attempt to halt the blaze."
This is Diplospeak for "We'll talk about it for a while, until it's to late to actually do anything about it, and declare 'unfortunately it's to late to take any effective action'." Then let the ship and cargo have a quiet burial at sea.
From the reports I've seen, there was no confirmation of how the fire started.
It seems odd that with so many EV's having been built thus far that spontaneous ignition of a brand new battery pack is likely to happen. I'm not saying it can't happen, but the odds have been going down very quickly.
This is a phoney story, how do we know? Well, the EV lobby group recently proved that gas cars are 600x more likely to catch on fire than any EV. As a matter of fact, they also proved there have only ever been 52 EV fires, ever.
I’m confident this fake journalism will soon be debunked!
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/mythbusting-evs/mythbusting-world-evs-are-electric-cars-susceptible-catching-fire
That was also a fake story as the survey took no account of the effect of the greater age/mileage range of the petrol and diesel engined cars compared with the EVs, and did not factor in the likely lower standards of maintenance on the older ICE vehicles which were either DIY maintained or just not maintained apart from getting through a mandatory safety inspection (which many of them would have probably failed). EVs in that survey would all have been younger and probably dealer maintained. It does make a difference.
When you are getting down to incidences that are measured in hundredths of a percent, the difference in the incidence of fires in on sort of vehicle versus another are pretty irrelevant anyway.
Simple fact is that vehicles catching fire is pretty rare whichever way you look at the figures. EV fires are only a big issue because of the intensity and longevity of a battery fire, and the difficulty of extinguishing it compared to carbon fuel fires.
Chinese EVs almost all use LiFePO4 which _doesn't_ burn without extreme provokation
There was a brief period when NMC was used because of Chinese government subsidies favouring longer range but when that was axed the makers all pivoted back to LiFePO4 and have been using it almost exclusively for the last 4-5 years
More information is needed about these cars - especially given that the USA market for Chinese EVs is tiny thanks to massive import taxes (tariffs) and the fact that most havn't been homologated for the DOT market, so can't be sold at all (USA is the only country which insists on DOT. Canada and Mexico regard UN(LHD) as acceptable)
LiFePO4 doesn't burn worse with salt water either
These ships and their fire containment systems are simply not fit for purpose for transporting electric vehicles (or any vehicle with a lithium battery).
They either need to build new purpose-built ships, or retro-fit the ships properly for this purpose. By my reckoning thats 3 or 4 car carrying ships that have completely burnt out in the past couple of years.
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