A gasoline fire can be put out with about a thousand gallons of water. A lithium battery in an electric car can take 3,000-5,000 gallons of water to put out. There have been cases of wrecked Teslas reigniting at scrap yards weeks after they were destroyed.
they gotta start taking the batteries out of them before scrapping them, probably with mandatory recycling. also hot take all cars should have a public transit and protected bike lane tax applied to them
That’s kinda true, in a sense that all batteries use a chemical reaction to generate electricity and a damaged battery can short and thus ignite arbitrarily. But there’s lithium-based batteries like LiFePo₄ that burn significantly less intensely if at all; and there’s lab-only chemistries that are non-flammable. So it’s not really because of the lithium specifically that they burn so well.
You know what doesn’t leak gas from fuel injectors onto hot engine surfaces?
EVs. Just saying.
And yes, I know, you’ll show me videos of piece of shit Teslas catching fire, as if that makes such problems equal to something like this.
Battery fires are significantly worse than combustion engine fires, that’s not unique to Teslas. I like EVs but let’s not pretend they’re fireproof.
They’re also much less frequent.
Nobody is pretending they’re fireproof.
Ba dum dum tshh
A gasoline fire can be put out with about a thousand gallons of water. A lithium battery in an electric car can take 3,000-5,000 gallons of water to put out. There have been cases of wrecked Teslas reigniting at scrap yards weeks after they were destroyed.
they gotta start taking the batteries out of them before scrapping them, probably with mandatory recycling. also hot take all cars should have a public transit and protected bike lane tax applied to them
You’d think we’d have a better solution for extinguishing this by now. Solid state batteries can’t get here fast enough.
The same thing that makes lithium good for batteries also makes it good for burning for days at a time and reigniting randomly
That’s kinda true, in a sense that all batteries use a chemical reaction to generate electricity and a damaged battery can short and thus ignite arbitrarily. But there’s lithium-based batteries like LiFePo₄ that burn significantly less intensely if at all; and there’s lab-only chemistries that are non-flammable. So it’s not really because of the lithium specifically that they burn so well.
If EV fires take 3-5x as much water to put out, but ICE vehicles catch fire 30x more often as EVs, is that really so bad?
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Teslas are a bad example anyway.
EVs are definitely the way to go here… just not a fucking tesla.
Unless salt water gets to them