Electric Cars

[AD1184]

I thought I would start a thread dedicated to all the many joys of the electric car revolution, not just those stories specifically related to Tesla and Elon Musk.

There's quite a big story in the national news here in England:

A multi-storey car park has collapsed after a fire at Luton Airport in England (ignore the airport's relatively recent re-branding itself as "London Luton Airport", Luton is nowhere near London).

Is this the car that started the London Luton car park fire?

Fire crews spent some 12 hours battling the inferno at the airport's £20million Terminal Car Park 2 after the multi-storey was engulfed by flames and caved in just before 9pm last night.

www.dailymail.co.uk

What's interesting about this is that it was an internal combustion-engined Range Rover that apparently caught fire first, but the fire got completely out of control once it spread to neighbouring electric vehicles. After a few fires on car transporter ships and this, we can now expect this sort of thing to become a fairly regular occurrence as electric car fires take down more and more structures.

Incidents where an electric car spontaneously catches fire are happening quite regularly. Here are some more British stories from this month alone where an electric car has caught fire spontaneously.

Family's electric car catches fire and sets their house ablaze

The Hensbys were woken by strangers driving by after their home near St Austell, Cornwall became engulfed with flames as a a result of their electric car catching fire in the middle of the night on Monday.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Car bursts into flames as black smoke rises from the burning wreckage

This is the moment as a car spontaneously bursts into flames at 7pm on Saturday, as black smoke rises from the wreckage on Abbeville Road in Clapham Common.

www.dailymail.co.uk

At the beginning of the month, 21 people were killed in Italy when a bus they were travelling on caught fire after a crash.

Battery technology in the crashed Venice bus made it less prone to...

MILAN (AP) - Italy´s transport minister is questioning the spread of electric vehicle technology following the fiery crash of a fully electric shuttle bus...

www.dailymail.co.uk

Internal combustion engined cars are quite capable of catching fire, as they use combustible fuel, and a mishap such as a fuel leak in the engine bay can cause a fire. However, typically the car has to be either running, or very recently running, for a fire to take place. Electric cars have a propensity to catch fire while sitting still, or while charging (which can be for significant proportion of its life). Furthermore, when an electric car catches fire, the results are typically much more devastating. Furthermore, there is a much greater propensity for electric car fires to spread between neighbouring parked electric vehicles (such as in the Luton parking structure incident above, or on at least two car transporter ships that have been lost at sea in recent years).

An electric car fire cannot typically be put out by the fire brigade, whereas an ICE car fire can. There are documented events where firemen have expended tens of thousands of gallons of water over hours onto single burning electric vehicles before the fires have gone out. Some official figures from manufacturers quote a typical water requirement to extinguish an electric vehicle fire, but with the observed quantities expended fighting real fires, one questions whether the water played a role in extinguishing the fires at all, or whether the fires were self-limiting by having expended all fuel available to them.

 

[nivek]

This is a serious issue, these are chemical fires and water will not extinguish a chemical fire efficiently at all...Dry chemical extinguishers however, are extremely effective at putting out these type fires...Dry chemical extinguishers work by coating the fuel with a thin layer of dust, thereby separating the fuel from the oxygen in the air,this dry powder also interrupts the chemical reaction of the fire...Dumping hundreds or thousands of gallons of water on a chemical fire may eventually extinguish the fire, but not after huge losses because of the fire itself not going out promptly and the damage caused by the amount of water used...

...

 

[nivek]

Porsche is recalling many of their electric cars due to a high risk of the vehicles combusting...

...

Hundreds of high-end electric cars recalled due to battery fire risk​

Hundreds of high-end electric sports cars have been recalled in Australia due a problem with battery protection that could lead to a high-voltage fire. More than 230 Porsche Taycan electric vehicles are subject to the warning, issued on Tuesday, that affects all variants of the model.

The recall comes weeks after two significant electric vehicle battery fires in Australia, and following a recall issued for an Alfa Romeo hybrid SUV that also raised battery safety questions. The latest recall affects Porsche Taycan vehicles from 2022 and 2023, with the federal transport department warning a fault could see water enter its battery.

“Due to a manufacturing issue, there is a possibility of insufficient sealing between the high-voltage battery casing and battery cover,” the recall said. “If a sufficient amount of moisture enters the high voltage battery, arcing can occur which increases the risk of fire causing injury or death to vehicle occupants, other road users or bystanders.”

Vehicle owners are urged to contact Porsche to organise an inspection and potential repair of their car. The Porsche Taycan is the manufacturer’s first electric vehicle and one of the most expensive on the Australian market, with the price of affected models starting at $132,550 and reaching $363,800.

The fire warning follows a significant fire in Sydney in September, in which a damaged lithium-ion battery removed from an electric car caught fire in an airport holding yard and destroyed four nearby vehicles.

Firefighters were also called to extinguish a blaze in the NSW Southern Highlights in September after the battery in a Tesla Model 3 electric car was damaged by debris that fell from a truck. No one was injured in the accident.

Despite the fires, data from Australian research group EV FireSafe found there were fewer than 50 verified electric vehicle fires around the world in the first six months of the year, and the vehicles were significantly less likely to catch fire than petrol or diesel peers. Most electric vehicle fires were caused by a collision or debris, the group found, followed by a battery fault and submersion in liquid.

EV FireSafe chief executive Emma Sutcliffe said unlike e-bike or e-scooter fires that had become more common, electric cars posed a low fire risk. “With cars, they’re subject to so much regulation – they’ve got to be crush-tested, they have to meet so many standards,” she said.

.

 

[Dejan Corovic]

Joy #1:
- if you get into a traffic accident while in an electric car, in addition to any mechanical injuries you might suffer like broken bones, punctured organs etc., you will be burning for 20 minutes, because that for how long electric cars burn. Not all batteries burn at once, but they tend to catch fire one after another.

So, just to rub it in: an accident in an EV means that you will be sitting inside the car, with your limbs broken and unable to move, while burning to a crisp.

Joy #2:
- you will be polluting planet until your car drives over 70,000 km. That's because electric cars require twice the amount of metal that normal petrol car, and to dig up all that metal mining companies need to move lot more dirt, and moving dirt creates lots of pollution. Additionally, electricity that goes into electric car is to a large part produced with "dirty" methods like burning carbon-hydrates and nukes.


Absolutely zero chance I'll by electric car.

 

[nivek]

View: https://twitter.com/StateOfPoland/status/1712173868322902285


.

 

[AD1184]

View: https://twitter.com/StateOfPoland/status/1712173868322902285


.

Is battery manufacturing sustainable, though? It is not obvious that it is, at least not how we currently do it.

 

[Dejan Corovic]

View: https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=828328438783154

 

[Dejan Corovic]

As a number of electric cars increases, number of scenes like the one above are going to increase.

. . . and let me make a prediction. As a number of burning electric cars increases, mainstream media will under-report these cases, for obvious reason that its not politically correct to be against electric cars

 

[nivek]

I post this here because electric cars are part of the Green Net Zero hypocrisy...

The last sentence of this article from the Telegraph in the quote below states; "People need to know the realities of net zero."...

...

The green energy net-zero plan will require a command economy​

And several technological impossibilities, and a massive drop in living standards

The symbols of the large command economies of yesteryear. US and UK green energy net zero plans will require something similar

Imagine the USA in 2050 has a net-zero emissions economy, as President Joe Biden has pledged that it will (the UK is also committed to this). Three very large, interrelated, and multidisciplinary engineering projects will need to have been completed. Transport will have been electrified. Industrial and domestic heat will have been electrified. The electricity sector – generation, transmission and distribution – will have been greatly expanded in order to cope with the first two projects, and will have ceased to use fossil fuels.

I have had a long career in industrial and academic engineering, and recently retired as Professor of Technology in electrical engineering at Cambridge University. I’ve spent some time looking into the feasibility of these ideas, and these are the facts.

At the moment the USA uses on average 7,768 trillion British Thermal Units of energy every month, most of which is supplied by burning fossil fuel either directly for heat or transport, or indirectly to generate electricity.

Because an internal combustion engine converts the energy stored in its fuel into transport motion with an efficiency of about 30 per cent, while electric motors are more than 90 per cent efficient at using energy stored in a battery, we will need to increase the US electricity supply by about 25 per cent to maintain transport in the USA at today’s level. Let’s assume that replacing today’s fossil-powered vehicles and trains with electric ones will cost no more than we would have spent replacing them anyway: it’s not really true but the difference is small compared to the rest of this. I should note however that a small part of today’s transport energy is used for aviation and shipping, which are much harder to electrify than ground transport, but we’ll ignore that for now.

Next we need to electrify all the heat. If this heat was provided by ordinary electric heaters, we would need an extra electrical sector equal to the size of today’s. But if we mostly use air-source and ground-source heat pumps, and assume a coefficient of performance of 3:1 – optimistic, but not wildly unreasonable – then we only need new grid capacity equivalent to 35 per cent of the size of the present grid for the heat task.

So far, the grid in 2050 will need to be more than 60 per cent bigger than its present size. We also need to work on the buildings. US building stock is made up of nearly 150 million housing units, commercial and industrial buildings, with an estimated floor space of 367 billion square feet. Some of this is well insulated, much of it is not. All of it would need to be, for our heat pumps to work at the efficiencies we need them to. Based on a UK pilot retrofit programme the national scale cost for this is $1 trillion per 15 million population. The figure in the USA could therefore be about $20 trillion. It might be as high as $35 trillion.

We should note here that as with transport, some specialist types of heating cannot at the moment be done electrically, for instance in primary steel production. These will involve extra costs if net zero is to be reached, but we’ll ignore that for now, even though we’re going to need an awful lot of steel.

Now let’s get the power grid decarbonised and make it 60 per cent bigger and more powerful. Taken together, the US electrical grid has been called the largest machine in the world: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution ones. We will need to add a further 120,000 miles of transmission line. This will cost on the order of $0.6 trillion, based on US cost data.

The 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines will have to be upgraded to carry much higher currents. Most houses in the USA have a main circuit-breaker panel that allows between 100 and 200 amps (A) current into the house, although some new ones are rated at 300A. The 100A standard was set nearly a century ago, when the electric kettle was the largest single appliance. In a modern all-electric home, some of the new appliances draw rather higher currents: ground-source heat pumps may draw 85A on start-up, radiant hobs when starting up draw 37A, fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 46A, and even slow ones may draw 17A, while electric showers draw 46A. The local wiring in streets and local transformers were all sized to the 100-A limit. Most homes will need an upgraded circuit breaker panel and at least some rewiring, and much local wiring and many local substations will need upsizing. The UK costs have been estimated in detail at £1 trillion, which would scale to the order of $6 trillion on a per-capita basis.

As 60 per cent of the current electrical generation is fossil fuelled, we need to close all the fossil stations down and increase the remaining, non-fossil generation capacity four times over. There isn’t much scope for new hydropower, and so far carbon capture doesn’t exist outside fossil fuel production. Using a mixture of wind (onshore $1600/kW, offshore $6500/kW), solar ($1000/kW at the utility level) and nuclear ($6000/kW), the capital cost of this task alone is around $5 trillion, and we have not dealt with the enormous problem of wind and solar being intermittent.

So far we’re up to $32 trillion as the cost of providing the insulated buildings and the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in a net-zero world. Although not all borne by households, this figure is of the order of $260,000 per US household.

Now let’s think about intermittency. Sometimes there is no wind and no sunshine, and our largely renewables-driven grid will have no power. Current hydropower storage would run a net-zero grid in the USA for a few hours; current battery capacity could do so for a few minutes. Net-zero advocates often suggest simply building huge amounts of battery storage, but the costs of this are colossal: 80 times as much as the power plants, hundreds of trillions of dollars. And indeed this is simply fantasy as the necessary minerals are not available in anything like the required amounts. If prices climbed, more reserves would become economic – but the prices are already impossibly high.

Straight away, we can see that a net-zero grid with a large proportion of renewables simply cannot be built. But for now let’s just ignore the storage problem and look at some more numbers.

The UK engineering firm Atkins estimates that a $1-billion project in the electrical sector over 30 years needs 24 or more professional, graduate engineers and 100 or more skilled tradespeople for the whole period. Scaling up these figures for the $12 trillion of electricity sector projects just described, we will need 300,000 professional electrical engineers and 1.2 million skilled tradespeople, full time, for the 30 years to 2050 on just this part of the net-zero project. Based on the budget, we might expect the buildings retrofit sector to need a similar workforce of roughly three million people. This is a combined workforce roughly the size of the entire existing construction sector.

Now let’s think about materials. A 600-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) needs 300 tonnes of high-performance steels. We would need 360 5-MW wind turbines, each running at an optimistic average 33 per cent efficiency (and a major energy storage facility alongside which we are just ignoring as it would be impossibly expensive) to achieve the same continuous 600-MW supply. In fact, since the life of wind turbines at 25 years is less than half that of CCGT turbines, we would actually need more than 720 of them.

The mass of the nacelle (the turbine at the top of the tower) for a 5-MW wind turbine is comparable to that of a CCGT. Furthermore, the mass of concrete in the plinth of a single CCGT is comparable to the mass of concrete for the foundations of each individual onshore wind turbine, and much smaller than the concrete and ballast for each offshore one. We are going to need enormous amounts of high-energy materials such as steel and concrete: something like a thousand times as much as we need to build CCGT or nuclear powerplants, and renewed more frequently. This vast requirement is probably going to affect prices, both of materials and energy – and not in a good way – but for now we’ll just assume costs remain at something like current levels.

So we can see that the infrastructure parts of the net-zero project which are theoretically possible would cost comfortably in excess of $35 trillion and would require a dedicated and highly skilled workforce comparable to that of the construction sector as well as enormous amounts of materials. Net zero would also require several things which today are completely impossible: scalable non-fossil energy storage, very high temperature electrical industrial processes, serious electrical aviation and shipping. There would also be the matter of decarbonising agriculture. These things, if they can even be achieved, would multiply the cost at least several times over, to more than $100 trillion.

So the real cost of net-zero, or more likely of trying and failing to achieve it, would be similar to – or even more than – total projected US government spending out to 2050. There is no likelihood of that amount of money being diverted from other purposes under anything resembling normal market economics and standards of living.

The idea that net zero can be achieved on the current timelines by any means short of a command economy combined with a drastic decline in standards of living – and several unlikely technological miracles – is a blatant falsehood. The silence of the National Academies and the professional science and engineering bodies about these big picture engineering realities is despicable.

People need to know the realities of net zero.

.

 

[Dejan Corovic]

I thought I would start a thread dedicated to all the many joys of the electric car revolution, not just those stories specifically related to Tesla and Elon Musk.

There's quite a big story in the national news here in England:

A multi-storey car park has collapsed after a fire at Luton Airport in England (ignore the airport's relatively recent re-branding itself as "London Luton Airport", Luton is nowhere near London).

Is this the car that started the London Luton car park fire?

Fire crews spent some 12 hours battling the inferno at the airport's £20million Terminal Car Park 2 after the multi-storey was engulfed by flames and caved in just before 9pm last night.

www.dailymail.co.uk

What's interesting about this is that it was an internal combustion-engined Range Rover that apparently caught fire first, but the fire got completely out of control once it spread to neighbouring electric vehicles. After a few fires on car transporter ships and this, we can now expect this sort of thing to become a fairly regular occurrence as electric car fires take down more and more structures.

Incidents where an electric car spontaneously catches fire are happening quite regularly. Here are some more British stories from this month alone where an electric car has caught fire spontaneously.

Family's electric car catches fire and sets their house ablaze

The Hensbys were woken by strangers driving by after their home near St Austell, Cornwall became engulfed with flames as a a result of their electric car catching fire in the middle of the night on Monday.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Car bursts into flames as black smoke rises from the burning wreckage

This is the moment as a car spontaneously bursts into flames at 7pm on Saturday, as black smoke rises from the wreckage on Abbeville Road in Clapham Common.

www.dailymail.co.uk

At the beginning of the month, 21 people were killed in Italy when a bus they were travelling on caught fire after a crash.

Battery technology in the crashed Venice bus made it less prone to...

MILAN (AP) - Italy´s transport minister is questioning the spread of electric vehicle technology following the fiery crash of a fully electric shuttle bus...

www.dailymail.co.uk

Internal combustion engined cars are quite capable of catching fire, as they use combustible fuel, and a mishap such as a fuel leak in the engine bay can cause a fire. However, typically the car has to be either running, or very recently running, for a fire to take place. Electric cars have a propensity to catch fire while sitting still, or while charging (which can be for significant proportion of its life). Furthermore, when an electric car catches fire, the results are typically much more devastating. Furthermore, there is a much greater propensity for electric car fires to spread between neighbouring parked electric vehicles (such as in the Luton parking structure incident above, or on at least two car transporter ships that have been lost at sea in recent years).

An electric car fire cannot typically be put out by the fire brigade, whereas an ICE car fire can. There are documented events where firemen have expended tens of thousands of gallons of water over hours onto single burning electric vehicles before the fires have gone out. Some official figures from manufacturers quote a typical water requirement to extinguish an electric vehicle fire, but with the observed quantities expended fighting real fires, one questions whether the water played a role in extinguishing the fires at all, or whether the fires were self-limiting by having expended all fuel available to them.

That's a steel frame, without any fire protection. I don't even know if that's legal.

 

[pigfarmer]

 

[pigfarmer]

meanwhile, it's ancestor from 53 years past is still running fine doing it's job and not bursting into flames. I guess we'll call this progress

 

[Dejan Corovic]

Its pity, because EVs are generally a good thing.

There is no friction inside electric motors so EVs last forever. I read about taxi cab company in L.A. that runs completely on Teslas because they need almost zero maintenance and never wear out.

 

[pigfarmer]

Its pity, because EVs are generally a good thing.

There is no friction inside electric motors so EVs last forever. I read about taxi cab company in L.A. that runs completely on Teslas because they need almost zero maintenance and never wear out.

Agreed. an ICE vehicle has a number of separate systems under pressure that have to be kept that way to work. Engine oil, antifreeze, power steering, fuel, brakes. About the only things I can think of in common might be tires and air conditioning. It makes total sense, just not shoved up our noses instantly - that makes no sense to me.

 

[AD1184]

Following the Luton Airport car park fire mentioned in the original post, a report to British government ministers has suggested that car parking spaces may need to be enlarged for added fire safety in the age of the electric car:

Burning electric cars must be dunked in baths of water to stop fires spreading​

Battery-powered vehicles pose a medley of risks in indoor car parks, ministers told

Car park spaces should become wider and burning electric cars dunked in baths of water, under proposed government guidelines to prevent battery fires spreading out of control.

Car parking spaces will have to be bigger because of electric car fires

1960s-era fire safety laws could be inadequate to tackle risks from EV batteries, says report

www.telegraph.co.uk

https://archive.ph/rSn9u

This British op-ed tries to suggest that electric cars are not a greater fire hazard. (While simultaneously conceding that they are? I can't get my head around it.)

Don’t blame electric vehicles for the Luton airport fire

As soon as the parking lot went up in smoke, social media was aglow with conspiracy theories blaming combustible electric batteries. Sean O’Grady douses the flames of EV hysteria…

www.independent.co.uk

https://archive.ph/TBWOO

In other news, Swedish startup Volta Trucks has filed for bankruptcy, due to battery supply issues.

Electric truck maker Volta Trucks files for bankruptcy in Sweden

Electric truck maker Volta Trucks said on Tuesday it has decided to file for bankruptcy proceedings in Sweden, after difficulties at suppliers made it hard for the startup to raise funds.

www.reuters.com

I have seen reports of a downturn in private EV sales.

New car sales 2023: slow private EV uptake builds demand for government incentives | Auto Express

Latest figures for August 2023 show the fleet electric purchases are surging in the UK while private buyers are reluctant to make the switch

www.autoexpress.co.uk

Fleet purchases are surging, because companies get all sorts of financial incentives to buy EVs, but there are many good reasons for private buyers not to buy them until the technology matures significantly. Now all the keen early adopters have got their EV, the rest can learn through word of mouth what a bad idea it is to own an electric car. EV ownership may only get worse before it gets better, as the electricity grid is further strained by the demand for charging and propaganda about them being cheap to run will no longer be viable once the government can no longer afford for EVs to be subsidized by ICE car owners.

 

[pigfarmer]

Fleet purchases are surging

I've recently noticed a surge of these things. One day there are none, the next day you can't throw a cat without hitting one.

Rivian EV Vans Getting Easier to Spot — Amazon Has 1000 on U.S. Roads

 

[AD1184]

Another fire-related headache of electric cars is that when cars are damaged in an accident and written off, insurance companies need to pay for these write-offs to be stored in lots awaiting scrappage (or sometimes re-sale to someone who will attempt to put them back on the road). British government guidelines are suggesting that EVs be stored with a fifty-foot cordon around them for reasons of fire safety. An impact-damaged EV is much more likely to spontaneously combust than one that hasn't been impacted, because the damage could extend to the battery pack, and loss of structural integrity could result in short-circuits occurring within it. You can't just drain the fuel tank like an ICE car.

Two EVs with a fifty foot cordon around each take up as much space as could store 100 ICE write-offs.

Damaged electric cars ‘quarantined’ over fears they will explode

Practice threatens to increase costs for insurance industry by more than £600m

www.telegraph.co.uk

https://archive.ph/qO4na

This US website has noted that Britain is running into EV charging issues, with centralized charging stations being built, to form the equivalent of petrol stations for electric cars, yet there is not enough electrical power for all the chargers. Who would have thought that? Isn't electricity something that comes out of a hole in the wall?

Why The UK Is Running Into EV Charger Issues​

Back in March of 2022, the United Kingdom government announced its intent to gradually phase out fuel-powered automobiles in favor of electric vehicles over the next several years, ultimately culminating in a complete ban on the sale of new fuel-combustion cars effective in 2030. It's a laudable goal to strive toward, especially for an entire country, and indeed, EVs are gradually increasing in popularity in the UK as a result. However, the beginning of the all-EV shift has brought with it some major concerns.

Why The UK Is Running Into EV Charger Issues - SlashGear

The United Kingdom seeks to ban the sale of new gas-powered automobiles by 2030, which is a laudable goal, but its running into a small problem.

www.slashgear.com

The article, and the business owner quoted in it, seem to be placing the blame for the situation at the foot of the power companies for not having sufficient 'production targets'. However, I am not sure the problem is so simple as that. Where is this excess capacity supposed to come from? Out of thin air? More power means more electrical generators, and pretty much the only things in this category that are allowed to be built are wind turbines and solar farms, neither of which can reliably generate electricity, nor can they store what they generate in any meaningful quantity, except at huge storage costs. Not to mention that the wind energy industry in this country is near collapse, thanks to input costs doubling with the inflationary crisis. At the end of this decade, five of six of Britain's nuclear power plants are due to have been decommissioned, with only one replacement power plant being constructed, behind schedule, and currently due to come online in 2028.

 

[AD1184]

You've heard of range anxiety, but what about charge rage? Where you become apoplectic when you miss your go at the forty-odd minute "fast charge" at the charging station.

Motorway service stations hiring staff to police surging levels of EV ‘charge rage’​

Moto hires staff to manage queues and prevent conflicts over limited charging points

Britain’s biggest motorway service station provider has brought in marshals to police “charge rage” among electric vehicle drivers battling for access to plug-in points.
Moto chief executive Ken McMeikan warned the UK’s motorway service stations are facing growing “public disorder” due to a lack of grid connections preventing him from installing enough car chargers to meet the surge in demand.

Motorway service stations hiring staff to police surging levels of EV ‘charge rage’

Moto hires staff to manage queues and prevent conflicts over limited charging points

www.telegraph.co.uk

https://archive.ph/i2gK7

 

[Dejan Corovic]

Serious problems with EVs clearly show what happens when political correctness and cherry picked information overtake reason.

Now governments will start tightening up legislation around EV safety, which will make EVs much less desirable, economical and practical. On the end, car manufacturers who were lured in to make huge investment into new production lines will have take in huge losses, because tightening of safety rules will reduce number of EV sales.

 

[pigfarmer]

what happens when political correctness and cherry picked information overtake reason

Oh God, doesn't that describe everything that's happened in the last couple of years?