California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.
In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an aircraft to drop fire retardant on the “immediate area” of the electric truck as a precautionary measure, the agency said in a preliminary report.
Firefighters said previously that the battery reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 Celsius) while it was in flames.
The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash along Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it would look into fire risks posed by the truck’s large lithium-ion battery.
Maybe don’t use water to put out a fire that can’t be put out with water. Aren’t these supposed to be professionals?
For as much as people want their Musky circlejerks. This is really just a problem with the switch the EVs that people aren’t willing to accept.
There is no way to really stop an EV battery fire.
The batteries in these cars are made up of several cells, packed into a watertight, fire resistant box. When just one of those cells goes it’s over. It can create a chemical reaction that can ignite the cells without the need for oxygen, pure heat will set them off.
The only real way of dealing with them is to let them burn themselves out, and even after that they aren’t safe and could reignite.
The way to stop them is solid state batteries
Or maybe just good guys with Li-ion batteries.
What we really need is POCKET SAND!
It’s not the electrolyte that’s the issue, it’s the lithium. Solid electrolyte batteries wont make any difference. Unless by solid state you mean, no chemical reaction and we just switch to electrostatic cells, but that is nowhere near viable.
I had been told that solid state batteries are far more stable and less likely to have thermal runaway. Is that just bullshit?
It’s less likely, but if they do get lit on fire then you still have a class D fire on your hands. Unfortunately with car accidents and that much energy being stored in one place, fires are going to happen.
Supposedly there are non lithium solid state batteries, but I’m not aware of any commonly available for EVs
You’ll take my spinning platter batteries from my cold, dead hands
that sounds great, where can I buy one?
Let me know if you find out
honestly, i don’t expect an answer. New battery tech gets announced every year, claiming to revilutionize energy storage. None have made it to market in any meaningful way, if at all. Lithium batteries hit the sweet spot of price to performance, and nothing else can compete. Looking forward to the day that changes.
So, you actually can buy solid state batteries now at least as external battery packs to charge phones and whatnot, but they’re still lithium based,
Flooding the batteries with water is the best way to put out a lithium-ion battery fire.
Isn’t oxygen deprivation (usually through burying) a much faster method?
Maybe for smaller things, a regular car maybe.
But by the time a suitable digging machine arrives on scene and digs a big enough hole for a semi it’d probably be faster to flood it with water. Not to mention what might be underneath the ground, so they’d also have to spend time determining if there’s any gas lines or whatever before they dig so they don’t make a much bigger problem
Do you volunteer your backyard for such burials?
Sure.
Sure you would, now. It’s easy to be virtuous when the only things at stake are fake internet points.
I’d love to see you show the same heroism when an excavator in fire department livery comes to your house, rips up your front lawn, damages your water line and underground cables, potentially damages your basement’s walls, and carries off two cubic metres of soil to put out somebody else’s vehicle fire somewhat faster than water would. I’m sure you’d feel great about the damage you’d have to get fixed, even if you ignore the cost. Or do you think that fire departments would just buy dumptrucks to haul soil to fires on the off chance that the reporter correctly identifies the involved vehicle as having a lithium battery?
It’s not ideal, but water with fire retardant is the most practical solution.
How many lithium ion battery fires have you put out?
Two.
The best policy is to not puncture batteries, and train others to not do so.
The next best is to know to smother them.
Anyone dealing with batteries would have. It is more common than you think and not just people being keyboard warriors.
AFAB?
all fires are bad…?