Another bad electric car fire...

[ckessel]

I can't wait till they start charging the EV owners for the Hazmat response. I know, wishful thinking.

 

[patrick66]

I can't wait till they start charging the EV owners for the Hazmat response. I know, wishful thinking.

You can bet that's coming. As it should, to be honest.

 

[toolmanmike]

You can bet that's coming. As it should, to be honest.

Someone has to pay for it and it shouldn't be us. Hopefully the insurance companies will charge EV owners accordingly. Those owners are already pissing and moaning about paying more to register and license the EV's. They don't think they should have to pay road use taxes to build and maintain the streets and highways they also drive on. Duh!

 

[patrick66]

The gas tax is not applicable to them, so the owners feel they should be able to drive "free" because they are so environmentally "conscious". "Well, Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!" Welcome to Rude Awakening 101, all you lucky EV pilots!

 

[Triplegreen500]

The gas tax is not applicable to them, so the owners feel they should be able to drive "free" because they are so environmentally "conscious". "Well, Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!" Welcome to Rude Awakening 101, all you lucky EV pilots!

The flipside of that is, they want to impose the highway tax on EVERYBODY (yes, in ADDITION to the gas tax)...so they can line their pockets even more.

Do that, eliminate the gas tax...I'd be relatively OK with it, just scale it so I don't pay as much for my 400-lb motorcycle as I do for my 8800-lb Cummins (MD already scales somewhat, with different tag/registration prices based on vehicle class and GVWR).

 

[Scott Engelhardt]

I pulled this off of a google search asking about EV road use taxes.
There are proposals for adding a tax to EV charging stations so that drivers are paying when they fill up, similar in spirit to what is done with gas-powered cars. The problem with that is EV drivers mostly charge their vehicles at home. States would be capturing that tax only when drivers charge up at public charging stations.
I think the dedicated charging at home needs to be on its own meter.

 

[Budnicks]

No thanks
don't want anything to do with any of them

that'll buff right out

run out of charge/power, leaves you stranded
hell;
Just walk to the next station & get a can of electricity
would be the least of the problems

 

[68BabyBlue]

The last two decades of my trucking career, I hauled in and out of two recycling plants that reclaimed heavy metals, much of it from batteries. A decade back, the western location got acquired by a new corporate owner. Management made the decision to shut down the on site cadmium smelter. After that, pure cadmium went straight to the captured furnace dust that I loaded in my tanker. I knew it was a bad deal when the production manager presented me with a full face respirator, and told me I'd wear it if I valued my internal organs.

Later, the eastern plant had to stop receiving the stuff, when they got audited during a chapter 11 bankruptcy, and were found to be out of compliance with their permits, along with increased cadmium levels in employee blood tests. None of this gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling about anything using batteries on a large scale.

 

[XS22J8R]

It will be interesting if they ever release the details of the car they find out sparked this big fire yesterday. My bet is it was an EV.
More than a dozen vehicles destroyed in Near West Side parking garage fire

 

[Photon440]

Why would you bet it was an EV? Gas cars burn too. I don't know what the stats will end up being for 2022, but in 2020 there were 52 electric vehicle fires in the whole year according to the NTSB. There were also 600 gas car fires per day in the same year (because there are a lot more ICE cars in total). Going by fires per 100,000 vehicles, a gas car is five times more likely to catch fire.
It would get boring if every gas car fire was mentioned here.

 

[SatelliteOfLove]

Wonder what the carbon footprint of a 1.5 hour lithium battery fire is, one that’s so hot it burns aluminum? And what toxic waste issues do you have disposing of the wreckage?

Asking for a friend.

 

[1 Wild R/T]

On a larger scale

 

[Photon440]

If you think that's bad, you should try to google gas car fire and see if you get any hits.

If the 170 tonnes of coal is accurate, then that windmill will pay back the energy in about four weeks. Unless it's built on the moon or inside a building with no wind, of course.

 

[1STMP]

Why would you bet it was an EV? Gas cars burn too. I don't know what the stats will end up being for 2022, but in 2020 there were 52 electric vehicle fires in the whole year according to the NTSB. There were also 600 gas car fires per day in the same year (because there are a lot more ICE cars in total). Going by fires per 100,000 vehicles, a gas car is five times more likely to catch fire.
It would get boring if every gas car fire was mentioned here.

You need to figure this the other way around,
and compare apples to apples. If EV's are
1, 2, or even 3 percent prevalent, then you
should count only 1, 2, or even 3 percent
of ICE vehicles catching fire. By the way,
most ICE vehicles catch fire after an
accident. (they don't spontaneously combust except on very rare occasions)
How many EV fires are attributed to
being in an accident?
A fair comparison will be when EV's and
ICE vehicles are of equal numbers on
Americas' highways. There'll have to
be 150 million EV's in operation.

 

[Triplegreen500]

And it's HARDER (near impossible) to extinguish a burning EV.

Ask a first responder - they sit back, contain, and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

 

[AR67GTX]

I believe I read a report from Europe that it took at least 10 times the amount of water to control an EV fire, along with related manpower, pollution/contaminate clean up. So I guess a single EV fire is equivalent to 10 ICE fires to start with. And NTSB statistics? Figures lie and liars figure. I wouldn’t believe anything published by our Government anymore and I’ll leave it at that w/o further elaboration. I wonder how many diesel buses catch fire every year? Forget it, someone will probably quote a Government statistic and they are here just to help us.

 

[bandit67]

News today stated Ga. is about to received $51 million in federal grant money to set up battery powered school buses thru out the state....I don't know anyone thrilled to hear this. I bet other states are also having this crammed down on them.

 

[68BabyBlue]

I can't comment on fires in diesel buses, but I have first hand knowledge of diesel truck fires from my 17 years in management. The fleet I worked for grew from 250 units to 900 during my management tour of duty, running nearly 100 million miles a year at the peak. We had two truck fires during that period, one a horrendous fatality from a side collision rupturing a fuel tank, with sparks then igniting the fuel vapor. The other was the result of driving without releasing the parking brakes, overheated shoes set grease on the hubs on fire, spread to the cab, no fuel combustion. Never had a spontaneous fire of any sort. We had a cargo fire while unloading that destroyed the unit and burned the driver alive, but the flames never ignited the diesel fuel, even after melting the aluminum at the top of the tanks.

 

[Photon440]

You need to figure this the other way around,
and compare apples to apples. If EV's are
1, 2, or even 3 percent prevalent, then you
should count only 1, 2, or even 3 percent
of ICE vehicles catching fire. By the way,
most ICE vehicles catch fire after an
accident. (they don't spontaneously combust except on very rare occasions)
How many EV fires are attributed to
being in an accident?
A fair comparison will be when EV's and
ICE vehicles are of equal numbers on
Americas' highways. There'll have to
be 150 million EV's in operation.

The percentages had been taken into account. Of course there are more fuel powered cars still out there on the road, mine included. The fires were based not on total vehicles, but on percent as you suggested. Yes, electric cars are harder to extinguish, but gas cars are more likely to catch fire in a bad accident. So to equalize the numbers, out of 100,000 electric cars there were 25 fires. And out of 100,000 gas cars there were 1,530 fires based on NTSB and Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

 

[Triplegreen500]

...and those areas who have adopted them, are phasing (have phased) them out...example:

Philadelphia's electric bus fleet has disappeared