The amount of lethal ice car fires is way higher than the amount of battery fires. Both in absolute and relative terms.
Not surprising of course that vehicles carrying large amounts of combustable fluids sometimes combust. Apparently it's one of the most common reasons for calling in fire trucks. People die in ice car fires too. If you genuinely worry about vehicle fires rather than spreading alarmist nonsense, you might want to rethink where you park your ice car. Especially older ones with fuel leaks, cooling problems, etc. More a question of when than if these things start breaking.
The relative safety of batteries to dirty, dangerous, inefficient, etc. ice cars is actually a strong argument for them. How is there no outrage against ice vehicle fires killing people on a regular basis? It happens so often that it isn't even news when it happens.
And of course the point of solid state batteries is none or at least a lot less flammable electrolytes.
> How is there no outrage against ice vehicle fires killing people on a regular basis?
This ignores the fact that there is a genuinely novel risk with Lithium-Ion batteries, which is that they contain large amounts of "stranded energy" which can trigger new fires. See the linked video above for examples of car fires being extinguished, only to have the car then taken to a tow yard where the battery spontaneously started another fire 5 days later due to the massive amount of energy in a non-discoverable state and the very unstable nature of it. With a gas tank, you at least have a reliable way to drain it, and it's not so volatile as to just spark up by itself. Given the current situation, I wouldn't be surprised to see tow companies that refuse to accept EVs due to the unpredictable nature of them in wrecked form.
With a gas tank, if it's on fire and you are close enough to drain it, I'd advise you to run like hell. That's how people die in ice fires: they are not quick enough moving away from the exploding gallons of fuel. Quite often the problem is that the car is engulfed in flames before the people inside even have a chance to leave the vehicle.
EV fires are more of a slow burn. Annoying if it happens to your car but you are very likely to have lots of opportunity to walk away from it. Just material damage. And again, the incidence rate of this happening is comparatively low to lethal ice car fires. Like by at least an order of magnitude; probably several.
The number of car fires in the US per year is in the hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of people killed. Loads of property destroyed. They catch fire while driving, when parked, when involved in accidents, etc. Occasionally they are set on fire intentionally (which is pretty easy and a popular action movie plot point). Making a petrol car go boom is stupidly easy. Happens all the time.
I would be very surprised to see tow companies decline what will soon be the majority of their business as ice vehicles become like the fossilized dinosaurs they burn: extinct. Towing electrical cars will be the only business they have long term. Of course, it's a free country and somebody else will happily take their business if some tow truck driver gets a bit irrational and anxious. Of course the tow trucks themselves will become electric as well at some point.
A vehicle cargo ship recently sunk off the Azures due to an out of control multiple EV fire. It is quite possible that ocean freight will require fully discharged batteries before transport in future.
An ICE car is a known risk. People know where the fire prone parts are, many carry extinguishers ( small, but still), and fire departments know how to quell such fires.
A Li-Ion fire cannot be stopped once it starts, it has to burn to the end. Recently there was a string of electric bus fires in Paris, and having unstoppable fires with thick black clouds in a dense urban city is not great. Solutions need to be found because it can become a real problem.
And yet, hundreds of people die in ICE vehicle fires and you just shrug it off as "such is life". How can you be worried about one thing and shrug off the other? The solution to that major risk is everybody switching to EVs. You'd save hundreds of lives that way. Every year.
The risk profile of a EV fire is mainly damaged property. You get to walk away from an EV fire almost every time because unlike petrol fires, such fires are not explosive. The random incident you mentioned (again, hundreds of thousands of ICE car fires in the US, every year) is a good example. This was a vehicle that burned for days on end. Super annoying but sounds more like it was smouldering and people probably got to walk away and watch from a safe distance. Petrol burns up quite quickly once it gets going. Extinguishing a petrol fire is not a thing. Mostly it's gone by the time the fire trucks get to the scene.
Extinguishing an EV fire is like every other fire, take oxygen out of the equation and cool the situation to below the point where it stops burning. The main challenge with batteries is that a shorted battery might heat up again to the point where it starts burning. Annoying but something fire men can be trained to deal with. A lot less dramatic than "unstoppable" fires of course. Most EV fires are complete non events. No drama with explosions. No casualties. A thing burned/smouldered, firemen showed up and took care of it, end of story. And they are rare to begin with.
One of the things I'm noisy about is mechanical door locks in BEVs. A thermal runaway event in an EV is equivalent to immediate arc welding temperatures where a gasoline fire burns a great deal cooler and unless the fuel tank gets super heated there is time to get out. In disasters like the Houston doctor tragedy...
...Having electric door locks that no longer work is catastrophic in these types of situations. A great deal more needs to be done on BEVs to create better fire walls and battery protection if they ever become mainstream transport.
I posted the link to the spectacular exploding Paris bus earlier. Here it is again.
I gotta say, electric door opening is one of the big reasons I'll never own a Tesla. In an emergency, you can't waste time trying to remember where to find and how to use the mechanical override.
As a side note, how many Tesla owners here train their passengers on how to get out in an emergency before giving them a ride?
@jillesvangurp unfortunately your comment is typical of the lack of understanding around fire risk in vehicles. Gasoline vapor burns relatively cool in comparison to a trapped energy runaway thermal battery event. A fully charged battery contains an immense amount of trapped energy which once compromised has to escape. Gasoline doesn't burn unless super heated, while diesel doesn't catch fire at all which is one of the many reasons it is used in commercial vehicles.
The NFSA video I linked to goes into BEV realities in some detail.
Tell that to the hundreds of people that die in ice car vehicle fires every year. It's not a minor risk if hundreds of people die. Versus almost none in EV related fires.
The reality is that people die every day in ice vehicle fires (petrol and diesel). It's not a hypothetical thing where you get to chin stroke and muse about the risks of petrol or diesel catching fire. It's happening. Every day. It's one of the most common reasons the fire trucks have to go somewhere actually.
A combustion engine is a wonderful thing where things get compressed, heated, etc. intentionally in order to combust the fuel. Diesel has a higher ignition temperature. That's all. The famous let's throw a match into the fuel works less well and is indeed a nice party trick. But it burns just fine once it gets going. Happens all the time. Just google for truck and bus fires.
The reality with EV fires is that:
1) they are rare compared to ice car vehicle fires (it's not even close; think orders of magnitude)
2) they burn quite slowly instead of explosively.
3) most of the incidents don't involve casualties and mainly involve property damage instead
Luckily the other big benefit of solid-state batteries is they don't tend to catch fire (even when physically destructed). The flammable part of lithium-ion batteries is usually the liquid electrolyte, but solid-state batteries don't have a liquid electrolyte.
I think the idea is that the state batteries are less prone to fires during charging and can therefore be charged faster. Not sure if that makes any difference if the damage is from impact i.e. car crash.
'short-circuited all-solid-state batteries can reach temperatures significantly higher than conventional Li-ion, which could lead to fire through flammable packaging and/or nearby materials.'
NFPA: Lithium-Ion Battery Fires in Electric Vehicles - Safety Risks to Emergency Responders
https://youtu.be/J6eS6JzBn0k
As battery tech slowly improves and more batteries are put in service this is going to become an ever more urgent issue.
https://insideevs.com/news/583324/paris-suspends-149-bollore...