Otherwise known as explosives, rocket fuel, and most kinds of batteries.
Authorities said they used 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames because the vehicle's batteries kept reigniting. At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery.
Where I used to work, they had a machine shop that used to work with magnesium, before my time. Firefighters had a rule if they got a call: don't go in.
Another place I used to hang around during college was a robotics research lab. They had a bunch of 1st or 2nd gen l Li-Poly batteries, in pouch form, to run their little robots. I was told to never use a any of the fire extinguishers hanging on the wall if there was a battery fire. I don't remember the details, but either those particular extinguishers would catalyze the reaction and make the fire worse or they would boil and explode and just spread the fire around to more flammable stuff (maybe including your clothes). Supposedly there was a bucket of sand in case of emergency somewhere to isolate the fire and just let it fizzle out, but I never saw it and it may have been a hypothetical bucket of sand meant to calm nerves rather than a real bucket of sand to use in case of emergency.
They exist. They trade safety for energy-to-weight and energy-to-volume density.
People act like it's evil bogeyman keeping the masses from using electric cars. It's not. It's technology limitations, some of them surmountable given enough money today, but some of them because of hard physics-based theoretical limits.
Having to carry your own oxidizer as opposed to sucking it out of the air is one of those physics-based limits. A system that carries its own oxidizer will always weigh more than one that only needs to carry its own fuel. And it will almost certainly take up more space too. No amount of woke pseudoscience will magic that away.
Again: li-ion batteries do not contain oxidizers. The energy storage mechanism is not a fuel-oxidizer reaction. That would be a fuel cell, not a battery. The energy storage mechanism is the voltage potential difference between a lithium ion intercalated into graphite vs. a lithium ion intercalated into a mixed metal oxide.
Fire in a li-ion battery depends on the type. In any system where energy is stored, there is the potential for creating heat. In a battery, this can be from short-circuiting the anode and cathode, for example. So now you have a hot li-ion battery - the peak temperature depending on the nature of the short and the nature of the cell. Most electrolytes are flammable past an autoignition temperature. At above a given temperature, you can also start altering / reacting your anode and cathode. In high-nickel cells in particular, at high temperatures they can start to evolve free oxygen. The various other metals mixed with them such as cobalt, alumium, and manganese reduce the tendency to evolve free oxygen at high temperatures, but there always is some potential at some temperature.
EV fires are rare. Tesla fires average one per every 205 million miles, vs. 1 per every 19 million miles on average for vehicles in the US - and that's inclusive of earlier, more primitive designs, as well as being inclusive of things that can apply to any vehicle, such as burning due to arson or a house fire. The difference is that ICE fires do not make national news.
From freshmen chemistry I seem to recall that oxidation/reduction reactions are a generic term for two species exchanging electrons along a potential difference.
You stated that li-ion batteries contain "oxidizers". Name the component that you think is an "oxidizer". Do you think graphite is an oxidizer? Do you think mixed metal oxides are oxidizers? Do you think hydrocarbon carbonates are oxidizers?
There are no oxidizers in li-ion batteries.
. Fuel and air don't spontaneously combust because while there's
There are loads of webpages you can find that describe the Li-ion half reaction that is oxidation at the anode:
LiC6 --> Li+ + C6 + e-
That's an oxidation reaction. No oxygens are involved (not a fuel cell), but it's oxidation nonetheless.
More fundamentally, if the battery provides current, where do the electrons that make up that current come from? They come from the anode. Where does the anode get free electrons? From the oxidation reaction.
Considering one of those battery pack jump starters are capable of releasing 5V at 2A as a USB charger, or 12v at 800A to jumpstart a truck, it makes sense that they could release a their stored energy very quickly as heat when uncontrolled. And "release stored energy very quickly as heat" comes within the range of definitions of "explosion" -- which is very deceptive when you're looking at a colorful plastic rectangle with rounded corners, in a convenient faux-leather carrying case.
That was hard to find. Although admittedly the current practice of Tesla owners of deleting or removing all badging could make it a bit difficult to determine which model was on fire.
Around here our fire departments train with various EV dealerships who send trainers and dummy vehicles around. Mostly GM and Nissan because, ya know, Tesla doesn't have dealerships, but the principles are the same for all EVs with capacity higher than a Volt.
Wow, that page is bad. So first the firefighter has to figure out not just which model it is, but which model year too. For the S there is a choice of:
Emergency Response Guide - 2016+ Emergency Response Guide â" Model S Dual Motor â" 2014/2015 Emergency Response Guide â" 2014 Emergency Response Guide â" 2012/2013
The 2016+ one is a 31 page PDF file. The firefighting section is on page 22. Feel like that should be right at the top, but anyway... It says use water. Up to 3,000 gallons may be r
When in doubt, use a powder extinguisher. Anyhoo, then best way to put out an electric car fire, would be with a dump truck of sand, but disposing of the system would still be unresolved, since the moment the sand is shoveled away, it can reignite.
The recommendation is to use water. Lots and lots of water.
The fire hazard from Li-ion batteries is not the lithium, but the electrolyte. Heat - either from external fire or internal short - causes the electrolyte to turn into a vapor, which causes cells to vent that hot, flammable vapor. That's what burns. Use lots of water to keep the batteries cool, which in turn keeps the electrolyte a liquid and inside the cells where it can't burn.
Putting sand on it might be the worst thing you can do, because that wi
Li-ion batteries do not contain oxidizers. The anode is mixed-metal oxides (on higher-energy / nickel-based cells) or iron phosphate (lower energy density cells). The cathode is graphite with some silicon. The electrolyte is mostly simple hydrocarbon carbonates with dissolved lithium salts. Lithium ions (not metal) are intercalated in a mixture of the cathode and anode - discharged = cathode, charged = anode.
Where I used to work, they had a machine shop that used to work with magnesium
I get really angry when I read articles about people still doing these kind of extremely reckless and stupid things. It's must be by extreme chance that they didn't crash into another car full of people or house. Car manufacturers should also have a kill switch for these stupid cruise control gimmicks when there isn't anyone in the seat too.
If you are implying that these guys would not have driven at high speeds and crashed into a tree if the name of the system was simply called any other name you could possible think of, then I simply disagree.
I was one of the adamant supporters of the term "autopilot" when so many called that wording dangerous. I believed, and still do, that autopilot correctly conveyed what the system was capable of. Many people however blamed Tesla in previous crashed because they thought autopilot made it sound like self driving when it wasn't.
Yet now that Tesla is actually calling it "full self driving", all those criticisms seem to have vanished, despite the fact that Tesla had not released a vehicle capable of driving itself, and crucially, Tesla have even admitted that the current generation of vehicles on the road will NEVER be capable of driving themselves without an attentive human driver behind the wheel.
Tesla's marketing department owns these deaths. If the people in the car didn't think it could drive itself, they never would have been in a moving vehicle with nobody at the wheel.
Again, your words imply, without actually stating, that people would not perform stupid stunts if they changed the name. To me, that is silly to an extreme degree. That message also implies that people are so dumb that they don't need to try it out, feel out where it works and where it doesn't, and they just blindly trust the product due to the name. That violates all empirical evidence for me. These accidents are people just not paying attention, because people don't pay attention. People without any
Yet there are plenty of videos of cars from other manufacturers where people turn on the autopilot (whatever it's called in those brands) and then hop into the back seat.
So yes, Tesla is making it sound like more than it is - but morons aren't brand-specific.
If you are implying that these guys would not have driven at high speeds and crashed into a tree if the name of the system was simply called any other name you could possible think of, then I simply disagree.
Quite possibly.
Calling it "full self driving" implies that Tesla thinks it's good enough to take over as a human and it's just the pesky regulators holding it back, and if you think I'm exaggerating Tesla even claims it's safer [futurism.com].
So yeah, I think there's people who will trust the autopilot to drive unsupervised when they wouldn't trust advanced cruise control to do the same.
No, I would not have counted you, and I'm still not. If you would have said that due to the name, you would have just trusted the car to drive and not pay attention regardless of how the car actually handled, then I would have counted you. From the OP, the argument is that if it was named anything else, these accidents would not have happened. I'm still looking for that mysterious dumbass. It's not you.
Plug in the seatbelt and put a backpack with some books on the seat.
I know this because sometimes I put cargo on the passenger seat and if I don't plug the seatbelt in the car nags me because it thinks the backpack is a person and the law says it must warn when people don't have their seatbelts on.
Just like any security or safety mechanism, it is impossible to stop the truly determined. Stopping the idiots who don't understand what they are doing, and the well-intentioned who made a mistake and just triggered it by accident is the best you can really ask for.
Don't know, but I remember a news article many years back, possibly apocryphal, about someone in one of those bus-sized mobile homes setting Cruise Control and then getting up to go get a drink from the fridge.
He was shocked to find out that "cruise control" allowed his vehicle to keep going straight when the road turned....
Cars on self drive should have a common light color and bulb, so the rest of us know no one is home...hit FSD or whatever it is, a blue or green light on the roof pulses slowly....
I really like that idea. Have a colored light mandated for front and rear of vehicles that have any self-driving features.
I wish there were requirements that self-driving abilities had to network with nearby cars, send informative signals to other vehicles via IR or something (I don't know how), etc. Seems like a lot of missed opportunities.
Tesla driver assistance [teslarati.com] could be 10 times safer than humans, but people doing reckless things like this aided and abetted by Tesla using terms like "full self driving" makes it more difficult to introduce safer driver assist technologies.
Yeah, yeah, we get it - you have a big-ass swimming pool.
It's a huge pain in the ass, and expensive if you buy good chemicals and run the pump 24/7 during the season. I actually haven't opened it in a few years.
If you haven't used it in years it means your kids are all grown up or you're not as young as you used to be. Remove the huge pain in the ass and install an outdoor jacuzzi.
Maybe it has some value removing heat from the system and limiting the chance of nearby things catching fire. But for that I'd be more inclined to soak the nearby things.
deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery
I've done IT work in my local firehalls. They all have small libraries of books/manuals about firefighting, including ones specifically dealing with electric cars. I'd expect most firefighters to have a least some training on this, as BEVs are not really new or uncommon anymore.
This is the recommended approach by Tesla officially [1].
The reason is stated in other comments, i.e. battery packs you get both oxidizer and fuel in one pack. Most common ways to extinguish the fire are to separate those two, which apparently does not work when they are already together. Thus, the best way to do this is to remove heat from the equation. and the most reliable way is to add water and wait.
Sometimes 'common sense' does not really work, and it's funny to see that random ppl on/. belie
"USE WATER TO FIGHT A HIGH VOLTAGE BATTERY FIRE. If the battery catches fire, is exposed to high heat, or is generating heat or gases, use large amounts of water to cool the battery. It can take approximately 3,000gallons (11356 liters) of water (applied directly to the battery); establish sufficient water supply."
Li-ion fires are due to thermal runaway. After a crash, some cell separators are likely damaged and they're already shorting internally. The extra current path through the water is relatively minor. The cooling capacity of water is far more significant. The idea is to get the separators to stop melting, at which point the reaction will stop.
The other things firefighters have on hand won't work. Chemical fire extinguishers try to block oxygen from the air, but li-ion fires don't need air. AFFF foam works great for gasoline, but it still conducts electricity, so it has no advantage here. Plain water is better and more plentiful.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Sunday April 18, 2021 @03:59PM (#61287316)
It almost sounds like someone didn't have enough training for their job as a firefighter.
It almost sounds like the firefighters did exactly as what Tesla tells you to do.
USE WATER TO FIGHT A HIGH VOLTAGE BATTERY FIRE. If the battery catches fire, is exposed to high heat, or is generating heat or gases, use large amounts of water to cool the battery. It can take approximately 3,000 gallons (11,356 liters) of water, applied directly to the battery, to fully extinguish and cool down a battery fire; always establish or request an additional water supply. If water is not immediately available, use dry chemicals, CO2, foam, or another typical fire-extinguishing agent to fight the fire until water is available.
Probably nothing. Any data was likely destroyed in the fire, and the cars themselves don't learn. All they can do is sent telemetry back to Tesla when they notice that something went wrong.
"At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery."
If you're wondering "Why didn't Tesla inform fire departments how to put out fires?", me too.
Tesla has been around since 2003. After 18 years, they should have been able to communicate how to put out fires at least through the U.S. Fire Administration, and probably through other means as well.
There are about 30,000 fire departments in the USA. 92% of them are registered with the National Fire Departmen
The high voltage wires in an electric car are orange for a reason. The physical disconnect location is also registered for every vehicle model. I was under the impression that firefighters and similar first responders* are advised to treat an electric vehicle differently. Sounds like a derp derp moment.
*Why is chrome starting to miss correct spelling for so many words lately, responder is right and it keeps getting the red underline.
This is where it happened. [goo.gl] (Fun fact, I used to live a few miles from there, and this is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect to see there.)
The cul-de-sacs are arranged a bit oddly. Rarely do you see them with a densely vegetated island in the middle, so the AI might not have been trained much on this scenario. There's also a long McMansion driveway coming off it at kinda the right position and angle that you'd see at a roundabout - also not a common traffic device in the US. Possibly the computer ID'd it as a roundabout.
This emphasizes the problem with their millions of miles of driver data. It only takes one odd cul-de-sac and it is in a totally new scenario than it has seen before in those miles.
Its very odd that there was no one in the driver's seat. It would take a lot of effort to do that. The car was very heavily damaged by fire and impact. I wonder if its possible someone was driving but their remains were not immediately identifiable.
It has a number of sensors to detect if no one is being attentive and some of them are flat out irritating to legitimate users, but they can all be defeated by idiots. I'm sure these guys thought they were being cool.
There's already a seatbelt sensor, so clearly measures were taken to avert such a shutdown of the car. Tossing a couple 40 lb weights in the driver's seat wouldn't have been difficult either.
That's the problem with idiotproofing: they always build a better idiot:P
As an aside, am I the only one who's shocked that after all this time there's still fire departments that don't know how to put out a battery fire? TL/DR: water, doesn't need to be fast, but lots of it because it needs to be continuous for long periods. You can't put out an individual burning cell, but with application of water you keep other cells cool and thus prevent fire from spreading to them. You don't stop the instant you stop seeing flames; the pack needs to be fully cooled before you stop.
Ironic that this happened right on the day that the Tesla fire data came out [tesla.com] showing a rate of one fire per 205 million miles driven (inclusive of things like arson), compared to 19 million miles for the average vehicle in the US.:P
The salient point missing, it is not a battery but a whole bunch of batteries. So put out the fire in one of the batteries only for heat to melt the innards of another battery and short circuit and then that battery is on fire. A fully charge battery pack of many batteries is much harder to put out than a discharged ones because the electricity stored in a melting battery shorts out and ignites the battery.
The battery pack needs to be redesigned to incorporate intumescent material https://en.wikipedia.org/w [wikipedia.org]
Actually the Tesla will refuse to self drive if your remove your seatbelt so they would have had to jump through some hoops to convince the car to self drive without a driver.
Just 2 weekends ago while taking a normal drive. There was a normal Car that was on fire. Apparently it was in a police chase and that normal ICE based car crashed into some trees and caught on fire. Most cars today you can trick them into driving, by putting them in gear and putting a brick on the petal.
While the Tesla tends to have a lot of extra safety features, I doubt it can stop stupid. They may had put a bag, on the seat, and put something on the petal. Heck they may had messed with the breaks,
To fool the system you just need to hang a weight from the steering wheel, or have the guy in the passenger seat tap the wheel every 30 seconds or so.
As long as Tesla insists on telling people the car can fully drive itself, some people will take them at their word, even if it means fooling the system to do so.
I don't know what happened in this case. The instinct is to assume they're morons trying to pull some Autopilot stunt to boast about on social media, the sort of idiots that Tesla owners despise for making them look bad. But in this case, I have my doubts. The reports are that they backed out of a driveway straight onto Hammock Dunes Place [google.com], went down to the end of the street and straight through the cul-de-sac. There are no lane lines on that street. You cannot activate Autopilot without lane lines.
The reports however is that there was nobody in the driver's seat. So what was going on? Almost wonder if they were trying to climb out through the back. Or maybe some of the reporting describing what happened was wrong? Who knows; I guess we'll find out in time. I hope the data is intact. It'll show if / when there was anyone in each of the seats of the car and when the pedals were pressed. Should be possible to build up a play-by-play.
I see something draped over base of the steering wheel, creating enough torque to prevent the system detecting it for at least a short time, and that blanket over the seat is probably weighted, or hides a sandbag, providing enough weight to trip the seat occupant sensor.
It's hilarious you think that 6 verified Autopilot related deaths in 10 years of data is a lot. Meanwhile 3700 people are killed by vehicles every day, the vast majority of them due to human error. About 12% or north of 400 deaths/day are caused by a failure in the vehicle itself.
But yeah, we should definitely ban Tesla for being dangerous. Real sound logic there.
this is the big thing, those batteries are a huge fire problem, and very poisonus gas problem when burning too. electric cars would be a lot safer without them.
Clearly much more dangerous than driving around with 50-60 liters of highly flammable and explosive liquid and a cherry hot source of ignition nearby.
There are millions of Tesla vehicles on the road and a vanishingly small number of deaths attributable to the car.
When some knucklehead wins a Darwin award by doing something stupid in a GM/Volkswagen/Toyota/etc, you don't see anyone blaming the car, but somehow Tesla is held to a completely different standard.
Also, you cannot use autopilot if you don't have a hand on the steering wheel. If it doesn't detect some resistance you'll get nagged after about 30 seconds. After a few nags, it will pull over by itself. The myth of Teslas driving down the road while the driver is asleep are fiction.
Maybe they 'gamed' the system. If that's true, this is not too much different than jamming something on the gas pedal and hopping out of the driver's seat in a conventional car.
You just can't stop peopke vying for that Darwin Award.
I mostly agree with you, however, I don't think you can safely call a feature "auto-pilot" and assume that everyone will understand the counter-intuitive limitations.
The story is widely reported and there is nothing suspicious about it. Batteries can and do set on fire - it's not hard to find examples of Teslas and other EVs that have torched thanks to a collision or just a fault of some kind. Tesla and presumably others are thinking about making the batteries more structurally integrated into the vehicle so it might change for better or worse, but its a reality right now.
As for the driver & weight - there you said it. Any measures the car can be trivially subverted even assuming they work in the first place - there are examples of Tesla's not enforcing holding the wheel even when autopilot is engaged. Tesla And the way "autopilot" and "full self driving" have been marketed has been reckless and dangerous from the beginning. Not least because of the misleading terms and implied capabilities but also through the enforcement or lack thereof of driver attention.
there are examples of Tesla's not enforcing holding the wheel even when autopilot is engaged
Yes, because the owners used to add rigs to the steering wheel to trick it into falsely believing someone had their hands on the wheel so they could for example take a nap in the driver's seat. There's at least one death where it's highly probable that this exact thing happened. Driver rigs the autopilot attentiveness sensor, takes a nap at the wheel, doesn't wake up when autopilot, loudly, tries to get him to take over when roadworks causes autopilot to not be able to make heads or tails of what's going on
It's hilarious you think that 6 verified Autopilot related deaths in 10 years of data is a lot. Meanwhile 3700 people are killed by vehicles every day, the vast majority of them due to human error. About 12% or north of 400 deaths/day are caused by a failure in the vehicle itself.
But yeah, we should definitely ban Tesla for being dangerous. Real sound logic there.
Like the push to ban vaping because a few idiots scorched their ballsacks with improperly stored batteries. Meanwhile 480,000 people in the U.S. die every year from cigarettes.
Teslas are show to be safer than average vehicles per mile driven:
https://www.teslarati.com/tesl... [teslarati.com]
Battery fires are also much less common than gasoline vehicles:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10... [cnn.com]
It's just EV naysayers that make a big deal about the negatives vs. the positives (no battery pun intended).
Those deaths (the 3700 a day) suck because they were killed by the actions of the driver. The Tesla deaths suck because they were killed by the actions of Tesla's programmers. It's one thing to hold an individual responsible for their own failure to drive their car; it's another to hold some faceless programmer responsible because his code didn't work as advertised.
Indeed. Still - if adding more driver support reduces this by 1700, but causes 100 extra deaths due to bugs it's a large net gain for society it would still cause gigantic liability issues for the car manufacturers... how should this be resolved?
Marketing aside, it is very clear when you enable FSD that you as the driver are the one responsible. So, no, it is not solely Tesla programmers at fault. It is the fault of the driver, with Tesla software being a contributing factor at best. If the driver was actively attempting to avoid the tree and the car still insisted on overriding the driver and careened into a tree, that would be different. FSD is a convenience amenity as it stands today. Operating the car safely is and remains the responsibility o
Actually, I doubt if the Tesla programmers ever advertised the code as full self driving. Advertising is the responsibility of the marketing department. It was probably a marketeer who decided to call it "Autopilot" for example. It was probably a marketeer who made the autopilot page at tesla.com talk about full self driving (glad to see that has changed now). The programmers but a really good lane assist system. People seem to have got the impression that autopilot means a Tesla can drive itself, but that
Those deaths (the 3700 a day) suck because they were killed by the actions of the driver. The Tesla deaths suck because they were killed by the actions of Tesla's programmers
No, you are wrong. Tesla repeatedly says that someone should be in the driver's seat and read to take control of the vehicle if there is a problem with the vehicle. Many Tesla deaths are caused, like the one's in this article, by the actions of the nominal driver that result in being unable to monitor the vehicle and not paying attention to the task of driving. In this case, the driver abandoned his seat and driving. In several others, I have read similar things. One was a driver, who had leaned the seat back and was apparently taking a nap instead of monitoring the vehicle.
What really sucks about those 3700 deaths a day is that every one of them is caused by a driver's actions, either by deliberately crashing the vehicle, driving in a dangerous manner, or not paying attention to the task of driving.
In both cases, it is the driver not paying attention to the task that causes the wreck
The only time one can say that the crash was the fault of Tesla's programmers is if Tesla said that AutoPilot was perfect and could drive the vehicle 100% on it's own and there were wrecks.
First, Tesla calls this "Full Self Driving Capability", you have to read the fine print to realize it's a theoretical capability, not real. Second, one of my older Teslas (Model S P85D) was touted by Elon to be a 700hp car (Elon rounded up, Tesla spec said 691hp, but ok). A couple of years later Tesla "clarified" that the motors in my car are 691hp capable, but not the rest of the car (battery, power delivery system, etc), but that still, in Teslas eyes, means the car is 691hp capable. So yes, Tesla is sell
Seen on a button at an SF Convention:
Veteran of the Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force. 1990-1951.
Eh (Score:4, Funny)
All I can read is "Here are two new submissions for the Darwin Awards".
Re: (Score:3)
the Concorde was the safest commercial airliner until one accident.
Guess where it came in afterwards?
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Fuel and oxidizer packed close together (Score:5, Interesting)
Otherwise known as explosives, rocket fuel, and most kinds of batteries.
Authorities said they used 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames because the vehicle's batteries kept reigniting. At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery.
Where I used to work, they had a machine shop that used to work with magnesium, before my time. Firefighters had a rule if they got a call: don't go in.
Another place I used to hang around during college was a robotics research lab. They had a bunch of 1st or 2nd gen l
Li-Poly batteries, in pouch form, to run their little robots. I was told to never use a any of the fire extinguishers hanging on the wall if there was a battery fire. I don't remember the details, but either those particular extinguishers would catalyze the reaction and make the fire worse or they would boil and explode and just spread the fire around to more flammable stuff (maybe including your clothes). Supposedly there was a bucket of sand in case of emergency somewhere to isolate the fire and just let it fizzle out, but I never saw it and it may have been a hypothetical bucket of sand meant to calm nerves rather than a real bucket of sand to use in case of emergency.
Batteries aren't a joke.
Your point is (Score:3)
hidden very well.
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe that'll be Musk's next great invention. Self-extinguishing batteries.
Re: Fuel and oxidizer packed close together (Score:5, Informative)
They exist. They trade safety for energy-to-weight and energy-to-volume density.
People act like it's evil bogeyman keeping the masses from using electric cars. It's not. It's technology limitations, some of them surmountable given enough money today, but some of them because of hard physics-based theoretical limits.
Having to carry your own oxidizer as opposed to sucking it out of the air is one of those physics-based limits. A system that carries its own oxidizer will always weigh more than one that only needs to carry its own fuel. And it will almost certainly take up more space too. No amount of woke pseudoscience will magic that away.
Iron and air packed close together (Score:3)
One can always use iron as a fuel source. [phys.org] Even breweries [gizmodo.com] are using it.
Re: Fuel and oxidizer packed close together (Score:4, Informative)
Again: li-ion batteries do not contain oxidizers. The energy storage mechanism is not a fuel-oxidizer reaction. That would be a fuel cell, not a battery. The energy storage mechanism is the voltage potential difference between a lithium ion intercalated into graphite vs. a lithium ion intercalated into a mixed metal oxide.
Fire in a li-ion battery depends on the type. In any system where energy is stored, there is the potential for creating heat. In a battery, this can be from short-circuiting the anode and cathode, for example. So now you have a hot li-ion battery - the peak temperature depending on the nature of the short and the nature of the cell. Most electrolytes are flammable past an autoignition temperature. At above a given temperature, you can also start altering / reacting your anode and cathode. In high-nickel cells in particular, at high temperatures they can start to evolve free oxygen. The various other metals mixed with them such as cobalt, alumium, and manganese reduce the tendency to evolve free oxygen at high temperatures, but there always is some potential at some temperature.
EV fires are rare. Tesla fires average one per every 205 million miles, vs. 1 per every 19 million miles on average for vehicles in the US - and that's inclusive of earlier, more primitive designs, as well as being inclusive of things that can apply to any vehicle, such as burning due to arson or a house fire. The difference is that ICE fires do not make national news.
Re: (Score:3)
You stated that li-ion batteries contain "oxidizers". Name the component that you think is an "oxidizer". Do you think graphite is an oxidizer? Do you think mixed metal oxides are oxidizers? Do you think hydrocarbon carbonates are oxidizers?
There are no oxidizers in li-ion batteries.
Re: Fuel and oxidizer packed close together (Score:3)
There are loads of webpages you can find that describe the Li-ion half reaction that is oxidation at the anode:
LiC6 --> Li+ + C6 + e-
That's an oxidation reaction. No oxygens are involved (not a fuel cell), but it's oxidation nonetheless.
More fundamentally, if the battery provides current, where do the electrons that make up that current come from? They come from the anode. Where does the anode get free electrons? From the oxidation reaction.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Self-extinguishing batteries.
All that's left is to start making the entire plane out of the same materials as the black box.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Fuel and oxidizer packed close together (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.tesla.com/firstres... [tesla.com]
That was hard to find. Although admittedly the current practice of Tesla owners of deleting or removing all badging could make it a bit difficult to determine which model was on fire.
Around here our fire departments train with various EV dealerships who send trainers and dummy vehicles around. Mostly GM and Nissan because, ya know, Tesla doesn't have dealerships, but the principles are the same for all EVs with capacity higher than a Volt.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure all EVs run at higher than one volt. [instantrimshot.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Wow, that page is bad. So first the firefighter has to figure out not just which model it is, but which model year too. For the S there is a choice of:
Emergency Response Guide - 2016+
Emergency Response Guide â" Model S Dual Motor â" 2014/2015
Emergency Response Guide â" 2014
Emergency Response Guide â" 2012/2013
The 2016+ one is a 31 page PDF file. The firefighting section is on page 22. Feel like that should be right at the top, but anyway... It says use water. Up to 3,000 gallons may be r
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The recommendation is to use water. Lots and lots of water.
The fire hazard from Li-ion batteries is not the lithium, but the electrolyte. Heat - either from external fire or internal short - causes the electrolyte to turn into a vapor, which causes cells to vent that hot, flammable vapor. That's what burns. Use lots of water to keep the batteries cool, which in turn keeps the electrolyte a liquid and inside the cells where it can't burn.
Putting sand on it might be the worst thing you can do, because that wi
Re: (Score:2)
Neither is gasoline you dumb shit.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Li-ion batteries do not contain oxidizers. The anode is mixed-metal oxides (on higher-energy / nickel-based cells) or iron phosphate (lower energy density cells). The cathode is graphite with some silicon. The electrolyte is mostly simple hydrocarbon carbonates with dissolved lithium salts. Lithium ions (not metal) are intercalated in a mixture of the cathode and anode - discharged = cathode, charged = anode.
You sound like you th
Luckily these idiots didn't kill anyone else (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Luckily these idiots didn't kill anyone else (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they should also stop calling it "full self driving" on the sales sheet if the car can't drive itself...
Re:Luckily these idiots didn't kill anyone else (Score:5, Insightful)
Luckily these idiots didn't harvest anyone else (Score:2)
Organ donor would have conveyed what the system was for.
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Re:Luckily these idiots didn't kill anyone else (Score:5, Interesting)
I was one of the adamant supporters of the term "autopilot" when so many called that wording dangerous. I believed, and still do, that autopilot correctly conveyed what the system was capable of. Many people however blamed Tesla in previous crashed because they thought autopilot made it sound like self driving when it wasn't.
Yet now that Tesla is actually calling it "full self driving", all those criticisms seem to have vanished, despite the fact that Tesla had not released a vehicle capable of driving itself, and crucially, Tesla have even admitted that the current generation of vehicles on the road will NEVER be capable of driving themselves without an attentive human driver behind the wheel.
Tesla's marketing department owns these deaths. If the people in the car didn't think it could drive itself, they never would have been in a moving vehicle with nobody at the wheel.
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Yet there are plenty of videos of cars from other manufacturers where people turn on the autopilot (whatever it's called in those brands) and then hop into the back seat.
So yes, Tesla is making it sound like more than it is - but morons aren't brand-specific.
Re:Luckily these idiots didn't kill anyone else (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are implying that these guys would not have driven at high speeds and crashed into a tree if the name of the system was simply called any other name you could possible think of, then I simply disagree.
Quite possibly.
Calling it "full self driving" implies that Tesla thinks it's good enough to take over as a human and it's just the pesky regulators holding it back, and if you think I'm exaggerating Tesla even claims it's safer [futurism.com].
So yeah, I think there's people who will trust the autopilot to drive unsupervised when they wouldn't trust advanced cruise control to do the same.
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I hear you but why did the car's logic allow propulsion without a driver in the driver's seat?
Any Tesla drivers able to chime in here? My passenger air bag knows if someone is sitting, a Tesla doesn't do the same with its driver?
Re: Luckily these idiots didn't kill anyone else (Score:5, Informative)
It will not engage self drive and will immediately go into an alert state if the driver removes his seat belt and eventually pull over.
I do not know how they bypassed that but it would take some effort.
Re: Luckily these idiots didn't kill anyone else (Score:5, Informative)
Plug in the seatbelt and put a backpack with some books on the seat.
I know this because sometimes I put cargo on the passenger seat and if I don't plug the seatbelt in the car nags me because it thinks the backpack is a person and the law says it must warn when people don't have their seatbelts on.
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He was shocked to find out that "cruise control" allowed his vehicle to keep going straight when the road turned....
We need warning (Score:4, Interesting)
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I really like that idea. Have a colored light mandated for front and rear of vehicles that have any self-driving features.
I wish there were requirements that self-driving abilities had to network with nearby cars, send informative signals to other vehicles via IR or something (I don't know how), etc. Seems like a lot of missed opportunities.
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Yeah but the tree can't exactly get out of the way when it sees the car coming.
stupid people do... stupid things (Score:2)
2 people nominated for the Darwin Awards
the fire brigade there obviously needs more training...
Why we can't have nice things... (Score:2)
For reference ... (Score:5, Informative)
Authorities said they used 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames because the vehicle's batteries kept reigniting.
My 20'x40' swimming pool holds about 40,000 gallons.
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Yeah, yeah, we get it - you have a big-ass swimming pool.
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Yeah, yeah, we get it - you have a big-ass swimming pool.
It's a huge pain in the ass, and expensive if you buy good chemicals and run the pump 24/7 during the season. I actually haven't opened it in a few years.
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If you haven't used it in years it means your kids are all grown up or you're not as young as you used to be.
Remove the huge pain in the ass and install an outdoor jacuzzi.
32,000 gallons of what? (Score:2, Insightful)
They put water on an electrical fire?
Maybe it has some value removing heat from the system and limiting the chance of nearby things catching fire. But for that I'd be more inclined to soak the nearby things.
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deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery
I've done IT work in my local firehalls. They all have small libraries of books/manuals about firefighting, including ones specifically dealing with electric cars. I'd expect most firefighters to have a least some training on this, as BEVs are not really new or uncommon anymore.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The reason is stated in other comments, i.e. battery packs you get both oxidizer and fuel in one pack. Most common ways to extinguish the fire are to separate those two, which apparently does not work when they are already together. Thus, the best way to do this is to remove heat from the equation. and the most reliable way is to add water and wait.
Sometimes 'common sense' does not really work, and it's funny to see that random ppl on
Re: 32,000 gallons of what? (Score:2)
Removing heat is all that water does for any fire. it's not magic.
Yes, water is the correct response. (Score:5, Informative)
From the Model S Emergency Response Sheet:
"USE WATER TO FIGHT A HIGH VOLTAGE BATTERY FIRE. If the battery catches fire, is exposed to high heat, or is generating heat or gases, use large amounts of water to cool the battery. It can take approximately 3,000gallons (11356 liters) of water (applied directly to the battery); establish sufficient water supply."
https://www.tesla.com/sites/de... [tesla.com]
Li-ion fires are due to thermal runaway. After a crash, some cell separators are likely damaged and they're already shorting internally. The extra current path through the water is relatively minor. The cooling capacity of water is far more significant. The idea is to get the separators to stop melting, at which point the reaction will stop.
The other things firefighters have on hand won't work. Chemical fire extinguishers try to block oxygen from the air, but li-ion fires don't need air. AFFF foam works great for gasoline, but it still conducts electricity, so it has no advantage here. Plain water is better and more plentiful.
Re:32,000 gallons of what? (Score:5, Informative)
It almost sounds like the firefighters did exactly as what Tesla tells you to do.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/de... [tesla.com]
Re:32,000 gallons of what? (Score:5, Funny)
Things I've learned from the comments on this story....
1) Keep pouring water on a battery fire to cool the surrounding batteries.
2) Never pour water on a battery fire.
Hm. (Score:4, Funny)
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Probably nothing. Any data was likely destroyed in the fire, and the cars themselves don't learn. All they can do is sent telemetry back to Tesla when they notice that something went wrong.
Fire fighters (Score:2, Informative)
"At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery."
If you're wondering "Why didn't Tesla inform fire departments how to put out fires?", me too.
Tesla has been around since 2003. After 18 years, they should have been able to communicate how to put out fires at least through the U.S. Fire Administration, and probably through other means as well.
There are about 30,000 fire departments in the USA. 92% of them are registered with the National Fire Departmen
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https://publikationen.dguv.de/... [publikationen.dguv.de]
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*Why is chrome starting to miss correct spelling for so many words lately, responder is right and it keeps getting the red underline.
Location (Score:5, Interesting)
This is where it happened. [goo.gl] (Fun fact, I used to live a few miles from there, and this is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect to see there.)
The cul-de-sacs are arranged a bit oddly. Rarely do you see them with a densely vegetated island in the middle, so the AI might not have been trained much on this scenario. There's also a long McMansion driveway coming off it at kinda the right position and angle that you'd see at a roundabout - also not a common traffic device in the US. Possibly the computer ID'd it as a roundabout.
Re:Location (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait for the investigation (Score:5, Interesting)
This sparks Fallout 4. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now aren't you glad the Ford Nucleon [wikipedia.org] didn't become a real thing?
Re:This sparks Fallout 4. (Score:4, Funny)
Re-verify range to tree, Vassily. One ping only.
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Tesla seats have weight sensors used to adjust airbag inflation speed.
They could use the same sensors to detect that no one is in the driver's seat.
But perhaps it is better to just let natural selection run its course.
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But think of the innocent trees that will die in the process
Re:This sparks joy (Score:4, Informative)
It has a number of sensors to detect if no one is being attentive and some of them are flat out irritating to legitimate users, but they can all be defeated by idiots. I'm sure these guys thought they were being cool.
Re: This sparks joy (Score:2)
There's already a seatbelt sensor, so clearly measures were taken to avert such a shutdown of the car. Tossing a couple 40 lb weights in the driver's seat wouldn't have been difficult either.
Re: This sparks joy (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem with idiotproofing: they always build a better idiot :P
As an aside, am I the only one who's shocked that after all this time there's still fire departments that don't know how to put out a battery fire? TL/DR: water, doesn't need to be fast, but lots of it because it needs to be continuous for long periods. You can't put out an individual burning cell, but with application of water you keep other cells cool and thus prevent fire from spreading to them. You don't stop the instant you stop seeing flames; the pack needs to be fully cooled before you stop.
Ironic that this happened right on the day that the Tesla fire data came out [tesla.com] showing a rate of one fire per 205 million miles driven (inclusive of things like arson), compared to 19 million miles for the average vehicle in the US. :P
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The salient point missing, it is not a battery but a whole bunch of batteries. So put out the fire in one of the batteries only for heat to melt the innards of another battery and short circuit and then that battery is on fire. A fully charge battery pack of many batteries is much harder to put out than a discharged ones because the electricity stored in a melting battery shorts out and ignites the battery.
The battery pack needs to be redesigned to incorporate intumescent material https://en.wikipedia.org/w [wikipedia.org]
Re: This sparks joy (Score:3)
Actually the Tesla will refuse to self drive if your remove your seatbelt so they would have had to jump through some hoops to convince the car to self drive without a driver.
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A lot of people already own something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/NEPAK... [amazon.co.uk]
I do. It's to stop my stupid car complaining that the bag of shopping in the passenger seat doesn't have its seatbelt fastened.
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The problem is the high potential to take others with them.
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Just 2 weekends ago while taking a normal drive. There was a normal Car that was on fire. Apparently it was in a police chase and that normal ICE based car crashed into some trees and caught on fire. Most cars today you can trick them into driving, by putting them in gear and putting a brick on the petal.
While the Tesla tends to have a lot of extra safety features, I doubt it can stop stupid. They may had put a bag, on the seat, and put something on the petal. Heck they may had messed with the breaks,
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To fool the system you just need to hang a weight from the steering wheel, or have the guy in the passenger seat tap the wheel every 30 seconds or so.
As long as Tesla insists on telling people the car can fully drive itself, some people will take them at their word, even if it means fooling the system to do so.
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Yeah, but how much is it going to cost every month?
Re:All those flames... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know what happened in this case. The instinct is to assume they're morons trying to pull some Autopilot stunt to boast about on social media, the sort of idiots that Tesla owners despise for making them look bad. But in this case, I have my doubts. The reports are that they backed out of a driveway straight onto Hammock Dunes Place [google.com], went down to the end of the street and straight through the cul-de-sac. There are no lane lines on that street. You cannot activate Autopilot without lane lines.
The reports however is that there was nobody in the driver's seat. So what was going on? Almost wonder if they were trying to climb out through the back. Or maybe some of the reporting describing what happened was wrong? Who knows; I guess we'll find out in time. I hope the data is intact. It'll show if / when there was anyone in each of the seats of the car and when the pedals were pressed. Should be possible to build up a play-by-play.
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Oh, and there's also this issue [twitter.com].
Re: All those flames... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: All those flames... (Score:3)
Cars are dangerous...details at 11.
Re:All those flames... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hilarious you think that 6 verified Autopilot related deaths in 10 years of data is a lot.
Meanwhile 3700 people are killed by vehicles every day, the vast majority of them due to human error. About 12% or north of 400 deaths/day are caused by a failure in the vehicle itself.
But yeah, we should definitely ban Tesla for being dangerous. Real sound logic there.
Re: All those flames... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: The statistics are clear (Score:4, Informative)
Re: The statistics are clear (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly much more dangerous than driving around with 50-60 liters of highly flammable and explosive liquid and a cherry hot source of ignition nearby.
There are millions of Tesla vehicles on the road and a vanishingly small number of deaths attributable to the car.
When some knucklehead wins a Darwin award by doing something stupid in a GM/Volkswagen/Toyota/etc, you don't see anyone blaming the car, but somehow Tesla is held to a completely different standard.
Also, you cannot use autopilot if you don't have a hand on the steering wheel. If it doesn't detect some resistance you'll get nagged after about 30 seconds. After a few nags, it will pull over by itself. The myth of Teslas driving down the road while the driver is asleep are fiction.
Best,
Re: The statistics are clear (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they 'gamed' the system. If that's true, this is not too much different than jamming something on the gas pedal and hopping out of the driver's seat in a conventional car.
You just can't stop peopke vying for that Darwin Award.
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I mostly agree with you, however, I don't think you can safely call a feature "auto-pilot" and assume that everyone will understand the counter-intuitive limitations.
Re: The statistics are clear (Score:3)
Re: The statistics are clear (Score:4, Interesting)
You're confusing gasoline with diesel fuel. Unless gasoline is chilled to around -40 degrees, it will absolutely ignite with a match.
What is so "hilarious"? (Score:3, Insightful)
And dismissing this problem that only a small number of people died is Ford and the Pinto gas tank thinking.
Or GM and the weak ignition lock thinking.
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The alternative to a Pinto was a safer car.
The alternative to a Tesla is a more dangerous (on average) gasoline car.
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Fact is, that very little in this has ANY VALIDITY. Can't drive AP without weight in the seat. And bursting into flames? LOL. Yeah. Right.
Re:All those flames... (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the driver & weight - there you said it. Any measures the car can be trivially subverted even assuming they work in the first place - there are examples of Tesla's not enforcing holding the wheel even when autopilot is engaged. Tesla And the way "autopilot" and "full self driving" have been marketed has been reckless and dangerous from the beginning. Not least because of the misleading terms and implied capabilities but also through the enforcement or lack thereof of driver attention.
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there are examples of Tesla's not enforcing holding the wheel even when autopilot is engaged
Yes, because the owners used to add rigs to the steering wheel to trick it into falsely believing someone had their hands on the wheel so they could for example take a nap in the driver's seat. There's at least one death where it's highly probable that this exact thing happened. Driver rigs the autopilot attentiveness sensor, takes a nap at the wheel, doesn't wake up when autopilot, loudly, tries to get him to take over when roadworks causes autopilot to not be able to make heads or tails of what's going on
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It's hilarious you think that 6 verified Autopilot related deaths in 10 years of data is a lot.
Meanwhile 3700 people are killed by vehicles every day, the vast majority of them due to human error. About 12% or north of 400 deaths/day are caused by a failure in the vehicle itself.
But yeah, we should definitely ban Tesla for being dangerous. Real sound logic there.
Like the push to ban vaping because a few idiots scorched their ballsacks with improperly stored batteries. Meanwhile 480,000 people in the U.S. die every year from cigarettes.
Re:All those flames... (Score:5, Funny)
As a trombone player I feel attacked.
Re: All those flames... (Score:4, Informative)
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Those deaths (the 3700 a day) suck because they were killed by the actions of the driver. The Tesla deaths suck because they were killed by the actions of Tesla's programmers. It's one thing to hold an individual responsible for their own failure to drive their car; it's another to hold some faceless programmer responsible because his code didn't work as advertised.
Indeed. Still - if adding more driver support reduces this by 1700, but causes 100 extra deaths due to bugs it's a large net gain for society it would still cause gigantic liability issues for the car manufacturers... how should this be resolved?
Re: All those flames... (Score:3, Informative)
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Actually, I doubt if the Tesla programmers ever advertised the code as full self driving. Advertising is the responsibility of the marketing department. It was probably a marketeer who decided to call it "Autopilot" for example. It was probably a marketeer who made the autopilot page at tesla.com talk about full self driving (glad to see that has changed now). The programmers but a really good lane assist system. People seem to have got the impression that autopilot means a Tesla can drive itself, but that
Re:All those flames... (Score:4, Interesting)
Those deaths (the 3700 a day) suck because they were killed by the actions of the driver. The Tesla deaths suck because they were killed by the actions of Tesla's programmers
No, you are wrong. Tesla repeatedly says that someone should be in the driver's seat and read to take control of the vehicle if there is a problem with the vehicle. Many Tesla deaths are caused, like the one's in this article, by the actions of the nominal driver that result in being unable to monitor the vehicle and not paying attention to the task of driving. In this case, the driver abandoned his seat and driving. In several others, I have read similar things. One was a driver, who had leaned the seat back and was apparently taking a nap instead of monitoring the vehicle.
What really sucks about those 3700 deaths a day is that every one of them is caused by a driver's actions, either by deliberately crashing the vehicle, driving in a dangerous manner, or not paying attention to the task of driving.
In both cases, it is the driver not paying attention to the task that causes the wreck
The only time one can say that the crash was the fault of Tesla's programmers is if Tesla said that AutoPilot was perfect and could drive the vehicle 100% on it's own and there were wrecks.
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First, Tesla calls this "Full Self Driving Capability", you have to read the fine print to realize it's a theoretical capability, not real. Second, one of my older Teslas (Model S P85D) was touted by Elon to be a 700hp car (Elon rounded up, Tesla spec said 691hp, but ok). A couple of years later Tesla "clarified" that the motors in my car are 691hp capable, but not the rest of the car (battery, power delivery system, etc), but that still, in Teslas eyes, means the car is 691hp capable. So yes, Tesla is sell