Electric cars.

A colleague (mentioned in this thread a while back) is over the moon because he is going on Monday to hand his Motability EV back and is getting a diesel Renault instead.

 

Fire clearly remains the biggest issue - not frequency, but severity. I had a brief chat with one of our premises/services guys at work yesterday and one of the biggest challenges we are finding as a business now is insurance.. and not vehicle insurance but premises insurance as insurers are increasingly risk averse to sites with EV's and chargers (and we have a LOT)

 

You can now get special extinguishers for small li-ion devices apparently, but vehicular ones are still stuffed. Insurance must be through the roof

 

Heavy duty cycle in harsh and corrosive environment. Who'd a thunk it

 

When you consider that the site my office is at has over 5MW coming in to charge the vehicles in phases, each vehicle is between 300 and 530 kWh capacity (so let's take the middle and say 400 on average), with 105 vehicles that is 42MWh that would be in the line of any fire. Whilst the incoming supply can of course be switched off instantly, you ain't stopping 40+MWh when it wants to go. I reckon I would hear the bang from my house.

 

Thankfully it's a relatively rare occurrence. Just be somewhere else if it happens!

 

That, I don't know... my understanding is that they are more unstable if they are below a given threshold of charge (10%?) and also above 80%, and it stands to reason if they are holding a charge that there is more energy to cause mayhem if/when they start to short internally if punctured or in a fire.

I think the biggest issue insurers have with them is that fire fighting tech hasn't caught up with the tech we are using - so whilst it is a very rare occurrence, when it does happen there is no defined protocols for fighting the resulting fire and they anticipate sites to be a total loss.

 

Two schools of thought (not that it will matter a damn if it's on fire!) - higher charge means more energy for chemical reaction and interaction leading to hotter, more active, fires. But the highly flammable bit is the carbonate solvent and that doesn't change with high or low charge, so the charge level doesn't really matter. Definitely dont overcharge as it upsets the lithium