It’s only happened on rare occasions, but some automakers have been trying to figure out why their electric vehicles catch fire – sometimes when the cars’ batteries are charging.
The most dramatic example occurred eight months ago in San Ramon when a fire broke out in the garage of Jorgen and Carolyn Vindum’s home, where their two Teslas were parked. Their 2013 Model S 85 was charged overnight, alongside their 2017 Model S 75, when alarms ripped the couple out of bed.
“I saw flames from the garage that reached up to the roof of the house,” recalls Jorgen Vindum. When he and his wife were safely out, Vindum called 911 at 5:39 a.m. Then he opened the fire on his smartphone, barefoot and in his pajamas.
“You can hear explosions from the cars and you can even hear the horn of the second car,” he said. “The cars kept igniting.”
Vindum said the explosions blew up the garage’s metal roller doors.
As the Washington Post first reported, a fire inspection report lists problems in the thermal management system and a fault in the electrics of the charged car as possible causes of the fire on December 30th.
In a telephone interview with the Union-Tribune, Vindum said the fire department arrived in eight minutes and it took about 20 to 30 minutes to put out the flames. Much of the house was gutted and both Teslas were burned to a crisp. Vindum believes that if anyone had slept right above the garage they would have died.
The San Ramon fire is one of several incidents involving electric vehicles or EVs using lithium-ion batteries.
Last month, General Motors issued a second recall for nearly 69,000 Chevy Bolts after two previously repaired cars caught fire. The automaker said the fires were caused by “two rare manufacturing defects” in the battery cell of some Bolt EVs manufactured between 2017 and 2019, GM Corporate News Relations’ Dan Flores said in an email.
In this file photo dated January 9, 2017, the Chevrolet Bolt can be seen at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. General Motors called back some bolts for the second time in July to address persistent battery issues that can set electric cars on fire.
(RELATED PRESS)
“As a precaution,” said Flores, owners should park their bolts outdoors immediately after charging, and drivers should not allow their vehicles to charge overnight. GM also urged drivers to limit the car’s charge to 90 percent and, if possible, avoid depleting the battery range below 70 miles.
Hyundai, Ford and BMW also issued recalls last year about the risk of batteries igniting when charging or overheating.
Six weeks ago, fire officials in suburban Philadelphia said a Tesla Model S Plaid, a new high-performance EV from automaker Elon Musk, caught fire while the owner was behind the wheel. The driver told CNBC through his lawyers that he saw smoke coming from the rear of the car and got out before the fire broke out.
Similar stories have been reported – one from a Tesla owner who drove a 2015 Model S in Frisco, Texas in November 2020, and another in 2018 in Los Angeles whose wife said he was in his Model S on Santa Monica Boulevard “Hardly moved in traffic”. .
Tesla didn’t respond to Union-Tribune emails asking the automaker whether it had established what caused the San Ramon and suburban Philadelphia incidents.
Tesla’s website contains a vehicle safety report in which the automaker says its electric vehicles are “the safest cars in the world.” The report also states that between 2012 and 2020, “approximately one Tesla vehicle fire occurred for every 205 million kilometers driven. By comparison, data from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and the US Department of Transportation show that one vehicle fire occurs for every 30 million kilometers driven in the United States. “
The NFPA itself was less declarative, saying there was no clear answer as to whether EVs have more, less, or the same tendency to burn as internal combustion engine vehicles.
“The problem right now is that when tracking vehicle fires, there is no way for fire departments or registration authorities to indicate whether it is a hybrid, electric or internal combustion engine,” said Michael Gorin, program manager for NFPA’s Emerging Issues -Team.
“A traditional internal combustion engine vehicle fire breaks out on US roads almost every three minutes,” said Gorin. “And at the moment there is nothing to say that an electric vehicle is more unsafe than a conventional vehicle.”
Firefighters face other challenges when dealing with EV fires, however, and that’s mainly due to the lithium-ion batteries that power them. The energy cell banks in an electric or hybrid vehicle are much larger than those in your cell phone or laptop.
If a short circuit occurs in an EV battery – whether in an accident or if it overheats while charging – the cell casing can burst. If a cell catches fire, it can cascade to other cells, causing what is known as thermal runaway and causing a fire.
This can lead to intense flames that are long lasting and require a lot of water to extinguish.
For example, NBC News reported on a crash outside of Houston in April that killed two people in a Tesla Model S that caught fire. It took the fire department seven hours and 28,000 liters of water – an amount the department normally uses in a month – to put out the fire because the car kept re-igniting. The NBC report said it takes about 300 gallons of water to extinguish a typical fire in an internal combustion engine car.
According to Tesla’s own Emergency Response Guide, it can take anywhere from 3,000 to 8,000 gallons of water to completely extinguish and cool a battery fire.
Gorin said the amount of water largely depends on whether firefighters can get straight to the source of the fire.
“One of the challenges is to have this large battery system in the vehicle that is jacketed with steel for protection, and that is an engineering design that was designed to protect the underbody of the vehicle for obvious reasons,” said Gorin. “With these batteries (firefighters) cannot channel the water into the battery itself, so they just cool the case around the battery. That’s why you might hear stories in which different amounts of water are put into the fire because … they don’t bring water directly into it. ”
Vindum said when the crews arrived at his house in San Ramon by the fire, the heat was so intense that they could not go up the driveway. “Both my wife and I had sunburns that peeled our noses off from the heat the next day,” he said.
The San Diego area has one of the highest electric vehicle adoption rates in the country, and in June the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department’s Education and Training Department posted an online training course on “Fire-Related Challenges” in hybrid and electric vehicles. All employees must log in and read the document. A fire department spokeswoman said the station’s captains also routinely discuss training exercises with their crews.
“Although non-battery fires can be fought like any other vehicle fire, rescuers should not have contact with high-voltage components during the overhaul,” the two-page memo says. “If the battery catches fire, is exposed to excessive heat or is damaged, you have to be prepared to use a lot more water than you would use in other vehicle fires.”
The exercise also mentioned that because of the possibility of re-ignition, towing services must be instructed to store the vehicles at least 15 meters away from other vehicles or structures in their yards.
The remains of two Teslas parked in Jorgen and Carolyn Vindum’s garage from San Ramon.
(Jorgen Vindum)
Bill Lamb, a 76-year-old San Diego retiree with experience fighting fires on Navy ships and helicopters and implementing mitigation measures in Maryland correctional facilities, says he is “a thousand percent” in favor of moving away from internal combustion engines but worry that electric cars will catch fire in underground garages.
“There is a high chance it will constantly re-ignite,” said Lamb. “So there is a concern that if you have an EV fire in an underground parking lot with multiple cars, it will be very difficult and dangerous to put out this fire,” as first responders would have flames, smoke and potentially toxic fumes indoors Fighting spaces while trying to prevent other cars from igniting.
Lamb said as the introduction of electric vehicles progresses, he believes safety standards will advance. Meanwhile, fortunately, electric vehicles “don’t catch fire that often,” he said. “It’s just that if you have one that burns in the wrong place, then in my opinion you have the potential for disastrous results and in a closed garage under a medium or high apartment building you are not where you want to be. ”
Coronado-based Jon Sinton received a recall notification for his 2017 Chevy Bolt. As GM recommends, he and his wife no longer charge the car overnight in their sleep. But that means they’ll have to pay a higher electricity price of 31 cents per kilowatt hour for their San Diego Gas & Electric Time of Use program instead of the cheaper nighttime tariff of 9 cents per kilowatt hour.
Sinton said that while it’s “really daunting” that he has a Bolt “whose resale value is now zero and a car that is severely limited in functionality because you can’t fully charge it and run it empty”. “, He has some sympathy for the automaker.
“They are pioneers in electric vehicles and they obviously don’t have a 100 percent success rate here,” said Sinton. “As with the pioneer with everything, you will have problems.”
Eight months after the fire in his garage, Vindum said Tesla hadn’t contacted him for information to find out exactly what happened.
“That was disappointing,” he said. “Who knows what is causing this, but if you don’t know then you should definitely investigate and if you do you should tell us. Either call them back or fix them. “
With a payout from their car insurance, Vindum and his wife bought a new vehicle – a gasoline-powered Audi A4.
Despite all of this, Vindum said he would still consider buying another electric vehicle even though he wouldn’t charge it in his garage.
“I think (EVs are) the future,” said the retired mechanical engineer. “I believe in renewable energies. I spent seven years in the 80s and 90s designing some of the largest solar systems in the country. ”
Sinton sees it the same way.
“Here we are on the way,” he said. “We are environmentally conscious. We obviously live in a country with enormous fire problems and we are equally concerned about climate change. I also think that since these events are rare among the EV population, there is no need to be completely afraid of them. ”
