New Tech: Shooting hot EV-batteries on pedestrians

submitted by
edited

gagadget.com/en/675870-chinese-engineers-have-p…

direct video link

10
36
1

Log in to comment

Hot Top New Old

Pedestrians, shop fronts, other cars, cyclists.

This is a horrible idea if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds.

 reply
26

And it doesn’t protect the driver from the angry mob of friends and family of the person they just battery-bombed.

 reply
12

That will never catch on for many of the same reasons that replaceable EV battery packs haven’t caught on. The mechanisms to make a high current load battery be removable have to be chonky. That’s extra space and weight that could be used to add more battery, or just not have that weight.

 reply
12

And also, other car driver will not like having a hot explosive shot right under their car and burning them instead.

 reply
7

Yeah, should discard the 18650s individually. Grape shot approach.

 reply
3

It has long been established that anybody not actually in the car is sacrificial

 reply
26

Yeeah. Let’s… Let’s not do that.

 reply
7

That thing really launched! All I saw were mangled ankles.

 reply
6

Kinda reminds me of the T-850 in Terminator 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPXHT8JDp5U

 reply
2

Comments in Not The Onion@lemmy.world

The source is the Epoch Times, which is not exactly reliable. Not a good look if it’s true, though.

 reply
10
edited

Interesting idea, horrible execution.

If they really wanted to go down this route, a better idea might be to push the battery out straight down and have a fireblanket deploy itself like an airbag to act as a flame shield and buy time.

Fire fighters are then free to move the vehicle from the fire to better assess and respond based on the circumstances.

 reply
7

The bottom is going to be armoured to an extent against bottoming out the car etc, so harder to do that (and have it be water/salt proof) through the floor I guess?

Having your battery eject itself because of a sensor failure while driving at 70mph would be exciting to everyone involved though!

 reply
3

I think this says more about the safety of those batteries. If they need an ejector precaution maybe they need to be more secure or not used at all.

 reply
6

Until they move away from lithium they will continue to go boom

 reply
1
edited

Questionable implementation but sound logic. Part of the reason EV fires are so hard to fight is you can’t just dump water on them, they actually have to be buried and smothered in sand/dirt or something that will insulate it from air and control heat. And if the fire starts inside the vehicle, ejecting the battery away from the fire can keep the fire from getting 100x worse.

I don’t know why you’d fire it sideways, directly at a sidewalk, at a few meters a second though. And not like, down and out the back. Make the rear bumper a pop-free folds down ramp lol

 reply
6

something that will insulate it from air

Just a quick clarification (I have run into my fair share of lithium battery fires and been doing a lot of research)

Insulating it from air doesn’t stop air from getting to it. The battery has all the oxygen (air) it needs whether buried in sand, deep under water or out in space to continue it’s catastrophic failure. The goal for being in sand, or having it suspended in an apparatus like one of those pouches or bags is to hopefully reduce the damage it does to the environment around it.

The more people understand how we really have no control once that thermal runaway starts the more people can protect themselves and hopefully find ourselves further away from these shitty ass designs.

 reply
6

All EVs should have plumbing and an external water access point for firefighters. The current sealed designs are impossible to extinguish.

 reply
1
edited

Switching to LiFePo and making the batteries easy to swap along a trip, is a better way to reduce fires.

Or solid state maybe? Not sure how flammable they are, but I know LiFePo are much lower risk than standard lithium ion (Nickle cobalt or whatever Tesla and the big Chevy trucks use )

Edited for spelling

 reply
1

I started exploring more LiFePo4s, NiMH are sometimes a safer bet. We don’t have many options out there unfortunately.

 reply
1

I know NiMH are way easier to charge, but lifepo4 has better capacity and way more charging cycles I believe.

The tricky thing with iron phosphate is that the voltage level between 75-80 and fully charged is very flat, so it’s difficult to reliably know the state of charge.

 reply
1

Solid state batteries are much safer, but much more expensive to make in facilities resembling chip fab clean rooms.

 reply
1
Insert image