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.
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!
Finally making road trips an adventure again!
More of an assisted drop than a mach 5 launch (though that kinda liftoff would be fun to see), but yeah it would have to take the armour with it, not that it makes much difference if the battery is ready to toast everything in the vicinity.
If airbags going off at highway speed isn’t an issue, we can probably do just as well checking several conditions (controlled stop) before pulling the trigger. Then again, this is assuming the brains are smarter than the ones yeeting a burning battery into a sidewalk.
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!
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.
Until they move away from lithium they will continue to go boom
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
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.
All EVs should have plumbing and an external water access point for firefighters. The current sealed designs are impossible to extinguish.
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
I started exploring more LiFePo4s, NiMH are sometimes a safer bet. We don’t have many options out there unfortunately.
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.
Solid state batteries are much safer, but much more expensive to make in facilities resembling chip fab clean rooms.
Of course the safety of your car is more important than some pedestrians’ shins.
The source is the Epoch Times, which is not exactly reliable. Not a good look if it’s true, though.
