Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

A Tesla burning frequently makes the news because those batteries can really burn. In fact, the Phoenix Fire Department has told their crews that if you've addressed personal safety and property safety, let it burn if the battery is on fire. There have been cases where an EV that had burned and been extinguished, reignited while being towed! Tow operators now try to have distanced areas for burned EVs so if they reignite, they can just burn.

But is this a case of EVs burning more often than gas-powered vehicles?

The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) reports there are about 321 car fires per day in the USA, one about every five minutes. But their stats don't break out internal combustion, EV, hybrid, what have you. So not terribly useful statistics.

Sweden, however, has some pretty accurate statistics.

From the article: "The Myndigheten för Samhällsskydd och Beredskap (MSB, or Authority for Social Protection and Preparedness) recently released the first report of its kind specifically tracking EV fires in Sweden and comparing them to combustion-powered vehicle fires and the results are clear: EVs are much less likely to catch fire.

Per the MSB, just 29 EVs and 52 hybrids caught fire in Sweden between 2018 and 2022. On average, 16 vehicles powered by batteries (EVs and hybrids combined) catch fire there each year. On average, 3,400 passenger vehicles catch fire each year in Sweden, meaning EVs account for 0.4 percent of all passenger vehicle fires there annually. Hybrids account for 1.5 percent, for a combined total of 1.9 percent of all passenger vehicle fires.

Put another way, gas- and diesel-powered cars account for 98.1 percent of all passenger vehicle fires in Sweden each year on average."

And the numbers have stayed low as more EVs have hit the road there. 20-24 EV fires from 2020-2023 with increasing ownership, which suggests the EVs are lowering their chance of fire.

It needs to be noted that some EVs sold in Sweden are not available here, and vice-versa.

Also: "According to the NFPA, the leading cause of vehicle fires is mechanical failure or malfunction, accounting for 45 percent of all such fires. Electrical problems are a distant second, accounting for 23 percent of the total. Not having gasoline, hot exhaust, and controlled explosions on board significantly reduces the possible ways for a fire to start."

So if someone starts talking about what a flaming death trap a BEV is, now you know some numbers behind it and that is blatantly not true.

https://www.motortrend.com/features/you-are-wrong-about-ev-fires/


Some other EV myths and their debunkings:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/11/heres-how-to-survive-your-relatives-ignorant-anti-ev-rant-this-thanksgiving/

The real interest here is battery electric and hybrid vehicles as those batteries are huge and expensive, but it would also be cool if you could double the service life of your smart phone or tablet battery!

The issue is pretty simple. We've always charged batteries using Constant Current (CC), where we apply a constant voltage and current to the batteries until they charge. We do it because we've always done it that way, and it's really, really easy from an electronics standpoint. I could sketch you a basic rectifying circuit to convert AC to DC at any given time, and that is what a charger does. The problem is, it increases the thickness of the anode of the Li-Ion battery, which decreases the battery's life.

Enter Pulse Charging (PC). With Pulse Charging, you're needing a more intelligent charging apparatus (okay, doable) that is introducing brief bursts (pulses) of electricity into the battery. This does not lead to anode thickening over time, and subsequent study of the test batteries shows that they can nearly double the life of the battery while retaining 80% of its capacity!

From the article: "The batteries were either charged conventionally with constant current (CC) or with a new charging protocol with pulsed current (PC). Post-mortem analyses revealed clear differences after several charging cycles: In the CC samples, the solid electrolyte interface (SEI) at the anode was significantly thicker, which impaired the capacity.

The team also found more cracks in the structure of the NMC532 and graphite electrodes, which also contributed to the loss of capacity.

In contrast, PC-charging led to a thinner SEI interface and fewer structural changes in the electrode materials."

and...

"The pulsed current charging promotes the homogeneous distribution of the lithium ions in the graphite and thus reduces the mechanical stress and cracking of the graphite particles. This improves the structural stability of the graphite anode," he concludes.

The pulsed charging also suppresses the structural changes of NMC532 cathode materials with less Ni-O bond length variation.

...

However, the frequency of the pulsed current counts: High-frequency PC charging protocols with square-wave current extend the service life of commercial LIBs the most, with a doubled cycle life (with 80% capacity retention) achieved in this study. Co-author Prof. Dr Julia Kowal, an expert in electrical energy storage technology at TU Berlin, emphasises: "Pulsed charging could bring many advantages in terms of the stability of the electrode materials and the interfaces and significantly extend the service life of batteries."

Very cool stuff. And since this is charging methodology, you're not changing the battery technology - though that's improving at a fairly rapid pace - so this should be implemented fairly easily. For certain values of the word easily.

There were a couple of things in the article that I didn't see that I'd like more information on. They didn't talk about any difference in heat of the test batteries during the charging cycles of the two methodologies, nor did they talk about any difference in the charging times. Both of those have some importance in a variety of applications.

It will be very interesting to see how this develops into field-deployed tech.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/04/240409123909.htm

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/04/14/020205/could-a-new-charge-double-the-service-life-of-li-ion-batteries

This will be amusing. BYD is a VERY large maker of electric and hybrid vehicles. In the final quarter of 2023 it sold more BEVs in China than Tesla sold in total! And now they want to build a plant in Mexico!

The attractive thing about BYD is they make affordable cars. It's hard to gauge how reliable they are, but as an example, their SUV hybrid can be had for around $30,000! It has an estimated combined range of 450 miles, which is quite respectable.

Naturally Elon is quite welcoming of the competition. No, that's not the word. NOT welcoming. He is quoted as saying "If there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world." This is the man who wants as little government interference in his operations as possible, until he wants his operations defended BY the same government against potential foreign competition!

BYD has six vehicles in production to Tesla's five at a much broader range of price points, and theirs aren't known to develop rust splotches like someone's weird-looking alleged truck.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/02/byd-may-build-electric-vehicle-factory-in-mexico-for-us-market/