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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

You'll never catch me with a lithium ion battery larger than ~150wH inside my home. I don't care how aggressively the statistics are massaged.

I've personally experienced laptop and cellphone batteries catching on fire and can see how something with 100x+ the capacity could cause some serious fucking trouble.

Anyone who has one of those 1kWh+ emergency power backup things sitting inside their house right now really needs to think twice about contingencies. Extend this thinking to an EV with 2 orders of magnitude more storage.

Can a gasoline car set itself on fire inside your garage entirely unattended? Sure. But I think it is much less likely to occur and the failure modes are more acceptable to me - I.e. I can inspect and anticipate if my gasoline car might be unsafe with more clues than around an EV car. You can smell gasoline. You can't smell a manufacturing defect in a battery pack.

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> But I think it is much less likely to occur

You think. The point of gathering data and studying it is to attempt to replace our animal-brain intuitions with real evidence.

I honestly haven't looked into the evidence on this enough either way, since I haven't yet seriously researched purchasing an electric vehicle.

But I know that I have a big tank of gasoline sitting directly underneath a portion of my childrens' rooms, and a big pipe of methane running into my basement running to a couple little tiny flames that are always lit and sometimes turned into a big blue flame to heat the household's air, or a slightly smaller fire to heat its water.

I trust these clearly dangerous things to be safe enough, but I haven't ever researched the evidence on the safety of these either. The only difference is that I've always lived with these dangers without ever really thinking about them; they're just part of the water I swim in.

One day EV batteries will be no different. It's rational for novel dangers to receive more scrutiny than old ones, but new things become old before long.

It's worse than that! You (well, I'm guessing, I don't actually know you) have this wire just bringing foreign ideas, and crazy people's written thoughts, from all over the world, and you pipe them straight into your brain, with no helmet on. And this happens right next to your kids! You're a mad man!

Are you worried about wires? Wait until I tell you about invisible electromagnetic radiation.

Too true!

I've had multiple recalls for my ICE cars that would have resulted in a fire that I wouldn't have been able to notice ahead of time. My neighbor's house burned down from a few week old car that wouldn't have been obvious it was about to burn the house down. Car fires are rarely as obvious as gasoline profusely spilling all over the place, you probably wouldn't notice it if it were to happen to you.

I wonder if, back in the days, you would have allowed your house to be connected to the electrical grid or the gas grid.

Spontaneous ICE car fires are most likely to be caused by the 12V systems, so you’re not going to smell gasoline.

Here’s an example:

> Tension on the transmission wiring harness could lead to wire insulation pulling back from the electrical connector. As a result, water from external sources could penetrate the connector. The presence of water may create a short circuit over time. As a result, the short circuit could lead to thermal overload if the vehicle's ignition is off for longer periods of time. Subsequently, the risk of fire cannot be ruled out.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2022/RCLRPT-22V533-6872.PDF

Cars and energy storage systems have MUCH better BMS than your laptop. And MUCH better pack level protection from the environment. An entire parking garage with several EVs in it burned down in Norway. Not a single EV battery pack caught fire. Think about that. A firey hellscape around them and not a single ignition. What if all of them were EVs. No gasoline to contribute to the fire. It’s utterly insane that so many people think ICE cars are safer than EVs. It has no roots in basic facts. No roots in common sense. No root in easily available statistics. It’s such an obvious case of people fearing something just because it’s new and different.

> An entire parking garage with several EVs in it burned down in Norway. Not a single EV battery pack caught fire.

Details can be found in the fire departments evaluation[1] of the fire, specifically page 28, where they note they did not find evidence of any thermal runaway in any EV.

They also note that cars with liquid fuel often have plastic fuel tanks, which can get damaged due to the heat and start leaking, spreading flammable liquid over a larger area...

[1]: https://www.rogbr.no/Rapporter%20og%20utredninger/Evaluering...

I think time will fix some of this, which of course doesn't counter what you're saying.

An example, how many decades of natural gas use were there, before we purposefully made it smelly? We've had more than a century of improvements to ICE cars, to learn how to make them safer. And even how to make safety systems and methods more cost effective. The issues with Pintos exploding upon being rear-ended, resulted of course in fixes, etc.

So I do wonder what will, eventually, come of battery tech. Say.. 40 years from now, or some such. I imagine it will be much, much safer. We certainly try to prevent such disasters, but it seems we're also commonly having an issue, people almost or sadly do die, and then we fix that problem.

Edit:

Googled, curious. Wow.

https://www.gasodorizer.com/gas-odorization-history/

New London School Explosion ... The explosion left behind a collapsed building, with as many as 295 deaths.

As a result of the disaster, the United States and Canada began regulating the use of odorants in gas.

This is the sad way it is, often. Everyone will say "Oh, it's fine!", sometimes with logic, sometimes with a desire to not accept the potential risk, thus feeling safer, and then a massive disaster occurs.

My guess would be some sort of global warming induced flooding event, with salt water, as a key for many cars at once going BOOM!

Gas cars spontaneously igniting are rare, but flammable liquids like solvents or gasoline for lawn equipment catching fire and causing massive destruction is fairly common. People often do things like store solvents in basements where fumes can get loose and get near furnaces and other equipment and ignite.

Stored energy is stored energy.

You do have a bit of a point about large lithium power bricks. I trust those things less than I trust an EV, especially if they are the weird ChinaCorp off brand type from Amazon.

>Stored energy is stored energy.

There's plenty of stored energy in a slab of solid steel, but that doesn't make it remotely dangerous. What makes lithium-batteries dangerous is the thermal runaway, enabled by the liquid capacitor.

We got pretty good at making it acceptably safe to drive around at 80mph with tanks of volatile liquid fuel right behind or under us. We’ll get good at this too. Lithium batteries are already surprisingly safe for what they are.

> There's plenty of stored energy in a slab of solid steel

Source? Are you confusing energy expended to make steel with energy being stored in it?

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