I'm not really seeing a scenario where an out-of-control car fire has worse results in a garage for gasoline vs. lithium ion.
In both cases it's an absolutely massive thermal conflagration, with no hope of putting it out using anything a homeowner has on hand, and it will proceed so rapidly that the house is going to be totaled by the time the fire department shows up.
I have to figure this is just bias toward the familiar. I will grant you that I don't refill an ICE car inside my own garage, so maybe charging genuinely makes the electric more dangerous. But it probably doesn't do so in fact, I would guess in both cases the biggest risk is something like leaving rags soaked in linseed oil and getting spontaneous combustion.
This is not common by any stretch. I have never seen a residential home with automatic sprinklers, only commercial real estate and apartments. The cost is prohibitive, and in many climates (where freezing is a norm) would be useless in garages.
The cost is absolutely not prohibitive, it's about $1-2/sq ft in a new home or $5-6/sq ft if you're retrofitting an old home[1]. For a new 2000 sq ft house that would be around $4000 dollars. Probably <1% of the overall house value given recent housing prices.
This would depend on house prices. Where I live, you can buy a 2000 sq ft house for $300K or less. That's 1.3% increase in price to add sprinklers, and I would wager that 99% of homeowners would prefer not to spend $4K on this.
Massachusetts only requires them in townhomes and houses over 14K square feet. In other words mansions. NY only requires them in three story buildings, otherwise it's up to the buyer. So these are nonsense arguments. Considering how many existing houses are exempt from all of this, I would estimate that less than 10% of the homes in CA have them, and less than 2% in these other four states.
I haven't heard of any ICE engines spontaneously combusting. I have heard of many lithium batteries, primarily in phones, combusting. We're better at keeping gasoline safe than charged electrical energy.
So crashes are a relatively rare cause. They also break it down by the area the fire started:
- 63% engine area, running gear, or wheel area
- 11% passenger/operator area
- 5% cargo/trunk
- 3% exterior
- 2% fuel tank or line
Interpolating between those numbers, you might guess that between 20% and 40% of fires could be described as "engine spontaneously combusting." That would be 45,000 - 90,000 per year in the US.
So despite you never having heard of it, it does happen.
Thanks for finding that data. That's interesting. I'm amazed that that happens, because absent people bringing it up when talking about Tesla I've never really heard that before.
Most interesting is that the first part of an ICE to catch on fire is most frequently the electrical wiring. And even if it is a flammable liquid (the second most likely cause), it's only a 42% chance that liquid was gasoline!
I had a friend whose block heater shorted out while the car was in his garage. He was alerted by a smoke detector, went out in his PJ's, opened the garage door, and pushed the car outside, whereupon it burst into a pillar of flame.
He noticed significant tingling in his feet while pushing the car out. This was in the days before GFCIs. He's lucky he wasn't electrocuted.
FWIW, a friend's Aston Martin V8 Vantage spontaneously combusted in front of his house a few years ago. Car was a total loss and took the insurance and manufacturer months to sort out who was liable for damages (fortunately, just replacement of the car - no other cars were parked nearby, and friend kept it in the street).
You've never heard of any ICE car spontaneously combusting? You must not follow any car recalls, tons of cars have been recalled in the past due to fire risks.
ICE vehicles can have strange failure modes leaking flammable fluids places where they should go where its really hot. Sometimes this gets mixed with a spark from a bad electrical connector, sometimes it drips on something hot.
My friends house burned down due to a car fire inside his garage. The engine didn't spontaneously combust (any more than the Tesla power-ask in the article), but having a car in a garage does pose some risk.
I don't believe EV cars are anymore likely to catch fire than gasoline cars. Either way, if a car catches fire in your garage you are in for a bad time.
It's definitely good to spread the awareness that many fire extinguishers are not suitable to put out lithium fires, though.
> fire extinguishers are not suitable to put out lithium fires
Only Class D fire extinguishers can put out lithium metal fires. But lithium-ion batteries do not contain lithium metal. Lithium metal batteries do so, but no EV uses lithium metal batteries because they're too dangerous. Class B fire extinguishers work just fine on lithium-ion battery fires. The difficulty with lithium-ion EV fires is that they tend to re-light, but water is still the tool of choice for putting them out.
Everybody else keeps trying to tell you ICE cars store more energy, or could spontaneously combust just as easily, and they're not wrong.
But when I'm filling up my car with a jerry can, I'm literally holding it. I know to have some sense of caution, and I can see spills. I do not leave it to slowly trickle fill overnight, like one would with an EV; not only am I not there in that scenario, but odds are I'm not even awake.
The odds are minuscule, and you're more likely to die in many other ways. But the fix is so easy - assuming it's not going to hit -30, just keep it outside. And the risk (probability multiplied by chances for it to happen) is going to get so great when everyone has an EV, that I can at least see your point.
I don't agree, and were I able to afford a house with a garage and a Tesla to park in it, I probably would. Doubly so as it hits -50 with wind chill here. But to dismiss your concerns outright doesn't feel quite right to me.
Well, you're not going to park a Tesla outside because you need to charge it overnight. And many people have to park their ICE cars in a garage not because it gets too cold, but because they live in a place (like San Francisco) where cars out on the street will all get broken into, vandalized, or stripped.
Probably not a major concern in your garage. These battery packs are built with fairly well-isolated cells that even if one fails should not result in a domino effect.
The reason you see issues in cases like this is because the wreck totally decimated that isolation with mechanical force and so you get runaway effects.
Many promising alternatives to lithium ion batteries are being experimented with now, so saying you don't ever want an EV parked inside your garage based on problems with lithium ion batteries may not be entirely reasonable.
I interpreted it as "I would never want an EV with the current tech in my garage". Considering he probably keeps his ICE car with a 12volt lead battery in his garage.
I have literally never heard of a Tesla bursting into flames while parked in a garage. Have you?
I mean that’s fine if this is the hill you want to die on, but right now I think it’s just as likely your gas car fireball explodes like a Hollywood movie while parked in your garage.
