California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.
In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an aircraft to drop fire retardant on the “immediate area” of the electric truck as a precautionary measure, the agency said in a preliminary report.
Firefighters said previously that the battery reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 Celsius) while it was in flames.
The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash along Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it would look into fire risks posed by the truck’s large lithium-ion battery.
This is not a Tesla problem. This is electric vehicle problem.
My local fire department once had to put out the same VW Buzz 3 times because it kept re-igniting. Nowdays they have containers filled with water that they completely submerge electric vehicles into that had caught fire.
It’s a Tesla problem in that it is a bumrushing tech that hasn’t matured for what it’s being used for because profit motive.
And no, if the tech isn’t mature to be both useful AND safe in the event of failure operating in the world, it belongs in the lab, not up for sale.
We shouldn’t be mass producing any vehicles that become bombs/environmental disasters that standard fire and rescue can’t appropriately address with reasonable tools upon crashing, because they inevitably will.
Its a market capitalism problem. Fire, ready, aim because rush the pos to sale. Musk is certainly a standard bearer as a prominent “get government and society’s wellbeing out of the way of my quarterly profit expectations” asshole sociopath capitalist.
We don’t have time to perfect and mature the tech though. That was 40 years ago. Now it’s whatever fucking works that isn’t fossil fuels and burning of them. It’s a damn sight safer than an ICE which is actually carrying extremely combustible liquids in it too. It’s not perfect but it’s better and this kind of " we have to hold off" is effectively supporting the status quo which is fuckig everything up as it is.
I hear you, and that’s a valid point, but I see that more as a function of our insatiable need for the primary driver of our destruction: growth/metastasis.
Growth is precisely what is destroying us. We need to find homeostasis with this world. We need to slow down, stop expanding supply chains, and work on making what powers these 100% clean first and foremost. Because right now, most electrics are functionally dirty too, their pollution just happens higher up the chain.
We won’t do that of course, because the reality is most people in the developed world need to accept that wasteful things like fast food, ridiculous amounts of meat, and plastic that serves no necessary purpose, everything from pop figures to disposable water bottles available to people with reusable vessels out of convenience, need to be made illegal yesterday if we want our species to have a decent future.
But our creature comforts are more important to us, and we will punish any politicians that try to call for genuine sacrifice. 🔥🤷🔥
Entirely valid and I agree that continual growth is right at the heart of most of our problems. I guess most of my frustration comes from the fact we’ve had at least 40 years of warning, 20 more years of proper, severe warning and promises for action and now that we’re seeing day in, day out that all the warnings were right, we’re still not moving with any real purpose. I genuinely thought that COVID would show us what we need to do and how we could do it but nope, slipped right back into business as usual.
I think your feelings toward Elon may be clouding your judgement here a bit. Putting out electric vehicle fire is hard, independent of the brand of the vehicle.