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What If We Are Wrong About Electric Cars? Part 3 – A Safety Discussion

Driving a car is the most dangerous thing most people do every day. That said, it is commendable that carmakers are trying to make their vehicles as safe as possible. How do electric cars fare in that regard? Although most of these vehicles are getting pretty high scores in independent crash tests, it is worth asking once again: what if we are wrong about electric cars?
A Tesla Model 3 caught fire after crashing in Baltimore on September 30, 2021 21 photos
Photo: Baltimore County Fire Department
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EVs pose some safety concerns due to fire episodes involving these vehicles and also due to their weight and performance. There are several cases of spontaneous fires while charging or even while driving, and some after crashes. EV advocates will label them FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) and try to dismiss these cases with the fallacious argument that combustion-engined vehicles present much more fire episodes than EVs. If you consider that there are many more ICE cars circulating, some of them very old and without adequate maintenance routines, that’s only natural.

The truth is that anything that involves energy has inherent fire risks. If fuel demands careful manipulation, so do batteries. They have to be manufactured in environments without contaminants, and there is a high risk that they may develop dendrites – little metal spikes that cause short circuits, fires, and even explosions. Hyundai and General Motors learned the hard way about those risks, respectively, with the massive Kona Electric and Chevrolet Bolt EV recalls. But it is more serious than that.

When a thermal runaway starts, one cell in a short circuit can heat those around it and cause a chain reaction event. It will not only involve all other batteries in a pack: it will also be much harder to extinguish than ordinary fire. As batteries have oxides, they can release the oxygen the fire needs to keep going until there is nothing left to burn. An enormous amount of water is necessary to kill these fires because the water is not only used to cut the oxygen supply: it is also applied (in massive quantities) to bring down the temperature. So much so that many fire departments insert EVs in a water tank to prevent them from reigniting.

Besides the fire itself, battery blazes release toxic fumes that are hazardous to human health. Just check what happened with Tesla's Big Battery in Victoria, Australia. The Megapack project caught fire, and authorities recommended that people around the site stay in their homes and did not open their windows. Neoen said the fire was caused by short circuits provoked by coolant leaks.

With the current battery technology, this is not the only safety risk involving electric cars. They can accelerate much faster than vehicles powered by engines and are also a lot heavier than similarly-sized machines. The lowest weight for a Tesla Model 3 (3,552 lb, or 1,611 kg) is equivalent to the highest one a Toyota Camry can have (3,572 lb, or 1,620 kg). More speed and more mass are a concerning recipe when it comes to passenger vehicles.

Mind you: we are talking about cars with battery packs that do not exceed 100 kWh. Some of these guys already weigh around 2 metric tons (4,409 pounds). New vehicles are exceeding that. The GMC Hummer EV tips the scale at 9,063 lb (4,103 kg, or more than 4 metric tons), with a 212.7-kWh battery pack that alone weighs 2,923 lb (1,326 kg). Imagine how difficult it will be for firefighters to drop one of these massive electric pickup trucks into water tanks. If any of these EVs hit smaller and lighter vehicles, chances are that occupants of the electric car will escape almost unharmed (if the battery pack does not ignite). Still, those in other cars may get seriously hurt or killed.

In their pursuit to reduce mass and complexity, some electric vehicles got rid of conventional door handles: opening them is up to an electric motor that may fail if the 12V battery loses power. Manual door releases are often challenging to find or complicated to operate, demanding tools to be accessed in emergency situations. Some owners have no idea where these releases are. That’s another safety concern that many EV makers are ignoring.

The higher mass in electric cars is also making suspension components fail faster or in more concerning ways than they did in combustion-engined vehicles. Tesla is accused of having “whompy wheels,” although the company’s fans always try to justify the failing control arms as a safety feature: they would collapse to absorb crash energy. When these components break while driving, the excuse is that the driver probably fractured the suspension before it eventually collapsed. The car and its engineering are never to blame for these supporters, most of them also Tesla’s shareholders. In the company’s defense, Porsche also faced suspension issues with the Taycan, and Rivian had them with the R1T and R1S.

Curiously, one of the main selling arguments Tesla fans use is also a liability. Many among them claim that the EV maker is a tech company and that its cars are computers on wheels. They love and crave every over-the-air (OTA) update because they would make the cars better, but that has not always been the case. Tesla capped the cell voltage in thousands of cars and got sued, accused of trying to hide battery defects. Newer customers are asking why Tesla does not release a single update that does not screw something in the cars.

Phantom braking is a famous Tesla issue that makes the vehicles stop several times wherever they are – even on highways at high speeds. Some cars started presenting it after updates. To make matters worse, rebooting a computer may be annoying, but doing so if it has wheels and is traveling fast can be terrifying.

What about recalls? Tesla fans say that if an OTA update can fix something, it is not a recall. They fail to grasp or pretend to ignore that anything that has to deal with safety and needs to be fixed is a recall object. Apart from that, Tesla’s OTA updates have not repaired the problem in at least one situation. An issue in China – possibly related to inverters – could make 67,698 Model S and Model X units suddenly stop anywhere, including highways. To avoid that, Tesla released an OTA update that will only cut power when the driver parks somewhere. However, the defect is still there.

Finally, there’s the question of increasingly higher voltages. EVs started with around 400V, but higher voltages would make battery packs lighter and faster to recharge. The issue is that anything above 220V is already pretty dangerous for human beings. This is why the Finnish company Toroidion bets on swappable battery packs that work at 48V. But it is an exception: most other companies are going to 800V or more.

For BEVs to be undisputedly safer, they need to be lighter, with batteries that are not so prone to thermal runaway. Nail penetration tests show that some of them can already cope with crashes without offering additional concerns. Another option would be to obtain the energy electric motors need from other sources, such as hydrogen or ultracapacitors. Yet, carmakers are betting on a single solution. What if they are wrong about electric cars?
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About the author: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo
Gustavo Henrique Ruffo profile photo

Motoring writer since 1998, Gustavo wants to write relevant stories about cars and their shift to a sustainable future.
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