| ICE fires occur in stationary as well. It's just that we have learned to handle gas better over the years. I otherwise agree, but it's complicated because while what you say in the first sentence is true, it was true for ICE at one point too. So for example, this is why gas containers have pressure releases, etc. I mean, for an ICE vehicle you go to a gas station and fill it up. It's hard these days to think about how really dangerous that is because of how safe we'd be able to make it. It's much more dangerous than charging an EV car in theory. Even storing the gas is dangerous! That said, what you are pointing out is that the other difference is more around the mechanism.
Gasoline can't ignite as a liquid. At high temperature it just vaporizes quickly into a gas and then ignites :) As a gas, it has a lower explosive limit of about 1.5% and an upper of about 7.5%. Within that concentration level it is flammable. Outside of it, no. Because you can get it to combust within this range, and we've become good at avoiding this happening in "normal" circumstances through safety mechanisms developed over the years. This was not always true, and you saw more fires in lots of situations as a result. EV fires on the other hand are usually self-sustaining chemical reactions[1] that got out of hand. Once triggered, they result in fire unless some safety mechanism stops them. You can see this is really not dissimilar from ICE - we spend almost all energy/safety mechanisms on preventing the ability to cause a fire in the first place. However, that said, these chemical reactions are more "omnipresent" than ICE for sure - once they are both "off", EV vehicles are more likely to explode than ICE ones. A lot of this is the fact that they are not really "off" most of the time. Regardless, however, we will do the same thing we did for handling of gas in general - we will figure out how to make that safer. If we can make hand-filling your gas tank with an explosive fuel safe i've got faith we'll be able to make EVs sitting around doing nothing safe.
We actually already can, just not at the energy density we want yet :) [1] I understand that as a nitpick, so is burning gas, but let's leave this alone at this level :) |