Flooding and electric cars

[Tricky Dicky]

Had to go out yesterday morning but on our return trip many of the roads we had to travel were already flooding and a number of cars were already coming to grief. Fortunately the Kuga managed to negotiate everything although within the hour all these roads became impassable. It did occur to me how would electric cars cope particularly with the tendency to mount batteries under the floor. It is one thing to protect connections from the normal spray generated in wet conditions and quite another when things get a good dunking. Anyone with any experience of driving an electric car in these conditions?

Richard

[David Wade]

Well apparently all sealed so better than conventional cars:-

Elon musk claims some of the Teslas will float..

Dave

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

I guess it depends on how conductive the water is and what the control electronics and motors do if they get wet. I doubt there would be a major failure as the batteries are protected from catastrophic run away failure, but I often wonder how insurance might view it, ie Electric car, driving through a flood, how stupid... grin. Brian

[tabbypurr]

not very

a) electronics: go haywire if not sealed b) slow down & corrode if unsealed

a lot of insurance claims are, some famously so.

NT

[Chris Hogg]

Most cars these days will float. During the disastrous floods of 2004 at Boscastle in North Cornwall, some 80 cars were washed out of the car park and a good many made it out to sea. It was reported that the RNLI were checking cars floating off the coast to make sure there were no occupants. Several had their windscreen wipers working, turned on automatically by the 'wet windscreen' detectors. There's a video half way down here,

a load of cars gaily floating past the cameraman.

[bert]

And the author has zero experience of anything to do with driving cars through water.

[harry]

I have electric car. Batteries are low down bu electronics high up. No problems so far. I did find this about my car,

[harry]

More info here.

[Jethro_uk]

WTF was that circuit energised without the ignition ?

[Richard]

Cat can has cheezburger.

[Chris Hogg]

Good question. I did wonder as I typed it. I vaguely recall something about emergency flashers working as well. But they were floating in sea water, very conducting so perhaps a short circuit?

Or perhaps someone just made it up!

[Jethro_uk]

The hazard lights are taken from a permanently live feed (obviously). But no reason for the wipers to be. In fact, given the gearing in some mechanisms I can see a non-switched wiper circuit taking a finger with it should the self-parking kick in unexpectedly.

I doubt that ... (my first thought was "bollocks").

Much more likely. A bit like Hillary Clinton having to dodge the bullets when she flew into Bosnia.

[Chris Hogg]

Another bit of film here. Cars certainly float - vans, people carriers, caravans, the lot!. Can't see any flashers or wipers going, but the resolution isn't good enough anyway.