Flooding and electric cars

Well apparently all sealed so better than conventional cars:-

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

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

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,

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

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

More info here.

WTF was that circuit energised without the ignition ?

Cat can has cheezburger.

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!

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.

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.