Luton Airport fire: EV involved?

[tim+]

Hybrids are the worst, then ICE with full EVs the lowest risk.

Tim

[Spike]

What’s the betting that this fire has an EV at the heart of it…

[Tim+]

What’s the betting every Tom, Dick and Harry jump to the same unlikely (statistically) conclusion?

Tim

[Tim Lamb]

In message [e-mail]>, Spike [e-mail] writes

Umm. I have parked there but can't remember which floor had the battery chargers.

>

[Ottavio Caruso]

Am 11/10/2023 um 08:07 schrieb Spike:

I think the EU is involved.

[Colin Bignell]

The Fire Brigade have said they think it started in a diesel car.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I'm not betting against you, for sure. The other massively probable scenario given the current events in Israel, and the ethnic populations of Luton, is a religion of peace warrior doing a bit of sympathetic mayhem.

It's amazing how big the racist anti semitic non white part of Britain actually is.

[charles]

Even if it wasn't, that will be the report

[Tim+]

“ Andy Hopkinson, Bedfordshire's chief fire officer, said the service had "no intelligence than to suggest it was anything other than an accidental fire". He said it was thought the fire started with a diesel car, and then spread through the car park.”

Tim

[Colin Bignell]

The statistical probability Seems to depend upon whose report you read. According to this article, in the USA, the National Fire Protection Association say that the fire risk for electric vehicles is about three times that of petrol cars, while the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that the rate of fires in electric vehicle was significantly lower than in petrol vehicles. The UK DfT say that the risks from EVs are comparable to petrol and diesel vehicles and the German ADAC say that EVs are about four times more likely to catch fire than petrol cars.

The one thing that does seem to be agreed upon is that an EV fire is more difficult to fight.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It all depends on your definition of 'fire' how many of us have had shorts on *old* cars that have caused smoke to rise, and needed to be switched off and towed home? Quite a few. EVS are new. And when an EV

*battery* goes up its not a 'switch off and tow home' - it.s a \*completely destroyed car.*

As you know I used to fly (and occasionally still do) model planes with lithium batteries. Back in the noughties lithium battery fires were very common and one contributor to a forum posted pictures of his burnt out car. He had left a battery - not connected at all - on the passenger seat of his car in a parking lot on a cloudless California day.

The presumption was that the battery had swelled in the heat until it shorted internally.

Its not the *frequency* of EV fires, its the *severity*. usually in a car park more than one car alone is destroyed, hoses have been destroyed, half a dozen buses, a freight ship sunk and possibly a car park destroyed in this case. I do not believe that a diesel car alone could have done as much damage as this has done.

Unless it was wired to so do,

[Andy Bennett]

Another load of invested interest scaremongering. Same as the boat that caught fire - all 350 EV's on board were intact.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Says who? Who has dived the wreck to discover this?

I cant remember a car ferry burning to the point of sinking before BEVs. Your naivete in believing what you are fed by an establishment who maintain their power essentially by lying to you, is rather touching.

[Tim Lamb]

Level 2 has the electric vehicle parking freebies and charge points.

>

[Robin]

I recommend full PPE before applying a bucket of sand on that article. First, it gives no details of or references to any of its sources.

Second, it from a source in the business of selling EV charging.

Third, it refers in the section you quoted to a source (the NHTSA) that, as I posted recently, others report doesn't collect stats on fires as such. It "collects data on crashes but says that only about 5 percent of fires are crash-related"

[Spike]

Diesel is kinda hard to light.

Might be a tool battery in the van.

[Colin Bignell]

My thought too, but I expect we will hear more about it in due time.

[Andy Burns]

low energy density compared to petrol though, I seem to remember it being proposed for ships.

[Colin Bignell]

There is also this report, from a service for UK fleet managers:

'Data obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealed that in 2019 the London Fire Brigade dealt with 54 electric vehicle fires compared with 1,898 petrol and diesel fires.

Vehicle registration numbers from the Department for Transport (DfT) show there are 50,000-plus plug-in cars licensed in the capital out of a total 4.63 million licensed cars.

Looking at the London Fire Brigade data, that would suggest an incident rate of 0.04% for petrol and diesel car fires, while the rate for plug-in vehicle is more than double at 0.1%.'

That was from 2020. According to the Mail Online, the LBF had dealt with

143 EV fires in 2023, as at 22nd July:

That projects to about five times the number in a year, compared to

2019. While that might reflect the growth in numbers of EVs, it does not suggest any improvement in the relative probability of fires.

[Robin]

Apples and fruit alert. The 143 is for "electrically-powered vehicles and hybrids". And follows the quote from the LFB that "E-bikes and e-scooters are becoming increasingly popular and the risk of significant fires is rising too." So I suspect it is comparable with figures for electric /cars/. And as a London resident I can confirm there's a fuckofalot[1] more e-bikes/scooters around.

[1] always felt this unit should be part of the FFF system