Luton Airport fire: EV involved?

[Chris Green]

Ah, yes, quite right. The 10has nothing to do with the year in that case.

[Spike]

The registration is from 1987, if the plate is in fact E10 EFL, but if that is the case someone bought the number to use as a vanity plate.

[Theo]

Legal reasons probably. If the fire service blames brand X, and actually it turns out the root cause was something else, brand X has a good case to sue for loss of reputation. We'd need to wait for the full investigation that describes the incident in full (with appropriate evidence) before coming to conclusions.

The Grenfell report took two years and, while this incident is not of that magnitude, there are plenty of legal consequences if they don't do it right.

Theo

[The Natural Philosopher]

So far I have been able to establish it was almost certainly a range rover of around 3-8 years age from the front view, and from the flame pattern almost certainly a PHEV hybrid. How anyone can make anything of the number plate except by using magic or religious faith or an intense desire for it not to be an EV is beyond me

[The Natural Philosopher]

I don't think anytone has suggested it wasn't a Range Rover have they? That horse has already bolted

[Colin Bignell]

I enlarged the still provided by Theo. That allowed me to make out E(X)?0 ?(F)L, where ? is indecipherable and () means probably. It is a bit like trying to read the line on the optician's chart below the one you can just about manage to read though.

[Andy Burns]

I couldn't make out the video on twitter or youtube, even downloading the footage and single-stepping around the frames. The AI enhanced version doesn't seem much clearer, and I can't really see where it can "magic-up" any detail from, does it "imagine" the detail it thinks you want?

Maybe with software which allowed you to define the rectangle of the numberplate as being of interest, it could average it out temporally, it might have a chance ...

[Theo]

Social media yes. Official statements no. It's the latter where legal liability lies.

Theo

[Theo]

So can we find a vehicle in the DVLA database that matches that pattern and is also of the right shape/colour/etc?

This site:

you to find all the registrations of a given make and model. You have to go through the trim levels one by one, eg: Ctrl-F them for letter strings (eg 'FL'). Then double check at the MOT history site - put the reg at the end of the URL, eg: I've used this when looking for parts at ebay scrapyards - often the yard blocks out part of the reg, but it's very handy to know the mileage of the vehicle the parts are coming from, so you don't get them from one that's already done 350,000 miles. Once you have a reg you can look it up on the MOT history site and check the mileage and whether the MOT of the vehicle is current or expired recently, or whether it expired years ago and has been rusting away in the yard.

It interpolates between frames - it's called 'video super resolution'. If you have a certain sampling resolution and the camera is not perfectly steady, on each frame a given pixel captures a slightly different view of the scene. If you combine those together you get more information about the underlying scene and hence can render it in higher resolution. This is why it's easier for humans to make out details on video than stills.

I was looking for a video to still super resolution tool but I couldn't find one without payware or writing code. I couldn't find one, so the '400% AI upscale' was the best easy and free one I could find. I'm sure there are better tools out there.

Theo

[Adrian]

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

I read/heard somewhere a while back, that any plate of that style (rather than the current xx nn xxx type) with a number below 20 is always a vanity plate. If that is the case, the age indicator (the first E in this case) would be irrelevant as it could have been issued anytime from 1987 onwards.

Adrian

[nib]

Wasn't it a Land Rover that took out 1600 cars at Liverpool Echo Area in

2017? Seems they have form!

nib

[Paul]

If you make a public declaration that turns out to be wrong, you could be sued.

And the results of any investigation, could be used by a pool of car owners, to sue the company (class action) making the defective product.

And if the vehicle is actually under an active recall, then the owner does not look so good.

It's lawyers and lawyer-cologne all round.

I would wait until at least the fire people admit there isn't enough material left to determine a root cause. There have been five transport ship events, where for at least two of them, a root cause could not be determined because it's all gone down the drain.

The brand of the car, does not bode well in any case. Now there is at least one fewer person willing to buy one. If they cannot make a converter, to convert from the 48 volt start-stop battery, to a 12 volt fan, without starting a fire, what else cannot they do ?

And I must say, I DO enjoy the comedy, of two tiny fire extinguishers sitting on the ground next to the vehicle :-)

The God Damn airport has a fire department!!! With foam!!! For aircraft!!! What they don't have, is a ladder truck to handle building fires. In the time that it took, to find two miserable tiny fire extinguishers (likely from the boots of cars), you could be contacting the airport emergency services and rolling some foam. So this is a case where the people did not execute in the correct order. Time had to have been lost, valuable time that could have saved the structure. Sure, I see a visible fire. But that fire wasn't big enough in the video, that it could not be stopped, or cooled off with water.

At the mall near me, you can open a hose cabinet and apply water if you want. Just open the big rotary valve and away you go. Even that would be better than nothing. The only limit for the civilians on the scene, is the oxygen level while they work. Eventually they're going to have to retreat.

Paul

[Andy Burns]

I doubt the ARFFS are allowed to look at anything that isn't "airside".

[Andrew]

You still cannot buy shares in JLR because they are not listed separately.

[Thomas Prufer]

Eh? Couldn't find that.

"There is no evidence that electric cars, with or without an accident, are more likely to burn than cars with combustion engines."

German ADAC, Feb. 28, 2022...

And digging down in the reports: a problem with *all* vehicle fires is that a lot of plastics (and sometimes magnesium and aluminum) are burning and reacting uncontrollably, leading to a witches' brew of toxic chemicals. The foaming agents added to the water to extinguish fuel fires and the burning plastics tend to be highly persistent environmental nasties. Auto fires are nasty, hard to put out, and spread easily, it seems.

Thomas Prufer

[Andrew]

The additives used to make furniture flame-retardent also seem to have unwanted side effects too from what I have read.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Is a hilarious and accurate take on the incident.

"Even if it wasn't caused by a lithium battery, it was caused bu lithium batteries"

This is also both humorous, and cogent

And this is a bit chilling, too.