It's hard to imagine a world where a few batteries strapped together is more dangerous than an internal combustion engine, but with the recent publicity
exploding laptop batteries have been getting, lithium-ion-based electric cars aren't looking so much like the "safe alternative" anymore. According to U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, more than 300 cell phone and laptops batteries overheated or caught fire from 2003 to 2005, with plenty of personal injury thrown into the mix. Car battery packs just compound the problem. That new
Tesla roadster, for instance, packs in nearly 7,000 batteries behind the passenger compartment. Tesla's CEO says they've done much more than the average consumer electronics manufacturer to keep their system safe, including liquid cooling, overcharge protection, three layers of fuses, and sensors to automatically disconnect the batteries in case of high-temperatures or if the car rashes. The individual batteries are also each protected in their own steel case to isolate them from the other
ticking time-bombs power units. Unfortunately, even with the best engineered safety precautions, an accidentally faulty manufacture is out of the designer's hands, and if one batter explodes violently enough to effect neighboring cells and start a chain reaction. Even with a failure rate of one in ten million, the odds are still pretty high for failure with 7,000 batteries in every car. As per usual, we will attempt to avoid reality, glue our cellphone to our skull, keep our
MacBook in our lap, and drag race our Tesla roadster like there's no tomorrow. 'Cause just like Alphaville said -- do you really want to live forever?
posted August 4th 2006 11:20AM
It doesnt matter anymore. If we move over to the Electric car and ditch the Gas industry, They will just raise more prices on electricity. I'm currently working on a car that will work off the Oceans Sea water.
They're just fine.
Just don't get 'em wet.
Mmmm, batter explosions!
Hold on, guys. Before you start getting all alarmist, think about what you're saying here. There were 300 laptop and cell phone batteries that had this problem in three years! That's an incredibly low rate compared to the number of internal combustion engines that must have failed in the same period. (I don't know the number, but it must be in the tens of thousands, if not the millions. An ICE failure can be very dangerous: scalding radiator fluid, thrown rods and pistons, etc.
Eww, Car rashes!!
Engadget must have food on the mind. Rashes and batter. mmmm.. Not that I am one to harp on misspellings.
What's up with all the spelling and grammar errors on Engadget lately? Proofread!
Wow, Paulie Miller off the top turnbuckle! Come on, how many times did you vote for the Bush/ Cheney Oil Barons? Come on, once, twice? Be honest. We won’t bite ;^)...
Listen, allot of the laptop and cell phone battery issues have been attributed to poor quality control and poor vetting of potential suppliers. I agree that the Dells and Nokias of the world need to do a better job here. Things like this will happen if you sign deals with some human rights violating sweat shop in se-Asia because you want “cheap” batteries. IT IS NOT THE BATTERY TECHNOLOGY (lithium-ion) BUT CORPORATIONS TRYING TO CUT CORNERS!
So please next time you right one of these, live up to the Engadget standard. Be a skilled artist. Paint (meaning write,) with precision. Don’t be a house painter with a roller and a “broad brush”. Sincerely and with love, FB ;^)...
PS I also here there is an all solar panel (plug-in and SUN POWER) version planed for sometime in the future which kinda has a carbon fiber look to it. Get this tech to sub 50k and, well, SIGN ME UP! Oh, and NIKOLA TESLA is (or was) THE MAN!!
And gasoline isn't explosive? I'd say the risk is probably about the same.
I have to agree with TheChaz. 300 out of however many million cell phones and laptops is not many. It sounds like they have taken safety precautions, and think about the cars today with a tank full of explosive liquid. Would you think of carrying around a gasoline powered cellphone in your pocket? Both from a chemical and flammable point of view, batteries seem safer. A quick search shows about 90 car fires per year just from refueling accidents. Couldn't find any stats on fires from collisions.
7,000 pounds of batteries...behind the seat...of a tiny car.
I'm guessing that part of the expense is a titanium tub protecting the passenger compartment from being crushed to an inch deep in a front end crash.
Unless the magic of electric power (bad gasoline, bad!) shields the automobile from nasty SUVs. Magic electric power that will likely come from coal-burning plants, because we just can't do nuclear now, can we...
"and sensors to automatically disconnect the batteries in case of high-temperatures or if the car rashes."
My car had a nasty bit of car rash a while back; that's what happens when you don't wash it enough.
Yeah, the article is alarmist crap.
In fact, good engineering design does anticipate possible failure modes, including those during manufacture, and provides design controls to minimize the effects of those failures. It's a two step process, the first being "Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis" (DFMEA) and the second being "Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis" (PFMEA).
So, doing things like monitoring the temperature of every cell, and protecting each cell with a metal case, go a long way towards eliminating the (very small) chance of fire.
And if the probability of failure is 300failures in 1B products (300/1B=0.00003%), the fact that there are 7000 cells raises the probability to 0.21% over the life of the cells. 99.79% of the vehicles are never going to have a problem.
I must say that, from articles in Wired and Autoweek, the engineering of the Tesla is decent, maybe better than the EV-1. It appears to me to be an electric Lotus Elise, which is a good thing. Lots of Lotus engineering is in there. I don't think that it is worth $70k, when you can pick up an Elise for less than $50k, but to each his own.
It is news stories like this that have relegated alternative energy transportation to the world of paper design. Yes, it may be dangerous if you strapped current technology dell batteries onto your hummer, but it is continued engineering that will make these safe. 120V in your wall socket or continuous explosions in your car's engine were also dangerous at one time. Engadget-- this article shows that you got worked by the big oil propaganda machine.
haha i wonder how many laptops and cell phones would explode if they had little tanks of gasoline in them!!!
@Asher... 7000 batteries, not 7000 pounds of batteries. The car weighs about 2500 pounds
Props to "The Engineer". Another thing to consider is that the battery cells in EV's are contained in "battery boxes" which are made to prevent explosions.
Hey..(sniff sniff) .. I smell petroleum all over this article..maybe it's just me..but I smell it all over any of the alternative energy .. alarmist stories.
I wonder whats the danger if a "manufacturer defect" say, causes a fully loaded Hummer gas-tank to ignite? This article is giving off some strong (petroleum) fumes.
Yeah, there's a chance a battery somewhere might explode at some time....so lets stay 100% dependant on an energy source thats going to be gone in a generation or two - and cause global warming that drowns a billion people in the process :)
Lets all take a cue for the R/C car world, forget Lithium Ion... Lithium Polymer, or LiPo batteries. LiPo and Brushless electric motors are the big craze right now for electric R/C. And a 3 Cell LiPo battery can squirt out nearly 10,000mAh at 11.2volts.
Dangerous batteries aside, has anyone looked at the performance of this car? Just as a drag racer this car is amazing, not to mention the 250 miles for every full charge. I'd risk my batteries exploding for that kind of performance. Besides, if you watch any movie you know that any car when in a crash will blow up.
Imagine if batteries were the standard technology and the internal combustion engine was its replacement. Do you think people would be more worried about the small risk of a fire in a battery back or the series of controlled explosions that happened thousands of times a minute under the hood of an ICE car?
To answer the article headline question....
No.
Nice "reporting" Paul Miller. /sarcasm
I support Engadget in fighting Dell. However, I tend to believe that future cars will run on fuel cells.
Those cell phone batteries exploded because idiot people dont let enough proper airflow. So you have a cell in your pocket and its 100 outside, something is bound to get too hot.
And not to target electric cars in general, but hybrid cars are just as suspect to explosions, but however airflow delivery to the batteries is part of the cars design..
Maybe we need our pants to be designed for proper cellphone air circulation.
I support Engadget in fighting Dell. But what have auto industry done wrong? Are you punishing them for a crime that they will commit in the future, or are you just trying to demote ecological cars?
A complete article regarding this new car (which is going into production) was featured on Wired 2 weeks ago. Catch up, Engadget.
yeah, this sounds so much more dangerous that the 17 gallons of highly combustible fluid i squirt into my car every other week.
I thought the Lion batteries burned up while in the process of being charged? Or was it spontaneous burn up? If while being charged then the driving of this vehic is not the issue.
All energy storage devices are explosive and potential bombs (sudden uncontrolled release of energy). The question is how stable are they.
The smaller the device to energy stored ratio the more high explosive it is.
I agree with a previous poster that this is alarmist crap. Also, to FB and other Tesla lovers, as well as for those who think that more electricity means more coal or bad nuclear fission, check out the huge ITER tokamak project just getting started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
Regarding cooling, my Highlander Hybrid, along with every other hybrid and full electrical car out there, goes to the extreme with cooling. The Highland Hybrid, for instance, has three very large vents under the middle seats that vent air from the batteries. Here we have a smaller car with smaller batteries than the Highlander, and OVER THE TOP cooling, and we get alarmist articles about the thing blowing up! Come ON.
this is just propaganda put out by the gas companies to try and slow down the idea electric cars
"Magic electric power that will likely come from coal-burning plants, because we just can't do nuclear now, can we..."
even if it's no better for the environment, coal power would still be cheaper than the consumer and keep our money from flowing into the middle east, or any other country.. at least until our coal ran out.
eventually, the world will have to embrace nuclear, or find a way to use renewalable resources at a decent price.
personally, i like the idea of electric cars - that way you can get get your energy from any source, not just one particular one... plus, for the hack-minded, it's way easier to generate your own electrcity than your own gas
I can't help but be suspicious of the timing of this article. It's probably pro-oil company propaganda disguised as news in response to the new documentary "Who Killed The Electric Car?"
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/
I was so incensed by this (recently) typical article from Engadget, I clicked the comments to complain...
But now I'm really happy that at least the readers of Engadget are intelligent enough to see through this uneducated poorly written article.
Engadget has really gone down hill.
Slow to report the news (other tech sites are always quicker to post), poor grammar and spelling throughout the site and really negative filler/pointless stories such as this.
Come on engadget, you owe it to your readers to do better!
"A complete article regarding this new car (which is going into production) was featured on Wired 2 weeks ago. Catch up, Engadget.
Posted at 2:40PM on Aug 4th 2006 by Joe [ ! ]"
you see that underlined text in the article saying "Telsa roadster" ... click it. OMG. it goes to an Engadget article from (oh surprise!) two weeks ago! sister site Autoblog was at the unveiling even. Catch up, Joe... or at least learn how the internet works.
Hmmm, car rashes! - those sound pretty painful!!! :-)
they should just get the mac fanboys to do a pr job for them and any exploding batteries will be either dell or microsoft's fault
Shame on you, engadget, for discouraging this technology with this cheap scare-mongering.
Every air flight that has taken off in the past few years has had thousands of Li-Ion cells stowed safely in the overhead compartment.
My laptop has a 9 cell battery, and I always take the 9 cell spare as well.
Maybe next time I'll take the safe option and carry 20 gallons of gasoline on board.
Much safer! Morons...
Car design has done little to cut weight. To minimise batteries needed aircraft technology must change our concept of the padded magic carpets we are accustomed to. Fit, form and function, cut out the A/C, the couch, kitchen sink, and you get an ultra light, maybe motorcycle tires and wheels for multi passenger transportation units. Example: our streetcars weigh over 100,000# to carry twenty or so passengers. Cut the weight to graphite or other composites, put them out of harms way (bus passengers ride high for impact protection) with monorails. The ultralight cars would be at risk, in our Nascar wannabee crazy freeway systems, so we would need heavy enforcment for safe driving, and child seat like racing seats and harnesses for all passengers, in an "eggshell" protective pod. We had viable electric cars in the 1970's, for lease only. They were taken back and destroyed because they never broke down. They were too efficient, and would have eliminated the planned obsolescence billion dollar maintenance profits for the car dealers.