Car Science #8: explosions on the M25
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You know what, I forgot to send this for ages again and I wrote most of this a few weeks ago and then I got depressed so just. I don't know. Here it is. The bag-wrapped present of festive newsletter updates. Happy new year!
I actually do have some plans to make car science better and easier to keep sending regularly for 2023 so, err. Who knows! Maybe self-improvement might prove possible after all. I'll send an email about that later. For now, I hope you and yours are safe and warm.
In the spirit of loosely keeping Car Science, if not weekly, then slightly tied to the news, here's a special edition that examines the question: do lithium ion batteries just go on fire for no reason?
Inspired by this tweet, which shows a car transporter in flames on the M1, it's time to talk about lithium ion battery fires and whether they're really a problem?
To get there we gotta talk about vapes, garbage, recycling, the Felicity Ace, Busan port, whatever the hell a RoRo is, semiconductors and software. So strap in I guess (but maybe be ready to leap if anything starts smoking)
Why do lithium ion batteries sometimes go on fire?
The answer to this one is relatively simple: because they get fucked up. Sometimes that's because of a flaw in the battery itself, like a packaging issue that causes part of it to be unexpectedly exposed - that's extremely rare, with anything like a vehicle battery but can happen with smaller, especially cheaper batteries that get chucked into bags and sat on and things.
Sometimes it's because they get too hot; every battery has an upper thermal cope point and past that it will become unstable. In particular, rapid charging or discharging at high temperatures can cause this; no doubt you've seen your phone warn it's gonna have to turn off, in extremely hot weather or if you leave it in the sun.
There's some things that happen as batteries cycle that can cause cell piercing, in extreme cases, as you get buildup around the anode and cathode. Again, this is much more likely in small, cheaply built batteries not the sort of thing being put in cars, not least because cars have software and sensors to look after and monitor their own batteries, so you're more likely to get a 'check battery' light (or y'know, detailed error message beamed over the infotainment) than a sudden fire.
But lithium ion fires are, even so, gonna be a problem for the automotive industry. It doesn't really cause them but it is selling the biggest lithium ion batteries around and people are looking for reasons to be nervous about them.
Hot trash
Battery fires are a big problem, right now. 2022 was officially the worst year for garbage fires, ever which, yeah. No big shocker, huh - I mean, check out the UK. But there is also a reason that literal garbage is actually going on fire, which is mostly discarded batteries.
Clearly, no one is throwing a 400kg EV battery into the trash (at least... please don't do that) but there are a hell of a lot of lithium ion packs that have headed to landfill. Aside from the massive electronic waste nightmare that is, well, everything, 2022 has been the rise of the disposable vape to honestly like, planet-threatening proportions. If this was a Marvel film or something this'd be a villain arc where we needed to allign with Thanos to snap the things out of existence; there are two disposable vapes being discard per second in the UK alone and it's only a very optimistic 25% or so of those that are even entering into recycling schemes, let alone actually being recycled.
Disposable vapes are particularly bad because they use lithium batteries. Now, it seems pretty obvious in 2022 that we should not be allowing anything disposable to use lithium batteries, including anything where they can't be replaced, let alone recharged as in these horrible little bits of ewaste.
I bought one to pull it apart while I was talking to someone about them for a research thing and there's a chip and wiring and a little lithium polymer pack in there. It's not a lot of lithium in it, of course; a vape with a 400mAh pack has about 0.12g in, a bigger one with a 750mAh pack has about 0.225g of lithium in. Which once you account for the fact the batteries are not being built to be recycled, although they are in principle rechargeable, is just an unrecoverable waste. With 1.3 million vapes being discarded per week in the UK, that's 156kg of lithium per week.
An electric vehicle pack, which manufacturers are a bit hairy about revealing any details of but generally has about 160g of lithium per kWh, so an 107kWh EV would have about 17.12kg of lithium in. It is currently not cheaper to recycle an EV battery pack than to get lithium out the ground, despite a recent, huge hike in the price per kWh. Because this is Car Science, the newsletter that doesn't say anything without context, it's gotta be noted that although lithium prices are going up, a lot of the price of production is tied to energy costs and freight costs currently - lithium the commodity is less of a problem than moving it around or sourcing the 50kWh of energy needed to make every 1kWh of storage or the 800% price rise in semiconductors that's stalling automotive production lines again, just as the crisis looked set to ease a little at last.
So: vape batteries are not going to be a viable trash mining operation and anyone who tells you they are is lying. And probably selling vapes and/or fake recycling schemes that dump them directly into some other landfill, once they've gone for a nice lil freight ride round the world. The ones that end up directly in garbage cans, though, are a bigger problem.
Aside from the fact they make up the majority (75%) of disposable vapes, they're being thrown away in such volumes (again, two per second) that every bin outside a pub in London is basically now a small inferno waiting to happen. All that needs to happen for a lithium ion battery fire is that either a) something sets it on fire, b) it gets pierced by something, say as a result of being macerated or crushed in a garbage truck.
Unsurprisingly, over 700 fires have been sparked by crushed batteries in garbage trucks and waste sites in the UK. Being a rolling trash fire is very much our thing but if you scale that up to waste collection across the globe, that's obviously pretty disturbing - especially since lithium ion fires burn at 2000C which is plenty enough to set everything else around them on fire and melt a bunch of stuff. Fortunately, most batteries that end up in garbage are relatively small, compared to an EV, so you don't end up with total destruction but a garbage truck fire can cost thousands of pounds of repair and be out of commission for an extended period of time.
Why am I talking about vapes in a newsletter about cars? Because these two issues are about to get really confused by people who want to smear EVs. Electric vehicles do not, usually, get casually tossed into a garbage truck and their batteries are not barely-shielded by a cardboard tube, with absolutely no system to cut off if they're broken or damaged. EV batteries are housed in their own casings and within the car's crash structure, have monitoring on any damage and should tell you if they have an issue. They aren't transported carrying charge and they don't spontaneously get exposed to water or heat - or at least, shouldn't.
Insurance
Not to get too Screaming Meals over here but actually, insurance can be if not interesting then something that holds a lot of sway over how stuff happens. So when the Felicity Ace car carrier ship went up just off the coast of Portugal last year it was a big deal.
Insurance for big-ass ships carrying thousands of luxury cars is underwritten by people with vast fortunes who mostly collect interest on 'em in insurance fees. Because the likelihood that a ship will catch fire and write off not only all its $500 million cargo but also itself is unbelievably low, this is very lucrative and mutually beneficial to both parties; the container and shipping companies get insured, the people with vast fortunes get richer, shit moves around the world.
Now, say, if you're Porsche you're not going to load thousands of your vehicles onto an uninsured vessel and just say bon voyage. So if you're going to move cars around you need properly insured car carriers
Problem is: one of the reasons the Felicity Ace fire was so severe was because some of the vehicles onboard were EVs or hybrids. The Felicity Ace is what's called a RoRo vessel, which is a stupid baby garble way of saying Roll-On, Roll-Off, so what it carries are finished vehicles capable of moving under their own capacity or at least being pushed/pulled. So, bar a possible bit of detailing in the vehicle centre at its destination port or a nearby factory (there's usually software updates to be installed, etc by the point of arrival) all these cars were in their final road state. It's one of the safest forms of cargo to carry cus like, hey, what's gonna happen with those they're done they're good.
Usually the only thing that happens with a car carrier is like, it fucking runs aground or sinks or something stupid. Which can lead to some interesting salvage operations (warning: clicking on this link will permanently skew your YouTube recommendations) but they don't tend to be considered at risk because of their cargo. Of 35 first on RoPax and RoRo vessels between 2005 and 2016 only one was thought to be caused by a new vehicle, with a further four caused by passenger vehicles on ferries.
I used to live on a boat and you might think sinking is the biggest problem something that's meant to float can have. It's not. Not by a long way. Sinking is totally reversible and usually really slow and you can close off bits of the ship to stop it. What's a really, really massive nautical problem is going on fire. That might sound nonsensical because hello??? You're surrounded by water but seriously: going on fire is what really screws boats up. You're much more likely to write something off for going on fire than a little bit of sinking.
Obviously, the Felicity Ace went on fire in a goddamned big way and by the time the flames reached the Taycan SUVs and other cars with lithium ion batteries onboard, the whole thing was probably out of control already. There's no evidence that the EVs started the fire but they did worsen an out-of-control blaze by adding 2000C heat that there's virtually nothing to do but let burn out. If you starve a lithium fire of oxygen then all it does is keep it quiet for a little bit before it's exposed again and you're back to towering inferno.
For context, the ignition temperature of steel is 1500C so when that battery's going, bits of the ship are going to be too. Bummer.
Understandably, the Felicity Ace disaster spooked people. The port of Busan, in South Korea, which handles vast amounts of EV components and EVs, started developing a new shipping container for EV batteries that could starve them of oxygen. Wallennius Wilhelmsen, a RoRo shipping company and Goodpack, who make shit to put stuff in on boats, made the RoRo cube which alleges it can be used to store EV batteries without the risk that, if one should go on fire, any of said fire can escape.
Progress, then but still there's a lot of nerviness about freighting EVs, ironically, given there are disposable vapes being moved around the world in absolutely industrial amounts and you can guarantee if a shipping container full of them went up it might be less dramatic individually than a Taycan but once you've packed several tens of thousands of them in there it all adds up.
Obviously, somewhere in all this there's the hideous nexus of a big, heavy EV running over a disposable vape, crushing it and its basically totally unguarded battery, setting fire to the EV's tyre and you get the rest. With the sheer number being discarded, it's a very real possibility - especially, in shipping terms, on RoPax (Roll-on, roll-off mixed with passenger usage, like ferries) vessels.
So there's a sort of perfect storm of a) genuinely concerning uses of lithium ion that are causing fires, b) the risk those could cause worse fires, c) nervousness about bigger lithium ion batteries, d) a shortage of people keen to lose their fortunes underwriting the next Felicity Ace when they could just buy Twitter or some shit like that.
Code of conduct
Ah yes, semiconductors. This is almost a footnote to the above, so just as well it's at the end but you've probably been hearing about the shortage of chips for the past two years. It's why you can't upgrade your PC and you didn't get a Switch for Christmas and your car took three years to arrive.
Automakers are terrible customers, for semiconductor manufacturers because they want massive volume cheaply and to certain standards known as automotive grade. A lot of consumer electronics you can change up what you're using but you can't (or at least shouldn't) really with cars because so many things including safety systems are dependent on them, so when an OEM goes to Bosch or whoever and says 'I need 500 million of, specifically, these chips' they do mean those ones. Which have been tested to certain temperatures and using the wiring around them and for that job because cars are pretty dangerous/
Unless you're Tesla. But the debate about whether to really call Tesla an original equipment manufacturer so much as a prototyping stunt house that accidentally delivers cars aside, there is a good reason that what les disrupteurs like to call 'legacy automakers' don't just switch up whatever chips they're using to be what's available this week.
If a normal OEM's cars start doing anything like catching fire at random then they go to emergency stakes. Take, for instance, the Chevrolet Bolt recall: every single Bolt ever sold was given a totally new battery by LG and Chevy after a possible fault that might have led to fires while charging at home was discovered and the two couldn't work out a way to manage it without replacing hardware. In all likelihood, there was probably some fix that would have kept it under control from a software perspective with some compromise - the emergency hold that was put on the cars to stop them reaching a state of charge above 85% of the normal usable capacity, pending battery replacement, might well have been sustainable and it's only GM's older, cheaper, EV model after all.
But you can't, as Jaguar discovered with the I-Paces burning on the back of a truck that had nothing to do with their batteries, get away with the image that your EVs catch fire. Truth is, there's been too many videos of apparently spontaneous EV battery fires and it doesn't matter what the brand is, especially because it happens to be (most of the time) a brand that's synonymous with electric cars to the majority of the public.
So: how do you solve the problem? Some of it has to be trust exercises, like the the Bolt, where LG and GM swallowed massive costs in order to make damned sure nothing was going to happen and Bolt owners are some of the happiest around, their cars effectively refurbished for free.
And then it has to be (hello, day job) logistics, too. Checking that the fleet your freight provider is using is maintaining the brakes before your luxury SUVs head off on it. That the car transporter vessel you put your vehicles on knows how to deal with fires and avoid them reaching the cargo. Which is all very well, if freight was currently cheap or plentiful but there's a lot more begging than choosing in terms of moving cars around, right now.
It's probably very unlikely that a Porsche Taycan started the Felicity Ace fire and Porsche Taycans weren't the only vehicles with batteries onboard, in any case. But it's entered the public consciousness that it is. That video of a car carrier on the M1 was heavily replied to by truckers pointing out it was a brake fire but not before it had been widely retweeted (and continued to be) saying it was because the cars were EVs.
And there's going to be more of these. Disposable vapes getting crushed and setting fire to things, people's phones catching fire on planes, etc. Heck, there will be more EVs getting driven in irresponsible states of maintenance and more transport of battery cars with unsuitable machinery because we're just moving a lot more around than before.
But the thing is: batteries don't just go on fire. Oil just goes on fire, natural gas just goes on fire as its carbonating the North Sea but if you don't break batteries, then they don't. That doesn't mean they're not dangerous to make and full of chemicals or that they shouldn't be treated with respect, like any high voltage system.
There are a lot of people interested in fanning these flames, though. 2023 is gonna be a challenge for lithium but not in some of the ways that keep getting predicted (resource competition, etc)
Anyway, that was a hell of a ramble. Back soon-ish with my plan for 2023's new, improved, gossipier, funnier, shorter Car Science.
Hazel
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