ABC AM interviewed Catriona Lowe, deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, last Thursday to discuss the fire risk of battery charging. She was speaking after an electric scooter exploded in a fireball at a backpacker hostel in Sydney last Wednesday.
Lowe called for a government consumer awareness campaign about the dangers of lithium-ion batteries that now power everything from phones to vacuum cleaners, power tools and cars.
A few weeks earlier, on September 12, five cars were destroyed at Sydney’s Mascot Airport after a battery detached from a luxury EV ignited.
This column discussed media reporting of EVs on February 6 and on November 15, 2021, but did not mention the difficulty of extinguishing EV fires because of what firefighters call the thermal runway. Global figures make clear EV fires are rare.
But they are an issue. The specialist US motoring website hagerty.com has explained in detail why many country US race tracks are refusing to let EVs or hybrids compete. It says there are only two ways to deal with lithium-ion battery fires: “Douse a fire with water to cool it down: a lot of water, between 3000 gallons (11,356 litres) and 30,000 gallons depending on the incident. Cooling takes 100 times more water than a gasoline fire.” The other method is to let the fire burn out and then submerge the entire smouldering wreck in water.
EV batteries can be compromised in even small vehicle accidents and that is when they become dangerous. This is now feeding into soaring insurance premiums in the UK, where the Guardian and the Express newspapers have reported EV insurance premiums are set to rise by up to 1000 per cent.
The Guardian on September 30 reported on a young man who bought a Tesla Model Y. When his policy renewal fell due his insurer refused to reinsure the car. When he finally found a company that would his annual premium had risen from £1200 ($A2290) to £5000 in one year.
The Guardian mentioned the increased cost of repairing EVs but did not get to the heart of the issue.
The battery is about half the cost of a new EV and batteries that sit under the car floor are easily damaged in quite minor accidents. Repairers say fixing batteries is extremely difficult and insurers are tending to write off even quite new cars if there is even slight damage to the battery.
This was the problem with the Sydney Airport fire. The car’s battery had been damaged, and damaged batteries are more likely to catch fire.
A March 21 Reuters report written from London and Detroit says: “For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or even assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents, forcing insurance companies to write off cars with few miles … And now those battery packs are piling up in scrap yards in some countries …”
The report says the UK has no battery recycling facilities so batteries from damaged cars have to be removed and stored separately in fireproof containers.
Thatcham Research, the UK car insurance industry’s central safety research group, said EVs were 25.5 per cent more expensive to repair than normal cars and repairs took 14 per cent longer.
It identified the most significant challenge for the industry as “insurance claims originating from high-voltage battery damage”. It said batteries “represent a substantial percentage of the original vehicle value” and “negatively impact the economic model of vehicle repair … due to their cost as a percentage of the car’s market value.”
Why do motoring journalists not mention any of this?
Surely buyers need to know if their new car insurance premiums are about to soar.
One senior industry figure this column spoke to said the real problem with fires in EVs was a lack of data.
Politicians were pumping out incentives for EV purchase before they really know what the risks might be.
He cited the potential dangers of EVs charging in parking facilities under residential buildings and the possibility fires could spread dangerous chemicals through building airconditioning systems.
A spokesman for the Insurance Council of Australia said it was too early to know what effects EV repair costs would have on premiums here but did suggest the cost of importing parts, scarcity of EV service centres and problems with battery repair and disposal would be an issue.
Taking up the challenge, Fire and Rescue NSW in July launched a two-year project called Safety of Alternative Renewable Energy Technologies looking at lithium-ion fires, end-of-life battery hazards and EV fires in structures such as parking garages.
The website EVFireSafe.com, set up by the federal government, is a good place to start if you want to understand why lithium-ion fires are difficult to control.
Yet the fire risk of batteries to owners pales when compared with the risk the manufacture, transportation, storage and disposal of used batteries poses to the global environment.
Detailed studies on carbon abatement show many EVs in the Western world charged on power grids still largely dominated by fossil fuel electricity production may take up to five years of driving to repay their manufacturing carbon deficit compared with internal combustion engine cars.
That falls to one year on grids powered by renewables or nuclear power.
This initial carbon deficit in the manufacturing stage is about 40 per cent of total vehicle life cycle emissions, according to McKinsey, and “can be attributed to the extraction and refining of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are needed for batteries, as well as the energy-intensive nature of battery manufacture”.
Here’s the rub for planet Earth. Most EVs exported around the world, including Teslas, are made in China, and China also dominates lithium-ion battery manufacture, even for cars assembled elsewhere.
Yet China is the world’s largest emitter of CO2 and its emissions are rising faster than emissions are falling in the West.
That is, Western countries are destroying their domestic motor vehicle manufacturing industries to hand over that comparative advantage, and the corresponding jobs, to China. Yet China is lifting emissions of greenhouse gasses that EV use is designed to reduce.
There are signs consumers are wising up in the US where EV sales have fallen sharply this year, price discounting led by Tesla and Ford has spread, and more than 100,000 new EVs sit in new-car lots. Demand is still strong here.
Few journalists will write it, but it is hard to justify putting up with EV range anxiety and the extra trouble finding charging stations while still paying the large premium over conventional car prices. This is simple technology that won’t do the planet much good, at least until electricity across the world is made without emissions. And the mining of many of the rare earths needed to make batteries is dangerous in some poor countries, both for the people working in mines and for the environment.
EVs, with instant torque and a low centre of gravity, are fun to drive. Not much can go wrong with them, maintenance is generally cheap and they make sense for city driving when constant stopping helps battery recharge.
Just don’t do anything to damage your battery.
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Lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles are both their biggest plus and most dangerous threat – to owners and the environment.