The EV thread

[LP]

I saw figures a day or so ago where 80,000 litres of water were used to contain a recent EV fire.

Language is a trap.

We describe it as a fire but most batteries failed by short circuit causing an arc, what we describe as a fire is closer to arc welding. Some combustible / volatile components might flare but the arc itself in the core components cannot be easily extinguished, you can only cool them until they discharge or break the battery down into smaller constituent components, that is why the fire brigade stand guard to basically leave them to self-extinguish dousing the surrounding materials.

You can get some very nasty stuff coming out of the battery during "the fire", the arc temperatures are typically much higher than a typical fire and you can end up with a cloud of toxic metal vapours similar to welding hazardous metals.

We can assume all the other surrounding body and interior materials for EV or ICE are basically the same, so we only have to concern ourselves with the differences.