The news of repeated electric vehicle fires has become a key factor in people’s reluctance to use them.
According to data from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, 69 electric vehicle fire accidents occurred in Korea over the past four years from 2017.
The situation abroad is no different, so there are continuous cases of famous car manufacturers recalling their electric cars in bulk.
The key reason for the fire in the electric vehicle is the battery part.
Lithium-ion batteries are a typical example of electric vehicle batteries.
First, if the separator is damaged due to poor battery cell manufacturing,
Second, if the battery management system (BMS) software is defective,
Third, various hardware in the battery is faulty, etc.
There are many fires mainly caused by these three reasons.
【 Interview] Kim Pil-soo / Professor of Future Automotive Engineering at Daelim University (President of the Korea Electric Vehicle Association)
“Lithium-ion batteries themselves have high energy density, but the fundamental limitation is that if problems such as holes are caused by separators, thermal runaway occurs immediately and sparks occur even in water.”.”
If I have no choice but to continue using existing lithium-ion batteries, will I have to continue to suffer from fire accidents in electric cars?
There is a high possibility that this problem will be solved in time.
The lithium-ion battery used now uses a liquid electrolyte, because research on developing a solid electrolyte battery is currently underway at home and abroad.
This solid electrolyte battery does not have the risk of electrolytes flowing out due to external impacts and is significantly less likely to catch fire because it does not contain flammable materials.
It is expected that electric vehicles equipped with solid state batteries will be mass-produced in domestic and foreign markets around 2030.
Of course, before that, there’s a chance that we’ll inevitably see more of this kind of fire accidents.
One more from here!
The particular problem with electric vehicle fires is that unlike ordinary internal combustion engine vehicles, once caught on fire, the fire rarely goes out until the vehicle is burned down.
Since the flames are strong, there are many cases where vehicles around them are burned together.
Last month, Hyundai Motor’s Kona Electric (Kona EV) fire in Busan took nearly 30 minutes to extinguish the fire.
Last year (2021), Tesla’s electric vehicle Model S fire in Texas, USA, reportedly took as long as 7 hours to extinguish.
The total amount of fire water used at this time is 100,000 liters, which is equivalent to the amount used by a local fire station for a month.
As the fire response to electric vehicles has emerged as a task for the fire authorities, training to study professional countermeasures separately or apply them to reality is also being actively conducted.
I’ll come back
What are some parts of the existing electric vehicle model that are in urgent need of technological supplementation to prevent fires?
First of all, if there is a fire, we need an internal fire extinguishing system that first extinguishes the fire inside the vehicle, and we need a system that detects the heat generation in the vehicle early and helps passengers leave the car before the fire breaks out.
What electric vehicle users should be aware of is,
It is recommended to set a target amount of battery charging to prevent overcharging and to avoid fast charging that may raise the temperature of the battery rapidly.
Also, when driving, be careful not to impact the body as much as possible, and putting a fire extinguisher in the vehicle is one of the basics.
In 2016, there were only 10,000 electric cars registered in Korea, but more than 230,000 cars at the end of last year.
With steady growth, won’t the day come soon when everyone uses electric cars with confidence?