>

i'm sure the phenomenon exists elsewhere, but reddit is absolutely hysterical in this regard
infectious and blinding is a good description, this is an incredibly hateful website filled with incredibly hateful people masquerading as progressives  
Fortunately few of these opinions are prevalent in the real world, because the type of hatred espoused on this site is often restricted to the homebound & chronically online who are unable to form opinions outside of what is on the front page of reddit, or whatever "gotcha" they happen to have read on twitter that particular day
This is surreal - my brother and I drove past this wreck yesterday. The  highway patrol who cordoned off the lanes looked confused as Hell, it's nice to know why. >

There really isn't much anybody can do when these battery packs light off. You just have to get back, avoid breathing any fumes and let it burn. Nobody is putting that out, not even a direct hit from a water bomber. >

I'm surprised that they don't use sand since that's fairly commonly used to put out electrical fires anyway. >

They dump it in a tank of water for about 24 hours, otherwise it has a tendency to reignite. >

Stupid questions but where do we have giant car-tubs for this purpose? >

You can bring in a truck that has a big "bathtub" in the back, and a crane to lift the burning car into the tub. Then take it wherever. At least it clears the jam quickly. Just waiting in-place for days while it continues to block traffic is a bad strategy. >

"...the NHTSA researchers, and the study was issued in October 2017. The report concluded, "...ignition of flammable electrolytic solvents used in Li-ion battery systems are anticipated to be somewhat comparable to or perhaps slightly less than those for gasoline or diesel vehicular fuels..." so yes, EVs catch fire too. >

I think the stats on the road point to electric cars having at least 3 times less fires after an accident and the fires are slow starting instead of explosive like with gasoline cars. >

EV fires require quite a bit more water to extinguish, however.
Edit: Water on battery fires is dangerous, but I'm mostly referring to situations such as this as water is still used to extinguish EV fires. >

A ' bit more ' is quite a understatement. I'm all for EVs but their fires don't mess around. >

From the article:

Officials said no injuries were reported but that around 6000 gallons of water were used to extinguish the flames. Two fire engines, a water tender, and a ladder truck were used to help put out the fire. >

Now imagine a garage full of EVs and one decides to combust 😬 >

I'd like to see that experiment done. On YouTube.
Park two Teslas next to each other normal parking distance away from each other. Get the battery pack to undergo thermal runaway and catch on fire. See what happens to the second Tesla. See if the second Tesla's thermal management system keeps the car safe or if the fire spreads.
There was a Porsche and Volkswagon EV fire on a cargo ship that they couldn't put out for 6 days.... >

Just wait, they'll deploy an Autopilot update that allows a parked Tesla to flee an inferno... >

Now I'm imagining a parking lot full of frightened Teslas zipping around like panicked dodgems. >

Or worse, one tesla doggedly trying to escape itself as it hobbles towards the nearest exist like a wounded pup that someone set on fire. >

did their fire suppression subscription lapse? >

The people that comment on every electric car post on Facebook about to get really excited >

I work at GM, Teslas have the best battery safety at the moment because of a patent they hold on an encasing material.
You see them more often in the news because 1) there are significantly more Tesla's on the road, 2) Tesla is an easy target for media given Elon's fuck ups >

Great, a patent on a safety feature. The US is killing it(s citizens). >

Volvo is looking down at Tesla is pure disgust >


Metro Fire of Sacramento said the Tesla S Model was not speeding while driving eastbound on Highway 50 when its battery compartment suddenly caught fire. 

So just driving normally and suddenly on fire. That seems totally safe. >

I like how they clarify that car wasn’t speeding, as though it would be totally normal for a car to catch fire when it was speeding. >

It sounds silly, but batteries do get hotter when they're being drained faster, so I can see why they said it.  It would be somewhat  less weird if some jackass doing 120 on the highway managed to get his battery to catch on fire. >

Regardless of the speed, I'd expect the car to automatically throttle the discharge rate if its battery is overheating. Seems like a safety system failed if it was allowed to get itself hot enough to combust. >

Yup. If the car is going to let me get to 120. It will let me do so safely. Regardless of speed laws. >

True but if you got a high temp warning in a normal engine and continued to drive 120 (or 50, but especially 120) I think we would place some blame on the driver for what happens next.
To be clear I'm not aware there was any warning here, so my hypo has some differences >

I have a POS Chevy cruze (relevant because of known overheating issues), and it decreases engine power when it overheats. Which is totally great when you're in the left lane going uphill, but better than a fire.
Not having any overheating warning is terrifying though. >

Hey I have one too, and it overheats >

Me three. It’s a nonstop game of find the leak. If that that car were a horse, the humane thing would be to take it behind the stable and put it down. >

I don’t know shit about cars, but my gf has a Chevy Cruze, and I thank her for doing us a favor of testing out Chevy. Even the dealership tried fucking us over after they completely fucked the engine & forgot to put the oil cap back on.
Never again. >

Elon already on the phone with the 3 guys left at twitter demanding a quick change to algorithm to try to hide anyone talking about this story. >

"before or after I print my code?" >

I had a professor that made us print our coding assignments. I actively dislike him to this day. >

I had one for intro programming that made us write it by hand for exams >

Had a professor like that for oop and graphics programming class. We lost points if we didn't write out all the include statements correctly. >

I'm sorry but that professor was an absolute dumbass in that regard. This pisses me off. Lol like how in the fuck do these people justify shit like that?! Prepping y'all for 1960's era coding? >

Same reason they make you memorize sorting algorithms- so they have something to grade you on when in reality 99.9% of the time you’re gonna google that shit for a reminder. >

Yeah. I would love to see statistics on how many programmers can even come close to implementing merge sort or something off the top of their heads. My guess is that barely anyone would be able to do it unless they just took a class that required it or were actively prepping for whiteboarding (also dumb as fuck).
But I do think there's a lot of value in understanding those things front to back. It teaches you a ton of different important coding techniques that you can adapt to other projects. I couldn't implement tree or merge sort off of the top of my head but there are things I learned from doing them like that in school that have helped me a lot.
But I still think what the user I responded to described is just over the top dumb. >

How often does this happen with combustion cars? >

No fan of Tesla but combustion engine cars catch fire a lot more frequently than evs. I'm not sure they normally catch fire just driving along. All lot of times people pull over to the side of the road for some reason, inadvertently parking in some tall dry grass, it contacts the exhaust and catches fire directly under the car and then the whole thing goes up. >

There was also that ford Pinto model that had a tendency to blow up when rear ended. >

I work as a medic in Norway. 
I have been to so manny car accidents i can't remember all of them anny more. 
Manny was cars on fire. It's no secret that we have a lot of Ev's in Norway.
So far, i been to 0 ev's fire,
I don't know the stats in Norway in general in Ev cars that burns. But I am willing to bet my job.
Ice cars win this even if you take in count % ev/vs/ice cars. 
I may be corrected over the years to come. But as for now, Ev's wins Easy whit safes cars around.
Sorry for the bad English. >

Your English is fine. I wish I could speak Norwegian as good as you speak English >

As well as. >

But I guess it does make it an internal combustion engine >

External combustion engine >

Sounds like we just need a new system to extinguish EV fires. Its just a new technical hurdle but EV's are statistically far safer that ICE cars, as far as I have seen. Im not sure why a single car catching fire is even a headline. >

I love how EVs make news for catching fire but ICE (internal combustion engine) cars that have amazing amounts of fires every fucking day don't make news. >

Because ICE fires don't take 6,000+ gallons of water and two fire trucks to put out. >

water shouldn’t be used to put out fires in the first place, gasoline or battery. >

Water is the correct way to put out a battery fire, but you have to submerge it to stop the thermal runaway. Easily done when it's a smartphone you can put into a glass of water, not so much when it's a car you have to drop into a tank the size of a swimming pool. >

''When encountering a fire with a lithium-metal battery, only use a Class D fire extinguisher. Lithium-metal contains plenty of lithium that reacts with water and makes the fire worse.'' >


it was only when the battery was disconnected from charging, the robot was rolled outside of the lab, and a copious amount of water was delivered by a fire hose, that the fire was extinguished

Sounds like they forgot to disconnect the battery before attempting to extinguish. For class C (electrically caused) fires, the first step is always to remove current. Using water on a class C fire that hasn't been turned into a class A or B fire by disconnecting current is a spectacularly bad idea, and so is using water on a class D (metals) fire.
A - ashes - things that burn "normally" - water is fine 
B - boil - liquids that burn - use an extinguisher, water might push the fire around
C - current - electrical fires - remove current and then treat fire according to new class, it can reignite as long as there's power
D - dickered. You're dickered, the fucking metal is on fire - got any sand? >

My #1 question is not answered in the article: What year was this car made?  If it's an older model, that would still be bad, but it would at least make more sense. But if it's only a year or two old, then it's a very big deal. >

This is my thinking also. Comparisons of EV fires and ICE fires are largely irrelevant if the car is less than a year old and caught fire anyway. If it's a 10 year old EV with dust and rodents living inside of it then this isn't really a shock to anyone. >

Bruh, this part of California is currently as cold as it will get all year long. Unless the cold somehow played a factor the temps couldn't be better for mitigating excessive heat that might lead to a battery fire. >

So far cases like this were caused by a piece of debris on the road penetrating the bottom of the car. >

This is what happens when you don't pay your $8 >

This post and comments feel astroturfed to hell >

i think people are sick of the insane bias on reddit.  When musk was a god, all you heard was how perfect teslas are.  Now that he's literally satan, all you hear is how awful teslas are.
It's not objective and its frustrating to people like me who don't give a fuck about him.  
It feels as though because people have realised musk is a cunt, that they now must also hate tesla, and by extension every EV.  It's giving a lot of ammunition to the people who want us all to drive gas guzzlers for ever.  The same thing is happening with self driving.  Every self driving accident involving a tesla is highly publicised and reddit just laps it up.  
A story about a car catching fire on a freeway, something that literally happens hundreds or thousands of times per day all over the world, is #6 on reddit, because reddit is so emotional >

It’s not just the insane bias. It’s the laughably unintelligent playing dress-up as the savvy experts that just beg to be poked at. Like, cool. Hate Elon if that gets you hard. I really don’t care. But don’t let that hatred blind you to other things just because they have some overlap in their Venn diagrams. It’s lazy. It’s nonsensical. But the echo chamber gets into its harmonic resonance and simply cannot fathom that any reasonable person could disagree that hate should be as infectious and blinding. It is goofy goofy shit.