Electric cars.

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The council here recently decided (without any consultations) to install 2 EV charging bays outside a 900 year old church right at the bottom of the path where hearses and wedding cars stop.

There's nothing around (shops etc) apart from the church so I really don't see the need for them.
 
There's nothing around (shops etc) apart from the church so I really don't see the need for them.

Maybe they are moving to electric hearses. ;)

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Our local Waitrose recently converted 8 parking bays into 2 transformer units and 6 bays with electric charging points.

In the last month, I've never seen a single electric car in there charging. They are either empty (most of the time) or occasionally a 4x4 is parked in them. 🤷‍♂️
 
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In the last month, I've never seen a single electric car in there charging. They are regret empty (most of the time) or occasionally a 4x4 is parked in them.
We have 12 in total 6 are in a supermarket car park that we dont use so i dont know how busy they are, the other 6 are in 3 pay and display car parks they have been there a while and its only in the last few months i have seen them being used in fact the one car park we use regularly (the one in the picture) has had a car on it every time we have visited lately.

As the chart below shows 16% of all new cars are EV and i imagine all of them have off street parking/charging so for the time being the majority of public chargers will be used by people occasionally traveling a long distance not by owners trying to run their EV solely on public chargers, empty spaces will be a common thing until people who dont have off street parking have the confidence they can run an EV solely on public chargers.
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https://newautomotive.org/blog/electric-car-count-april
 
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I've parked there I can't imagine coming back from hols to find you car is a burnt out shell....

A few snippets from the independent....

With flights set to be disrupted for most of the day, Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service has now revealed the cause of the blaze was a diesel car.
“We don’t believe it was an electric vehicle,” Andrew Hopkinson, chief fire officer for Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, said.
“It’s believed to be diesel-powered, at this stage all subject to verification. And then that fire has quickly and rapidly spread.”

AA technical expert Greg Carter said the most common cause of car fires is an electrical fault with the 12-volt battery system.
He added that diesel is “much less flammable” than petrol, and in a car it takes “intense pressure or sustained flame” to ignite diesel.

Cars usually need to be be running for this to happen. At least it seems arson is off the table.

Threads merged as it turns into a discussion about EV fires - Admin.
 
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No EV in the vicinity then?
A few months ago there was a car transport vessel ablaze off the Dutch coast. Took ages for the salvagers to put out the fire which was down to an EV. News said they had more than 50 EVs loaded apart from non-EVs. And ports weren't keen to let the ship dock as nobody is really prepared for EV fires.
But what about the car park collapsing ....
 
Cars catch fire occasionally...the same for ICE cars and EV's, though ICE cars tend not to catch fire when turned off and stationary and usually the result of poor maintenance or damage, and in some cases manufactures defects, such as Ferrari suffered some time ago. Boeing had and issue with Lithium Ion batteries spontaneously combusting when they first started using them on 787's (never good on aircraft) but they fixed that, and laptop batteries a few years ago had a penchant for spontaneously combusting too, but again we seem to have sorted that out too.

Car park collapsing is interesting. IF it was a diesel car that caused the fire then they can be handled quite easily and put out and don't really burn with that much ferocity in the first place, certainly not enough to damage concrete, but with structural damage to the car park suggests a far more intense and sustained fire has been raging which they have been unable to extinguish. So either way, sounds like one or more EV's have been involved even if they didn't start the fire making it more difficult for emergency services to deal with.
 
From eye witness reports i don't believe for one minute it was a diesel and the intensity of the fire caused a partial collapse of the car park. this has EV written all over it
 
“We don’t believe it was an electric vehicle,” Andrew Hopkinson, chief fire officer for Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, said.
“It’s believed to be diesel-powered, at this stage all subject to verification. And then that fire has quickly and rapidly spread.”

Amazing how its gone from the quote above to -

this has EV written all over it


Here is a 2009 test video, a small fire was started on the armrest of the left hand car and by 8 minutes they were both alight imagine how much worse it would have been had there also been one on the other side, once the fire reached the petrol tank it would have been an inferno.

 
Maybe damage limitation by HM Government going on here
Well there was certainly alot of damage limitation going on around that car transporter that was a floating inferno for a month or so off the coast of the Netherlands a few months ago. Alot of "nothing to see here, no EV's on board"...then it was "there were only about 50 EV's on board, but still nothing to see here, it is entirely normal to have a huge burning transporter floating off your coast for a month that we can't extinguish".....then it turned out there was about 1500 or so EV's on board. Still think that several months on there has been no official statement about what happened on the ferry. All very quiet as if nothing happened at all.

I just get their feeling that sometimes political policy is getting ahead of actual physical capability....like James Bond Tomorrow Never Dies where the Media is making the news...
 
Amazing how its gone from the quote above to -




Here is a 2009 test video, a small fire was started on the armrest of the left hand car and by 8 minutes they were both alight imagine how much worse it would have been had there also been one on the other side, once the fire reached the petrol tank it would have been an inferno.


Well at least a few squirts of foam from a fireman's hose would have it sorted in a relatively short space of time....but this on the other hand....

 
Well at least a few squirts of foam from a fireman's hose would have it sorted in a relatively short space of time....but this on the other hand....

Its not just EVs that are a problem when they catch fire as this and my earlier video shows and the squirt didn't work out too well here ;)

Watch this for 15 seconds and see what happens when the petrol tank goes if that had happened in the car park it wouldn't have taken long for the rest to follow suite.

 
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I am not saying EV fires are not a thing and are not a big problem when they happen but when you look at the stats below and compare them to how many EV battery fires have been reported in the UK it really is a drop in the ocean.

How many plug-in cars are there in the UK?
As of the end of September 2023, there were more than 1,450,000 plug-in cars, with around 900,000 battery-electric vehicles and 550,000 PHEVs registered.
Last year, more than 365,000 plug-in hybrid and battery-electric cars were registered, showing a growth of 20% on 2021.
 
I'm always wary of the word Believe. Like the phrase 'I believe in god'.

Whatever started the fire a bunch of Big Li-ion powered cars going up just increases the danger, because more toxic chemicals than an ICE car and an exothermic reaction.

A certain Mr John Cadogan said on his auto expert channel when not if this happened the incident would be worse.

Now travel into the future where we all have ev's, the newly built car parks will have extra safety measures in mind to mitigate this risk*

* - Unless we've found a safer battery chemistry, although generally speaking storing large amounts of energy always carries a risk and please before you say 'Hydro is safe' , that will be because we really know how to build dams. Whereas there are going to be lessons learned the hard way it seems with EV's.

Shameful thing is , it doesn't have to be this way **, oh hang on we live in capitilistic society, so maybe that's how it rolls.

** if you build car parks with firewalls between each car that would solve 2 problems, 1 - your car is less likely to get a car door ding from whoever parks next to you 😊, and of course a car fire would be contained to a single bay, however I point you to my earlier comment about the society we live in.

@chippytea - I understand why this was merged into EV cars, we don't have all the facts in at ground zero for the first vehicle to catch fireother than the car park had partially collapsed. I always thought that carpark needed more concrete anyways. I'm sure I parked there at the end of 2018 so surely it wasn't designed to mitigate against the increased risks ev's can bring.
 
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Its not just EVs that are a problem when they catch fire as this and my earlier video shows and the squirt didn't work out too well here ;)

Watch this for 15 seconds and see what happens when the petrol tank goes if that had happened in the car park it wouldn't have taken long for the rest to follow suite.


That could have been the li-on battery if it was a hybrid. wink...

but totoya's are usually bullet proof so heavens knows why it happened.:confused.:
 
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