Making mechanics liable - maybe jointly as a business and an individual - for their failure to inspect vehicles properly would be a pretty simple mechanic to reduce this risk.
I'll take the inspections.
Battery fires are more frequently spontaneous, or occur during charging.
How many barbequed children do you find an acceptable number?
I think trying to use inspections to solve that is a case of barking up a really stupid tree. In the case of EV charging fires there's not really much a mechanic can inspect that some electronics cobbled onto the pack couldn't. In the case of battery pack damage an annual inspection isn't going to do much good since most of those cases will cause problems before that or not at all.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/28420/parked-teslas-keep-catch...
Article list 9 cases. None involved accidents. Several were during charging, one during transport (on a flatbed truck).
All are of
Of that, I’d say half of the initial failures are simple things that don’t require a mechanic, (dead bulbs, bad/low tires) and the rest require a me hanic to do something.
You implement mild inspection laws and they do nothing because people can just pay the fine or whatever.
You implement invasive inspections where people are rich and they do nothing because rich people already don't drive on bald tires and whatnot.
You implement invasive inspections where people are poor and you create incentives to circumvent the law and hardship among those who don't ignore the law.
Mechanical failure is a negligible cause of accidents and injury so applying lots of effort co chase something that's only a source of the minority of problems is kind of a fools errand to throw a ton of societal resources at it.
If inspections really make the roads safer it would be an insurance thing and you'd see differences in premiums that reflect differences in law, insurers setting up their own programs where none exist and lobbying states for inspection programs. You basically never even hear a peep out of them about safety inspections unless it's in the context of getting people to upgrade to a newer car with better safety tech. Contrast with intoxication, distraction and driver training which are issues that insurers and their lobbyists constantly weigh in on.
I suppose if the problem is widespread enough, every city will have a mobile dunk truck at the ready for electric vehicle fires.
As it is, I've lately been wondering about what happens to 14 year-old electric cars with dead batteries that cost more than the car is worth.
Cool stuff! And thanks for repurposing the motors.
Also, needing to plan for larger vehicles like a pickup truck would mean > 4,000 lbs of water to submerge one, base an approximate dimensions of such trucks & the corresponding volume of water.
Than again with batteries generally in the bottom of the car, maybe you'd only need to submerge a few feet?
I can definitely see the need for new emergency response equipment in the EV future.
Seems like something similar in design to this would do the trick, maybe with sufficiently thick steel plating on the side:
Except that the 22 year Model 3 also has a computer inside the battery that should be keeping things in check. Assuming the battery can even hold any charge at that age.
You know when you saw that old Chrysler Grand Caravan burning on the side of the road, and you hear the story that the person has been holding it together solely with thoughts and prayers and maybe $500 between tires and oil for the last 7 years of its 19 year life?
That's the current inevitability. I'm not worried about someone's 6-month old Bolt or 2-year old Model 3. The issue is when we're eventually talking about a 22-year old Model 3 that's had 13 years of deferred maintenance, is totally clapped out, and is only on the road because someone paid some mechanic off to look the other way during a state vehicle inspection for the past 5 years.
Germany is starting to standardize on towing an electric car away to dunk it in a tank to ultimately handle fires.