Electric cars will never be as safe as fossil fuel car. It's just the nature of how the energy is stored. Fossil fuel needs a conversion process to become energy. Batteries are energy at the ready.

Fossil fuel cannot self combust, it needs an outside ignition source.

Batteries on the other hand can self sustain a chemical reaction to self ignite, or get hot enough to ignite something else around it. It doesn't even need oxygen for that reaction to happen.

Describe it in another way, fossil fuel is Uranium ore, while batteries are Uranium at critical mass.

 

this is a very bizarre and mostly wrong view. Gasoline vapor is extraordinarily flammable with sparks or heat, not even open flame. Liquid gasoline readily forms vapor when exposed to air at standard pressures. No amount of smoking cigarettes is going to blow you up next to a BEV. Batteries are much safer in crashes. Even if several cells are punctured, they don’t explode in their entirety like a tank of gas. While the bev fire is more difficult to put out, it burns and expands more slowly.

few of the electric fires were in the absence of an outside source. These are almost always during charging, transferring a huge amount of energy and more importantly heat into the vehicle. AFAIK, the only exceptions involved damaged or defective cells. A gasoline car with a damaged tank or engine is extremely prone to catastrophic fire.

and this is just comparing gasoline with the current lithium ion batteries using liquid / gel electrolytes. It’s the electrolyte that is flammable. Solid state batteries are much more resilient and thermally tolerant.

chemically, gasoline has a lot more energy more densely stored in a much more unstable form. It’s fundamentally less safe.

 

Same for gasoline, can't be lit by a cigarette.

Damaged cells have higher chance of getting on fire than a damaged gasoline tank. Gasoline needs high temperature that is present only near the engine. Tank is in the back. Diesel even less likely.

Depends which chemical is used. Some explode.




As for gasoline vs EVs,
- Gasoline cars are safer at higher speeds
- while EVs are safer at lower speeds

The reason for that:
- once the speed is high enough for the cells to get damaged, it's very likely that the car gets on fire and occupants are heavily injured, possibly fainted.
- in a high speed crash, where the cabin gets damaged, occupants of EVs have more severe injuries than folks in gasoline cars, because the battery case has to be protected with a strong frame and the crumple zone ends basically at the boundary of the cabin/battery resulting in higher peak deceleration.

- in a low speed crash the better crumple zone of EVs (only on the front) smooths out the deceleration, resulting in less injuries.
- at low speed frontal crash gasoline can get on fire if fuel lines get damaged and spray around in the hot engine bay.

- in vehicle to vehicle crash (EV-ICE crash) EVs of the same size protect better since they are heavier = less deceleration.

 

Violently untrue. Liquid gasoline won’t but it vaporizes very easily once exposed to air. Gasoline vapor is insanely flammable.

 

Was that a lighter or a cigarette?

Youtube search, gasoline cigarette


.

 

excellent question. News reports allege cigarette but YouTube is full of ****. In any event, gasoline vapor is extraordinarily flammable, and will explode. liquid gasoline will aerate and vaporize quite easily at room temperature in a well ventilated area. It is vastly more dangerous than a lithium ion battery.

 

this article looks more credible, the cigarette's temperature is higher than the ignition temp of the gasoline, but there are cases when it doesn't ignite it
https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae1.cfm

 

gasoline has an energy density only surpassed by radioactive materials - the most explosive non-nuclear bombs in the US arsenal are fossil fuel based…no one builds bombs or weapons using LiON batteries.

Batteries have their issues, but they are no where near as dangerous as gasoline…

while a LiON battery wil catch fire, the gasoline next to it in the garage isn’t going to help matters, and will make it worse - but they don’t catch fire that often - so I’m fairly comfortable with all the LiON batteries in the world - and it’s just not cars - so lets please stop comparing something who’s sole purpose is to explode to something that provides electricity.

 

What can I say. Other than you can't read or comprehend? And you are completely WRONG!!

Go re-read what I posted please. I say fossil fuel cannot self combust, it needs an outside ignition source. <--------- see this part?

Gasoline, gasoline vapor or propane or whatever, CANNOT self ignite!

Saturn's moon Titan, has a giant lake of methane, so why doesn't it turned into a giant fireball and explode? Because THERE IS NO OUTSIDE IGNITION SOURCE!!!!!!

Put a damaged gas tank side by side with a damaged battery cell. The gas tank might leak gasoline till it's empty and then turned the whole room into a vapour filled chamber. But it won't ignite or explode, unless a source of ignition is introduced.

The damaged battery cell, however, can self combust. Even a minor defect inside the cell would be enough to make it go up in flames. See all those exploding Samsung phones before.

There is no arguing with physics and chemistry, it is what it is, heck, these are basic high school physics and chemistry.

EV are nothing more than a electric circuit. When the electrons flows as designed, nothing will happened. But when a short circuit is introduced somewhere in the loop, then heat and sparks will be generated. Because of resistance, a electric current will generate heat as a by product. higher resistance means higher temperature.

A battery cell is nothing more than a concentrated energy cartridge, if a circuit is designed correctly, the stored electricity will flow nicely out in a controlled manor and nothing happens, but if a short circuit is introduced somewhere, all the stored energy will release at once, just like a bomb.

 

Lol. The real world has no sparks or heat sources. There are definitely no heat sources in ICE impacts. Gasoline is much safer than the lithium ion battery in billions of phones and laptops. Or any of the other electronics throughout your house, car, and work. Which explode like BOMBs instead of distending, warping, melting and igniting. /sarcasm

You’re wrong about the basic energy stored in gasoline, which is more than 60x greater than a battery pound for pound. And its relative safety in the actual world which any teenage boy could tell you.

fossil fuels can auto ignite. It’s the premise of a diesel engine. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/f...res-d_171.html

titan’s moon doesn’t explode because it’s too cold. It receives energy from the sun. Which on earth can cause gasoline containers to explode in the trunks of cars and hot garages due to vapor pressure. Remember when I said gasoline vaporizes extremely easily ? Yes, so easily it can explode by pressure without even igniting. Very safe, the safest!

 

You know, the pit you are digging? It's getting deeper and deeper, soon you will come out of the other side of the Earth.

The article you quoted? Did you even read it?

It cites the auto-ignite temperature. What's the ambient temperature of Earth again may I ask?

It's way lower than the auto-ignite temperature.

Do I have to repeat myself again?

OUTSIDE SOURCE OF IGNITION!!!

To get to auto-ignite temperature of gasoline, or diesel for that matters, it NEEDS a EXTERNAL heat source to get to that temperature. Storing fossil fuel in ambient temperature, like you know, normal Earth temperature, it CANNOT ignite by itself, unlike battery cells, which, by the way, can 'auto-ignite' even in a unpressurized and un-temperature control cargo hold of an airplane in sub-zero temperature WITHOUT OUTSIDE IGNITION SOURCE.

And you actually answered yourself, Titan's temperature is way below auto-ignite point of methane, same thing as Earth's ambient temperature for gasoline or diesel.

You really don't have any reading comprehension at all, not from reading off the internet or your own writing. That's sad.

Thanks for linking the article though, it literally supports my side of the argument!