Unplanned things that happen to expensive cars

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Oliver Schick

This is really quite an incredible story. What I'm most interested in is the role that li-ion batteries are said to have played and apparently continue to play:

Felicity Ace, a specialist cargo ship carrying more than 4,000 cars, caught alight near the Azores on Wednesday evening. The vessel’s 22 crew members were evacuated but the fire continued to burn for several days, fuelled by lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles on board.

[...]

João Mendes Cabeças, the captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, told Reuters over the weekend that lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicles were “keeping the fire alive”, adding that specialist equipment was required to extinguish it. It was not clear whether the batteries sparked the fire.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/21/abandoned-burning-ship-had-400m-cargo-of-luxury-cars

I don't know if it's possible to remove batteries from cars like these easily, but it would surely seem sensible to do that if it is during such a voyage, and then re-insert them at or close to the destination port? Or are there reasons why that wouldn't work at all?

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Bobbo in reply to @Oliver Schick

The batteries sit as low as possible in the chassis as they are very heavy items and mounting them as low as possible makes for positive handling characteristics. Normally to remove a battery pack you need to completely separate the body from the rolling chassis and then lift out the battery pack.

You may have noticed that many electric cars have a higher roofline than their Internal combustion engined counterparts, this is because you are sitting on a 125mm(ish) pillow of highly flammable lithium-ion batteries. Its also worth noting that the batteries cannot be easily put out once ignited. Current thinking is to let them burn and minimise damage to the surrounding area in development is a shipping container that can be transported to the scene of a fire and filled with burning car + water.

The clever idiot Musk is openly talking about integrating the batteries into the chassis of the next generation Teslas because y'know its a great way of guaranteeing built in obsolescence.

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