About 25 years ago, I was working at a research institute with a good sized EV battery development program. Our EV Program built an experimental EV with a sodium sulfur battery. At that time, you had to keep the battery at about 600 degrees F to keep the salts molten (lots of work since then on lower temperature Na-S batteries).
Sure enough, one day the battery leaked liquid sodium-sulfur on the asphalt parking lot and WHOOM! up she went in flames. The fire took out a couple of employee cars on both sides of the EV.
So EV battery fires have been around a long time.
—”Sure enough, one day the battery leaked liquid sodium-sulfur on the asphalt parking lot and WHOOM! up she went in flames. The fire took out a couple of employee cars on both sides of the EV.”
I worked at BP R&D in Naperville, IL and we never had anything that exciting.
And I cannot even think about the safety review and the many repercussions!
But we did have an abandoned Nike missile silo, just outside my building and we could look it up on old maps.