Brand New Ford EV F150s Catch Fire. Is This What You Call Greased Lightning?

Another reason why Automologist MAC think EVs are NOT the future of transportation. 

And they huffed and puffed…

I am sure that Ford is hoping that the new F150 EV will become the next hot commodity in the Big Blue line-up, but most definitely not like this. Footage that has just aired on the Americaland news channel, CNBC, shows the fire that ripped through a Ford holding lot in Michigan, a yard where Ford F150s were being held for final quality checks prior to charging and being released to the public.

The footage and some of the stills taken slightly later show three trucks merrily barbequing themselves. It is not clear from the footage how long the vehicles burned, EV fires are notoriously hard to extinguish, but the aftermath photos clearly show that the road surface had partially melted.
The event happened back in February and the footage was only released when the news station applied for the footage under the American Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This leads me to believe that this sort of event is both embarrassing and potentially more common than we are led to believe.

We are led to believe that EVs are safe and only have a problem when there is an accident, but a spontaneous fire like this of vehicles before they have been charged may indeed be a wake-up call for the industry. The comments from the emergency personnel attending the event also speak volumes:

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up,’ said one police officer.
‘It should be okay, the smoke is clear today,’ said another (not sure what that means).
‘We’re not putting this f****r out, look at it!’ said a third.
‘They will have to put a whole f*****g lake on it to put them out.’

Seems to me like they have experienced this before.

As a result of the fire, Ford did halt EV F150 production for five weeks and now claims to have the spontaneous combustion problem under control. The claim is that EVs are no more likely to become a BBQ pit than their Internal-Combustion-Engine-Powered cousins. That may be true but when an EV does go up, it is far more spectacular and so very often prove to be almost uncontrollable, bordering on a menace even to the trained professionals in the fire brigade.

Why are EVs so hard to put out? Well, we have covered this before, but in short, they are a self-contained fire waiting to happen. The lithium-ion cells contain flammable materials, like carbon in the form of graphite, and cathodes that release oxygen in ever greater amounts as they get hotter in a fire. So, once started, the fire is self-sustaining, allowing them to burn for hours. But worse still, they also have a propensity to reignite, sometimes days later.

The world’s authorities are still trying to convince us that EVs are the future of personalised transportation systems, but for sceptics like me, the darned things are going to have to stop spontaneously combusting before I am convinced.