- China tested a system that ejects an EV’s battery when it detects a fire.
- The smoldering pack is shot up to 20 feet away from the vehicle, keeping the people inside safe.
- It currently appears to be a risky solution, but it could be further developed to be safer for those around the vehicle.
Electric vehicle battery fires are no joke. While statistically less frequent than gas car fires, they do mean a bad day at work for any fire department.
Once one cell inside the pack ignites, it sets off a chain reaction that spreads from cell to cell and is extremely difficult to stop. This is known as thermal runaway, and scientists from all around the world are looking at ways to prevent it or mitigate its effects and keep occupants inside EVs safe.
China is at the forefront of EV tech, especially when it comes to charging and battery technology, and it’s also looking at implementing novel ways of making electric vehicles safer. One idea that was recently presented by the Chinese Vehicle Collision Repair Technical and Research Center, in collaboration with Joyson Electronics, takes this safety tech to a very odd place.
The video has been shared on a variety of Chinese social media platforms, and is now going somewhat viral here in the West. InsideEVs is attempting to learn more about the video’s provenance and the technology allegedly at work here.
They demonstrated an automated system that shoots the battery from underneath the vehicle less than one second after it detects that thermal runaway has occurred. This makes a lot of sense because it keeps the car itself from burning down and the occupants inside safe, but it’s also pretty alarming and potentially dangerous.
In the demonstration video, they show the pack being jettisoned from underneath the car with a bang. The system is designed to shoot the pack between 10 and 20 feet (3 and 6 meters) away from the vehicle, where emergency crews could handle it far easier than if it were still hidden in the underbelly of the vehicle.
While it might be easy to poke fun at such a solution, it at least tries to find a solution to EV battery fires. They are exceptionally hard to put out, so in many places in Europe, when emergency crews are called to handle a burning EV, they may roll up a huge water tank into which they submerge the vehicle to make sure the fire is put out and that it doesn’t reignite. It will actually keep burning underwater too, with temperatures reaching over 1,800°F (1,000°C).
Having just the battery pack to put out and not the entire vehicle going up in flames should make it much easier to put out. However, what you see in the video looks like the product of an early idea that still needs refinement to make it into a production vehicle.
In its current form, it couldn’t possibly be approved, since it would pose a serious danger to other vehicles or nearby pedestrians. A huge smoldering battery pack weighing hundreds of pounds hurtling through the air can do a lot of damage, and as shown in the video, this looks like more trouble than it’s worth.
But if an evolution of this system would work with the sensors and cameras around the car, even use artificial intelligence to make sense of what’s around, there might be something to this idea. The vehicle would also need to be able to control the force of the battery ejection, and even its direction, to minimize the risk of it causing damage or injuries around it.
This may not be the last time we hear of this seemingly ludicrous but not completely crazy idea.
