After Hurricane-Caused Flooding, Some EVs Exposed To Saltwater … – Slashdot

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If you live along one of the coasts salt is almost always in the air, even higher amounts during storms. Would exposure to salt air on a continual basis have the same effect?
You can hear sizzle and pop around high voltage lines anywhere it isn’t bone dry. Salt spray has nothing to do with it.
>”Salt alone isn’t a conductor.”
Water, alone, also isn’t a conductor. But water is so good at dissolving things, it almost always has ions present that make it a conductor.
I’ve never seen water nor salt directing an orchestra.
With a few more impurities added, you get a human.
My experience living on the coast is the salt spray eats everything exposed on the outside. Wheel wells rust out. Any scratch in the paint will rust. But it doesn’t get deep inside. Up above the frame is sheltered enough from the wind that it wasn’t a problem. On an EV I would expect the bottom of the battery box to corrode, but as long as it doesn’t rust through, the interior should be fine.
Northern snowy climates are much worse on vehicles because of the salt they put on the roads.
+1 million points informative.
Part of it is how some automakers have moved ECUs from inside the firewall (where it is climate controlled usually, and out of the elements) into the engine compartment, where they are exposed to salt, road grime, and whatever splashes up.
Potting or a conformal coating is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it makes resoldering components difficult to impossible, but on the other hand, it can prevent issues in the first place by keeping stuff from being able to get to the board in the first place, as well as help with heat issues.
On one hand, automotive design is a solved problem. There are ways to make vibration resistant harnesses, pot boards to ensure that even direct contact with salt spray won’t cause issues, keep all the critical stuff on the other side of the engine firewall, and in some cases, even using fiber optics for communication to ensure voltage issues fry fewer parts. However, in the pressure to make things cheaper, these basic things tend to get thrown out the window, just because it is a good way to sell more cars. “The car’s computer is fried, sorry, nothing we can do except offer $250 for the trade-in value, and we have some new models you only have to wait four months for, selling for just $5,000 over sticker.”
Would exposure to salt air on a continual basis have the same effect?
Not sufficiently to cause a hazard. You would need to have Salt and Water collecting on the unit at the same time. Also material from the air such as humidity is so low in amount, that if the air actually deposited enough water to form a weak electrical contact – the extra heat would allow that humidity to evaporate right back out, so that a sufficient amount of water never collects to cause a higher current.
In a humid environment with salt in the air will likely give you energy loss and extra discharge of the batteries (Plus extra corrosion) over a longer period of time due to conductivity between poles and corrosion, But not big enough acutely to actually short cells.

If you live along one of the coasts salt is almost always in the air, even higher amounts during storms. Would exposure to salt air on a continual basis have the same effect?
This is why you’ve got to really check for rust on a car that’s been living by the coast.

However I highly doubt exposure to salty air is going to cause any issues with lithium based batteries, otherwise we’d have regular reports of laptops and phones catching fire in seaside towns. The issue is that the cells were submerged in salt water, not just the corrosivity of it, but it’s also a conductor so can easy create the kind of shorts and voltage issues that cause lithium based batteries to conflagrate.
Did I just get rick rolled?
>> I would think that any EV or hybrid that was been subjected to saltwater immersion should be totaled and the battery decommissioned.
Any immersed car is totaled.
EV or not, saltwater or not.
The water just enters and corrodes everything.
People reselling those cars to unsuspecting people put those people in danger.
What about 4WD cars with snorkel, fording creeks or rivers?
You definitely can kill the Toyota Hilux, but only by crushing it with a pallet of Nokia 3310 phones.

Pure water is non-conductive. Just wash it all off with lots of de-ionized (non-salt) water to flush away any salt that may have been deposited. Do not attempt to power on until after all salt has been flushed out of the electronics
How do you know where the water has gone? If you safely assume everywhere then maybe re-submerge the entire car in pure water for a while. Maybe.
We all know the answer is a garage filled with rice

Frankly, I would not submerge the entire car.
Neither would I, but I wouldn’t buy one where they just “washed it off” either. Buy or sell salvage cars to your hearts content, so long as everyone knows up front it is all good. They are never going to be reliable cars again though. Caveat Emptor.

Do not attempt to power on until after all salt has been flushed out of the electronics, otherwise an unintended electric arc could apply power to the wrong bits and potentially cause serious permanent damage to the vehicle
Like worse than being submerged?
The article cites only two actual cars bursting into flames.
This is just a FUD article.
Yes, so by all means, we should ignore a fairly obvious failure mode until more people get killed.
It’s FUD because the advice is actually the same for ICE vehicles.
Knew a guy who parked in the wrong spot when a flash flood happened. They just totaled his vehicle out.
I’ve seen people buy cars that had been submerged… the dealers know (if there’s no dealer record, and no report against the serial number, the mechanic will figure it out in seconds anyway).
Nobody wants to work on them because every contact that can be reached by water will be corroded.
General rule: do not allow your car to be submerged in water, they’re not built for that.
However, the risk of fire due to submersion is not really present in an ICE vehicle. That’s a ‘win’ for the EVs.
However, the risk of fire due to submersion is not really present in an ICE vehicle. That’s a ‘win’ for the EVs.
No it isn’t. After Hurricane Sandy, a bunch of Fisker EVs parked in the NJ Port caught fire. You can find plenty of news articles on it – https://www.motortrend.com/new… [motortrend.com]
What shorted out? It wasn’t the high voltage system.
It was the 12V system that shorted out and caused them to catch fire.
The high voltage system is, well, full of high voltages. Manufacturers take lot of precautions around it bec
You’re horribly confused.
You’re comparing an electrical fire in an ICE, as caused by an electrical short, to a chemical fire caused by an electrical short (or water penetration of a cell) in a (lithium powered) EV.
Entirely different things.
>”It’s FUD because the advice is actually the same for ICE vehicles.”
It is sensationalized, for sure, but welcome to mass media reporting.
In any case, the advice might be the same, but a previously-submerged ICE vehicle is far less likely to spontaneously burst into flames. And an EV fire is really, really bad- almost impossible to extinguish. If your car is in your garage at the time, that could be a huge disaster.
>”You say that as if an ICE is easy enough to extinguish to matter.”
Not at all.
>” A burning ICE will burn out unless you have a fire truck standing right next to it when it starts to burn.”
You can typically extinguish an ICE engine fire with a simple fire extinguisher. And engine fire is the vast majority of ICE fires and they most always happen while the engine is/was running. Of course it can and often will get bad, especially if not fought quickly.
But in the case of a lithium ion battery fire, removal of oxygen doesn’t help much, so a fire extinguisher is useless. Even with a fire engine right there, all they can typically do is continuously douse it, in an attempt to prevent other things from catching fire and wait for it to eventually exhaust its “fuel”.
… and how is catching fire the same as being totaled out due to damage from flooding?
Not even comparable.
I’ve bought once-flooded vehicles. There is dirt and corrosion where you don’t expect it, and you might have more maintenance than an unflooded vehicle because of it, but nothing readily perceptible after initial damage occurs.
(There were so many flooded-out vehicles on the market after the entire state of NE flooded back around 2010, it was hard to avoid.)
> Knew a guy who parked in the wrong spot when a flash flood happened. They just totaled his vehicle out.
Yeah, an hydrolocked engine is totally the same as a car self immolating. If I had to pick, 100% of time I’d rather have my ass seated in a car with an hydrolocked engine.
Jeremy hates electrics anyway.
Salt water is amazingly destructive to automobiles and immersion merits scrapping. Unscrupulous resellers will always try to profit from flood cars but many parts like electronics are ruined when immersed.
Why isn’t “when water reaches X level, initiate battery disconnect and seal off connectors” the captain obvious solution?
What do you think it is, a Starfleet shuttle?
The best technology we have for that is what’s called a breaker (or a fuse).
The problem is that EVs are effectively made of lithium: a metal which reacts explosively to water.
Add electrical current (ie a battery) and you’ll get rapid corrosion and exposure to the elements. Instant fire.
there is, at most, a kg of lithium in an electric car…
Wet things don’t typically burn… unless it’s water that causes them to burn.
You might have a small electrical fire on a wet ICE vehicle… but the water will actually cause a small inconsequential electrical fire which might otherwise self-douse turn into an explosive fire almost immediately.

The Way Forward is walkable cities
There is the theoretical utopian walkable city where everyone is super nice and everything is clean and the weather is always pleasant.
Then there is the reality of city congestion, predators, and crap weather to contend with.
You can have it, but I’m never moving there.
That’s it. I’m moving to Lake Wobegon tomorrow!
I’d rather walk when it was snowing than when it was raining.
And I do – its only a mile to where I work.
Oh and umbrellas don’t work when its windy.

So if you’re talking about people being nice when I’m guessing you’re worried about is crime and I’m guessing that’s because you’re thinking like the sort of person who did a classic white flight. That’s only a problem when you abandoned the cities to poverty because you consider some citizens to not deserve a decent quality of life. It’s a problem that is completely solved by guaranteeing all citizens and acceptable quality of life.
As for poor weather we live in the year of our Lord 2023 and there’s this glorious invention called the umbrella. When you’re talking about a walkable City you’re talking about a city that you really can just walk anywhere you need to be. Sure there will be places you want to be that are further away but need to be will be in walking distance. So the short of being snowed in there’s no problems and if you’re snowed in you aren’t getting in your car, electric or otherwise.
Here’s a nice walkable city for you that I’m never living in: https://www.fox29.com/news/for… [fox29.com] , “I did a year in a war zone in Iraq, did 2 years in Ukraine, and would not have expected this to happen in my own neighborhood,”
I grew up in a very walkable city. It was crowded and dirty and dangerous decades ago, and it’s a lot worse in every way now. You can have it, it’s my gift to you. I’m done with subway trains and city busses and knowing which streets have the most dangerous alleys and everything bein
That’s weird, the office is a 20min drive and almost everything else is a 10min walk.
I guess I should wake up and join your dystopian nightmare.
why would you need to go to the office, apart to satisfy the real estate fantasies of thos multinational corporations that possess those office buildings ?
Walkable doesn’t mean you can’t get on public transport, it just means that public transport doesn’t have to go right to your door or the door of the place you are visiting.
Japan is a great example of that. It has an excellent rail network, which is joined to an excellent bus network. Together they mean you can go most places easily without a car, and a little bit of walking. In fact, it’s often faster than trying to get through traffic in the big cities.

The Way Forward is walkable cities
While it is a way forward, it is unlikely to be the way forward for one simple reason: time. The first walkable city required a concerted effort over 20 years before it was walkable. That of course only happened because the people in it wanted it to be walkable.
What is currently happening is science and engineering are pushing the development of solid state batteries forward. They are considerably lighter and don’t have the thermal runaway problem which also makes them easier to manufacture.

Never mind the fact that we are rapidly getting to the point where cars are too expensive for rank and file citizens to own without sacrificing every other aspect of their quality of life.
I bought a used

unless you could deploy them in semi trucks which currently you cannot (they can’t haul enough load for the range).
Yes, trains are preferable to trucks. Long haul trucking needs to be done away with.

You might find that an EV makes economic sense for you personally but that’s only because of a massive amount of subsidies and externalized costs that aren’t sustainable.
You act as if the cost of batteries hasn’t been plummeting.

The whole system isn’t sustainable. It’s either going to collapse when…
“Men and nations do the right thing when they have exhausted all other options,” which means the deal shall be altered. Also, if you hadn’t noticed, work-from-home was just proven to be a viable option and has taken root.

or it’s going to become a rather horrible dystopia…
What do you mean become? The dystopian present is upon us. The current economic system is a powder keg and it’s going to explode in an uncontrollabl

And the used market is terrible. Cars hold their value entirely too long now because people are holding on the cars longer because of the higher costs. It’s fine to say that they last longer but that’s not a help if you’re just starting out in life and you’re facing the lower pay that the kids get versus their parents and grandparents.
What’s “entirely too long”? People hold on to their cars longer because they last longer. So if the cars last twice as long and hold their value twice as long, then that just means that people with limited income have to buy used cars that are twice as old to get them at the equivalent price, but they’ll still last twice as long once they buy them on the used market, so they’re still probably better off, assuming you don’t run into something idiotic, such as a state refusing to license a car older than a
And yes, I’ve watched Adam Something’s videos.
You might have a point but the problem is that we have other much bigger problems that need to be solved that EVs don’t fix.
Again, EVs only solve — and are only intended to solve — the two problems I listed previously. Alleging that EVs are proffered by some to solve more that those two problems only so you can retort they don’t solve those problems is disingenuous.
You cannot say they reduce carbon emissions if the means to recharge them is using fossil fuels.
Except renewable power generation is rising fast [euronews.com]. And when a given power generation area goes renewable, all EVs in said area immediately benefit.
So what would you have us do? Wait until all power generation is 100% renewable before anybody can buy an EV? Perfect is the enemy of good.
Charging EVs via electricity generated from fossil fuels is still less polluting than having ICE cars burn those fossil fuels themselves. It’s much easier to have better and more efficient pollution-mitigating filters at large plants, too.
And once an area finally gets less polluting energy sources, EVs are already there to take advantage of it.

The Way Forward is walkable cities.
I didn’t just walk out of the city, I drove out of it as fast as possible without breaking any speed laws. The only appeal of city living is that it might have good Internet. I live in the suburbs, and have gigabit fiber. If I could have that out on a couple hundred acres, I would be in heaven.
what nonsense. public transportation means no one has to walk, and cars can be self-driving and form trains with either ICE or electric vehicles in a city to make a similar thing.
walking everywhere is for savages. being penned in to a few miles is for medieval peasants.

Look up the YouTuber Adam Something. He’s got several good videos explaining why cars will never solve the problems with transportation that a modern civilization has. Because we all grew up with the things we don’t really consider what we’ve had to give up in order to have them. Things like the enormous amount of real estate devoted to parking or the heat Islands in our cities that can’t be eliminated let alone the hours and hours spent in traffic. And that’s all before we consider that the majority of smog in your city is little particulates of tires. Seriously Google it.
If that isn’t a load of horseshit, I don’t know what is. I looked up some of his videos. How suburbs destroyed America [youtube.com] is one. I think you’re looking at the problem as just a city dweller. Yes. Cars in the city are a PITA. But there’s a whole style of living outside of cities and Adam Something’s video which I linked to above is full of lies regarding the suburbs. I don’t have the energy to dissect that video, but even if I did it’s not worth my time. FYI: most people live outside of cities, at leas

The Way Forward is walkable cities.
A walkable city doesn’t solve my 50km commute to the middle of bumfuck nowhere where it doesn’t make sense to run train or bus services.
Even people who promote walkable cities recognise there’s a place for cars in their utopian world.
ask yourself if that 50km commute makes any sense

The Way Forward is …
Another true believer proselytizing to us, the unwashed masses, the secret to salvation after a lot of penance.

Look up the YouTuber Adam Something. He’s got several good videos explaining why cars will never solve the problems with transportation that a modern civilization has. Because we all grew up with the things we don’t really consider what we’ve had to give up in order to have them. Things like the enormous amount of real estate devoted to parking
…which is kind of unavoidable at a lot of stores. Ever try to carry lumber or a new oven on a New York subway? Bus? Uber? The fact of the matter is that most stores that have a lot of parking also have people buying a lot of stuff at once, and it isn’t really practical to remove that parking no matter what you do.
And the folks who say, “Shop at your small local grocer” are really saying “Pay 50% more (at least) for everything you buy.” Big box stores are able to provide low markup precisely because they’re able to sell in volume, but that means they have to sell to a lot of people, which means they’re geographically distributed, and are almost certainly not walking distance from your apartment. And you can’t bring a grocery cart on public transit. So the reality is that those big parking lots (or at the very least parking garages) really aren’t avoidable in the real world.

or the heat Islands in our cities that can’t be eliminated
… and won’t go away no matter what you replace the roads with, because the heat islands are principally caused by having buildings so close together that they prevent airflow to cool down everything, including the buildings themselves. They’re a fundamental property of high-density living, and any alternative to individual vehicles inherently requires high-density living, so complaining about cars as if eliminating cars and roads would somehow fix the heat island problem is downright backwards. The heat island effect is caused by people not spreading out enough for cars to be required.

let alone the hours and hours spent in traffic. And that’s all before we consider that the majority of smog in your city is little particulates of tires. Seriously Google it.
Meh. Traffic and smog are both caused by having too many people in too small a space. And no, tires are not a majority of smog. Depending on which study you believe, the total percentage of particulates from cars could be anywhere from 15% [washingtonpost.com] to 52% [greencarreports.com], but most of that comes from brakes, not tires. And thanks to regenerative braking, that portion is on its way down.
The critical component for smog, of course, is ozone. And again, as EVs replace ICE cars, that’s on its way down, too.
So basically, your reasoning is a decade out of date at this point.
And of course, given that half the particulates come from something other than cars, arguing that eliminating cars solves the problem seems prima facie absurd. Smog is an urban problem caused by having too many people living too close together. The way to solve that is to spread out more.

Never mind the fact that we are rapidly getting to the point where cars are too expensive for rank and file citizens to own without sacrificing every other aspect of their quality of life.
In pretty much any medium-sized city, you can find literally hundreds of used cars for under $2,000, which is likely less than you’d pay for a year worth of public transit fares. To be fair, that’s not the total cost, because you also have fuel and insurance and maintenance, but that’s also probably only 20% of the real cost of that public transit fare, were it not being massively subsidized by taxpayer dollars. In fact, in some cities, it would actually be cheaper to give everyone below the poverty line $10,000 in Uber fares than continue to subsidize the public transit systems. Public transit really isn’t very practical, and never has been. The only reason anybody puts up with it at all is because it is the only way to deal with high urban density. But the solution isn’t to make people more dense so heavily subsidized, overpriced transit is required to get around. The solution is to not try to pack everyone into tiny little boxes built up to the hundredth floor.

The Way Forward is walkable cities.
No, not even remotely. I’ve spent a decent amount of time in walkable cities. My experience has been that they smell, there are people doing heroin on the sidewalks at night, and everything costs half again more to twice as much as it does in the suburbs. That sort of environment might appeal to some people, but that infatuation tends to end at about age 30. The people still living in the cities after that are mostly stuck there because the jobs are there.
We’d all be better off if they bulldozed all those giant heat islands and spread people out more. If the pandemic didn’t clearly demonstrate why high-density living is backwards and misguided, I really don’t know what will. Solve the commute problem by building road networks that are designed for high traffic flow, with roundabouts instead of traffic lights, long enough ramps for vehicles to reach the speed limit before merging instead of just 25 MPH coming off of a metering light, and freeway exits designed to get you away from the freeway quickly enough that popular exit ramps don’t back up all the way onto the freeway. Add additional freeways as needed so that every major road has at least alternate route that is viable for when there are accidents. And push for more driver assistance in cars so that they don’t have so many accidents.

Ever try to carry lumber or a new oven on a New York subway? Bus? Uber? The fact of the matter is that most stores that have a lot of parking also have people buying a lot of stuff at once, and it isn’t really practical to remove that parking no matter what you do.
Such stores in Japan often partner with local delivery companies, or will even lend you a van for free for an hour. Any cost is typically more than offset by not having to own a huge truck all the time.

And the folks who say, “Shop at your small local grocer” are really saying “Pay 50% more (at least) for everything you buy.”
In the UK we have local branches of big supermarkets, who have the same prices.

heat islands are principally caused by having buildings so close together that they prevent airflow to cool down everything
That’s a contributing factor, but dark tarmac and lack of shade are the big ones.
Wouldn’t it be easier to simply make hurricanes illegal? After all, they damage a lot more than EVs.
considering you can’t get insurance there, living in Florida is already illegal
We were told that when the battery starts to fizz there’s 20 seconds to get 20m clear. Clearance is needed because the lithium smoke is extremely toxic (skin, lung and eye melting) and our standard gear and breathing apparatus won’t protect the wearer from lithium fumes. Plus each battery cell burns like a flame thrower with a 2m flame. The trainer said that if people are still trapped in the EV once the fizzing begins, its better for onlooker optics if the fire crew keeps spraying water in the general direction even though the hose is out of range of the vehicle.
Water does fuck all – something like 20 tons of water (my notes say 50 but memory says 20??) is needed to extinguish a standard EV battery fire. That volume can only be delivered with multiple engines connected to a reticulated water supply – something that won’t be feasible outside of a few very well equipped urban areas.
Looking to the future, we were told that building codes haven’t kept up with EVs (new codes are being blocked because EVs are sexy and green). He said that as the national EV fleet ages there’ll be a significant increase in non-accident EV battery fires. The problem is that old EV batteries are most likely to catastrophically fail while they’re being charged, and because building codes haven’t kept up with EV chargers, car fires will inevitably burn down houses/offices/parking garages etc because everyone wants convenient access to charging points right next to their exits.
Apparently China is moving to prevent lithium-based batteries being used in EV models that are primarily designed for city commutes (ie they don’t need the range) and are instead requiring safer but shorter range batteries that use sodium (I think). But doing that here requires regulatory willpower that is entirely missing when it comes to EVs which are marketed almost entirely on long travel range.
We should ban NMC, at least, and only permit LFP or less flammable chemistries.
The NMC cells emit oxygen from the electrolyte when heated, the LFPs don’t.
People should definitely know where their HV battery cut-off is located. Model 3 had is under the back passenger side seat. Completely disconnects the battery from connections outside the battery pack. I suspect what happens is that it’s occasionally engaged to charge up the 12V system. If the car is or has been submerged and when it engages the HV circuits that happen to be shorted from the salt corrosion you get a run-away thermal event. Throwing that switch prevents the contactor from engaging the HV.
considering it’s now almost impossible to get insurance there, just move out of this crazy state…
> Do you understand how a lead./acid battery produces low voltage DC?
Do you understand how a typical car’s low voltage electrical system operates at nearly 100 amps? And a shorted battery can dump two or three times that?
On my previous car (VW Jetta), I had to replace the fuse box that sits on top of the battery because it melted. A bad electrical connection in one of the main wires was causing a high resistance, which generated enough heat to char the surrounding plastic. I didn’t even notice until the car turned itself off while I was driving because it lost all electrical power.
Fact is the 12V system is far and away the biggest fire hazard in both ICE and Electric vehicles. Even the earliest Tesla fire incidents, with the Roadster, were linked to faulty 12V battery cables.
Two EVs caught fire and there’s hundreds of headlines crying about electric cars are going to burn your house down. Subaru recalls 271,694 vehicles [nhtsa.gov] over the possibility they might spontaneously burst into flames due to an electrical fault and not one news outlet mentions it…
=Smidge=
The reason why people talk about lithium ion battery fires is that they cannot be extinguished most of the time. It is a thermal runaway inside the battery which produces flammable gasses which then can start burning as a secondary fire. Most of the time the internal thermal runaway cannot be stopped. This is dealt with by just letting the battery to burn out and only making sure nothing else catches on fire from the battery in the meantime.
That is not true for fires caused by 12 V lead-acid batteries in a
I don’t have strong opinions on nukes like you do; you made some really strong statements and you’re really smart and I want to learn from you.
So, what is your proposed replacement for nuclear power on aircraft carriers, submarines, and cruisers?
Maybe wind power? We can put sails on them?
I mean you must have an idea for the USN they didn’t think of, right? You weren’t just mouthing off like some virtue signaling echo chamber inhabitant moron. Right?
Did you even read what you were replying to or just knee
You had me at unicorn flatulence…
As people move from one technology to another we’ll see the fires move as well. You know why we don’t report about it when a petrol car catches fire? Because with 600 of them catching fire *DAILY, JUST IN THE USA ALONE* we’d have no room to report on anything else.
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