37,082 Australians survived road crashes (with injuries) in 2015 of which 31% were due to speeding.
If Bill Shorten is elected 50% of vehicles will be electric by 2030. If half of the 37,082 survivors (or 18,541 survivors) had been in electric vehicles would they have been able to escape? See below what can happen when you are trapped in a electric vehicle.
90% of crashes are due to driver error. Ask Bill Shorten:
November 2015: Bill Shorten crashes car in Melbourne
Cartoon: Warren Brown Source: News Corp Australia
Bill Shorten’s office confirmed [that] Shorten crashed his late mother’s Mitsubishi into a number of cars on Pigdon Street in Carlton on Sunday morning. A caller to radio station 3AW’s Rumour File suggested the crash was caused by a coffee that spilt in Mr Shorten’s lap.
The question arose after the fatal crash Tuesday [May 8, 2018] of a Tesla that took the lives of two South Florida high school students. Police are still investigating the cause of the crash, which occurred as the students’ Tesla Model S reportedly traveled along Fort Lauderdale’s Seabreeze Boulevard. It drove off the road and crashed into a concrete wall, bursting into flames, police said.
Statement from Tesla
Safety Probe of Tesla Crash Cites Battery Fire Risk
[On May 8, 2018,] A Tesla Model S [which was] involved fatal high-speed crash in Florida[,] reignited twice after firefighters extinguished a fire in the electric vehicle. The [US] National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said in a preliminary report [that] the vehicle was travelling 116 miles (187 km) per hour, seconds before it crashed into a metal light pole. The Fort Lauderdale Fire Department found the vehicle fully engulfed in flames and extinguished the vehicle fire using 200–300 gallons (around 750-1,100 liters) of water and foam.
During removal of the car from the scene, the battery reignited and was [again] extinguished. ‘Upon arrival at the storage yard, the battery reignited again’, the report said, and was again quickly put out.
Tesla declined to comment on the report, but has said its vehicles are much less likely to catch fire than gasoline-powered vehicles.
There have been other reported cases of crashed Tesla battery packs reigniting, including after a fatal Tesla crash in March in California. In the California crash, the battery reignited five days after the crash in an impound lot and was extinguished by the San Mateo Fire Department.
‘Battery fault’ causes electric bus to explode in Chinese tunnel
An electric bus exploded while in a tunnel in eastern China due to a battery fault. [The] Eyewitness video captured a fireball suddenly emerging from the bus after it had come to a halt in a tunnel in Tongling City in Anhui Province. The driver cut the power to the bus and evacuated the only two passengers on it. Fortunately, no casualties were reported. Local reports said a battery fault was the cause.
Why the Fire that Incinerated a Tesla Was Such a Nightmare to Put Out
But are Teslas more likely to catch fire than other cars? And when they do catch fire, why are they such a nightmare to put out? The limited available data suggest that electric vehicles are NOT more prone to battery fires — but their lithium-ion batteries can fuel hotter fires that release toxic fumes and are HARDER TO EXTINGUISH, experts say
The process can occur in just milliseconds: Overheated battery modules create a domino effect, producing more and more heat, and the battery explodes
Picture from Electrek
“Lithium-ion batteries are the workhorses of modern-day gadgets; they’re found in everything from smartphones to jumbo jets to the Tesla Model S”. … “The batteries typically come in cells; a laptop battery may have three or four cells, whereas a Tesla Model S may have thousands”.
UCL Chemical Engineering PhD student Donal Finegan and Dr Paul Shearing researched what happens when Li-ion batteries overheat and explode.
Shearing made it clear that catastrophic failure is extremely rare:
“Hundreds of millions of lithium-ion batteries are produced every year, and catastrophic failure, such as explosion or melting, is rare”, Shearing said.
Batteries can blow up or melt when internal electrical components short-circuit, when mechanical problems crop up after a fall or an accident, or when they are installed incorrectly, Shearing said. But at the heart, all of these failures occur because one portion of the battery gets too hot and can’t cool down quickly enough, creating a chain reaction that generates more and more heat.
“It’s kind of this snowball process that we call thermal runaway,” Shearing told Live Science.
“During thermal runaway, the miniature battery modules can melt, giving off heat, and the electrolyte material between the anode and the cathode may even boil”, Shearing said.
Shearing and his colleagues heated commercial lithium-ion batteries to 250 degrees Celsius. Using a high-speed 3D camera and a particle collider, which bombarded the batteries with synchrotron X-rays, the team captured thermal images of the batteries as they underwent the flash transition to overheating and thermal runaway.
Last week, Brian Owler, Labor’s candidate for Bennelong – a neurosurgeon – questioned whether John Alexander accepted ‘climate science’. Labor likes to use the word ‘science’ a lot. Neurosurgeons might study Biochemistry not Lithium Battery chemistry.
Owler’s words could be prophetic. he said:
‘He [Alexander] says if the house is on fire to get out’.
‘Well, we don’t have a second house – or planet – to run to. It would be better if we didn’t start the fire in the first place’.
The teenagers in Florida died because they couldn’t get out of the Tesla.
Whilst we use Li-ion powered devices in numerous gadgets, currently only 0.2% of cars in Australia are electric vehicles (2,284 in 2017).
On April Fool’s Day, 2019, the ALP released this policy:
Labor sets 50 per cent EV targets for new vehicle sales and government fleets
The Australian Labor Party has unveiled its first electric vehicle policy, setting a 50 per cent target for EVs as a share of new passenger vehicle sales by 2030, and for government fleets by 2025.
In 2018, 1,145 Australians were killed in fatal crashes, of which 90% were due to driver error and 31% due to speeding. The total car population was 17.6 million, nearly 18 million.
Source: The Academy of Science
The Road Trauma report from the Dept of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities (BITRE), shows that 1,226 road crash deaths occurred in 2017. In 2015, some 180,000 crashes occurred from which there were 37,082 ‘hospitalised injury’ cases. What happens when 50% of the vehicle population is electric and 31% of accidents are due to speeding? Can we expect a proportion of 50% of the 37,082 non-fatal injuries to become fatal because the occupants are unable to escape a persistent battery fire? That’s what happend to the kids in Florida – they couldn’t escape the fire.
Source: BITRE: Road Trauma Australia
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