- Hyundai is growing an unmanned firefighting car to fight underground fires.
- A rash of a number of EV fires in Korean parking garages has damped the nation’s electrical market.
- The Korean authorities can be engaged on measures to extend transparency on the place these batteries come from and what’s inside them.
Over the previous few weeks, South Korea has been gripped in one thing of a panic over a spate of electrical car fires in underground parking garages. Whereas these have been lower than a handful of incidents—a Mercedes-Benz EQE, a Kia EV6 and a Tesla Mannequin X all caught fireplace in and round Seoul inside a number of weeks of one another—it’s comprehensible why they’d put the nation on edge.
In any case, most Koreans in main city facilities reside in these big, high-rise buildings, and whereas an EV fireplace is a nasty affair on day, one underground is even worse. The smoke from the Mercedes fireplace broken 140 vehicles and despatched two dozen folks to the hospital, and all incidents have been notoriously troublesome for firefighters to extinguish.
This isn’t one thing that tens of millions of Koreans wish to cope with, and as such, it is led to a precipitous drop in EV gross sales. And that’s not a headache Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group desires to cope with. It has big international ambitions for EVs and even right here within the U.S., it is rising as maybe the highest risk to Tesla’s market share.
No marvel, then, that Hyundai Motor Group is bringing a gun to this knife combat. Or reasonably, a roving firefighting robotic.
That is actually one technique to do it.
Korea’s Yonhap Information Company stories that Hyundai is working with the nation’s Nationwide Fireplace Company to develop and deploy an remote-controlled firefighting car beginning in 2026. The robotic is depicted in handout illistrations as a six-wheeled brilliant purple tank-like car. It’s reportedly primarily based on an present multipurpose unmanned car platform from Hyundai Rotem, the conglomerate’s industrial car arm. (That is additionally reminder that the Hyundai Group is gigantic in scope to the purpose the place it virtually makes vehicles as a type of facet hustle.)
The car is alleged to have water cannons and enhanced warmth resistance, which it might want since lithium-ion battery fires can attain temperatures of 5,000 levels Fahrenheit.
However that is precisely the purpose. An uncrewed car designed particularly to combat these sorts of fires ought to have the ability to do a job that’s probably too harmful for human firefighters. When a EV fireplace occurs in a densely packed underground parking storage, room to maneuver is proscribed, smoke fills the area rapidly, warmth will get trapped and the blaze will unfold rapidly to different vehicles. And lithium-ion battery fires take large quantities of water and retardant to extinguish. This will likely simply be a job higher suited to machines.
Statistically, EV fires occur far much less than these of gasoline-powered vehicles. However once they do occur, they are often catastrophically troublesome to place out.
The robotic is not the one step that automakers and the Korean authorities are taking to fight fires and reassure the general public about EV security. The latter entity (which has closely incentivized its EV trade as a technique to surpass different international opponents) will quickly mandate battery transparency guidelines in order that EV patrons know precisely what’s of their energy pack and the place it’s from.
At the moment, EV batteries are a little bit of a black field; it is usually troublesome to know who even provides them, not to mention the place their varied parts are sourced. After the Mercedes fireplace was traced again to the automotive’s Farasis-made battery, some Koreans are already pointing the finger at China for a few of these incidents. (Because the Korea Herald notes, “no strong proof suggests” Chinese language-made automotive batteries are considerably much less secure or extra fire-prone.)
Regardless, battery transparency guidelines ought to assist prospects know which batteries could be extra of a threat than others whereas they’re procuring, and we might see such guidelines get adopted worldwide.
As for Hyundai’s firefighting robotic, trials are set to start within the second half of subsequent 12 months. No phrase but on the robotic’s battery measurement, vary or estimated charging speeds.
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