Looks like the Mountain View fire chief is very unhappy with the state of procedures on how to respond to battery fires:
Tesla battery reignites days after deadly crash: 2 Investigates
I saw one picture with the emergency responders looking gleeful about the crash and the results. I think that team of emergency responders is actively working against Tesla. I don't know what's wrong with them. That was the Moutain View area responders at the crash scene.
That is a very good article. It's worth reading.
I think either EV manufactuers need to come up with a common fix for this, or emergency responders need to have robots that can take the battery out without risking human life, and isolate it in containment. With gas car fires, similar issues happen, but they manifest slightly differently. I think a lot of this is simply a lack of willingness of people to learn. The gene pool that makes emergency responders is probably solidly anti-EV. That will change as soon as EVs get cheap enough that they're less expensive than gas cars, but I think also emergency responders may be combating the effort to reduce the number of crashes, which means layoffs for them, and since their families have always worked in the same industry, they are fearful about finding new work. As usual, Tesla seems to be non-proactive about this, being more reactive instead, but they're trying to turn a profit right now, so it will probably take a long time for attitude shifts at Tesla.
This seems to support the thought that emergency responders have decided to stop responding to EV fires until further notice, and want some type of equipment to deal with it better:
In the meantime, Mountain View’s fire chief has banned crews from touching any damaged batteries "until it is verified that it is 100 percent de-energized." He’s also shared his memo with fire agencies across the region.
"We wanted to share that with the rest of the fire service. Not only with our firefighters in our department but to the rest of the Bay Area fire departments to know what the challenges that we faced and could potentially face if they encounter a similar situation," said Diaz.
The Mountain View Fire department is considering several changes including creating a specialized team to handle electric vehicle incidents. They also hope get a new device called a DC hot stick, currently in the testing phase, that would allow them to quickly and safely check if an electrical vehicle still has electricity flowing.
Tesla batteries have this feature that other car EV batteries do not, and I think emergency responders will just let live occupants burn to death rather than save them, even in Teslas, because they won't be allowed to differentiate between Teslas and other EVs:
Tesla battery packs are designed so that in the rare circumstance a fire occurs, it spreads slowly so that occupants have plenty of time to get out of the car. According to witnesses, that appears to be what happened here as we understand there were no occupants still in the Model X by the time the fire could have presented a risk. Serious crashes like this can result in fire regardless of the type of car, and Tesla’s billions of miles of actual driving data shows that a gas car in the United States is five times more likely to experience a fire than a Tesla vehicle.
from
What We Know About Last Week's Accident
As long as Tesla is not magnaminous and instead is one-sided, that means others will take up the other side, and will have a leverged effect in response. Lawyers do not help Tesla in this way. This is a problem with juries that award excessive liability verdicts, and companies that respond by not caring about human life enough to solve issues. But, there is inherent risk in many things. I'm currently afraid that awful soup of social misdesign is causing a situation where systemic mechanisms will be put in place that don't save EV occupants, even if they are very savable.