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Wiki Sudden Loss Of Range With 2019.16.x Software
- Thread starter Dutchmeeuw
- Start date
I suspect you have a higher chance of being hit by lightning or die in a car crash than your Tesla's chance of catching fire in your garage. What a drama! I'm all for forcing Tesla to do something about our packs, but suggesting that our cars are just waiting to catch on fire is both factually false and needlessly alarmist.
You are a bit off (on the lightning comparison)
May 2018 ... 300,000 Teslas on the road ... about 40 fires have been reported:
Are electric cars more likely to catch fire?
The odds of becoming a lightning victim in the U.S. in any one year is 1 in 700,000:
Flash Facts About Lightning
Reading the entire article reports that those 40 are crash or other damage while driving.
There is indeed one well know spontaneous fire in that underground parking, which happened somewhere in April 2019.
In total, there are about 800k tesla produced by end of 2019, according to Tesla Production And Deliveries Graphed Through Q3 2019
So the odds are not so far off to the lightning comparison.
Pretty sure this post was in jest, but to clarify:
While the coolant in the Tesla battery packs is super similar to that used in some fire suppression systems, as it is not flammable, there's an insignificant amount in the battery pack to do anything about a fire (only around a gallon in total). In contrast, sprinkler systems filled with coolant will have hundreds of gallons of coolant in the piping that will be expelled when the system trips, and when that happens the coolant is quickly followed by hundreds or even thousands of gallons of water.
Saying the coolant inside the battery pack should put out a battery pack fire is like taking a single bucket of water and expecting it to stop a raging building fire.
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To the video in question and other "my battery just burst into flames" type claims... I'd put my money on arson and/or insurance fraud.
Update on the class action law suit: CAND-ECF-Confirm Request
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic mediation has been rescheduled to July 24th.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic mediation has been rescheduled to July 24th.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Between poor service in my area and the issues some of you are dealing with I'm not sad that I've put off my purchase. I do have a Cyber reservation but definitely not going to get one of the early ones.
The math is wrong. The denominator is not all Tesla vehicles produced thus far. It is of earlier model S & X vehicles, likely with specific battery models, but we can't be clear which, because the data is not revealed by Tesla. There have been a good number of non-crash related fires. Agreed the two most recent have not had their cause identified, so can't be added to the numerator yet.
The odds are way higher than most other potential causes for home fires that my home might be susceptible to.
It's enough that I redid my fire detection to give me as early a warning as possible, so we can get out of the house quickly. Every time I hear the fans in the unoccupied car screaming at high speed through the walls it reinforces my precautions.
BigNick
Infamous Fat Sweaty Guy
Since COVID I generally don't charge past 50%, but prior to that I would charge to no more than 75% (was 80% but then that SoC started running the pumps some time back). I usually don't have fans running unless I'm actively charging the car or running the climate control to pre-cool/pre-heat.
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The same here. 50% is my new max for my city car.
cpa
Active Member
These continuing 30-day postponements are becoming stale. Save the legal fees and judge’s time and push it into 2021.
Yes, slight sarcasm. But the COVID pandemic is not going to vanish in 30 days.
Be realistic. Don’t be disingenuous.
Coolant isn’t flammable. If you submerge batteries completely in water, there is no oxygen to combust. However, water with solutes creates a galvanic process that corrodes metals and creates an environment for ignition. If cells become exposed because of corrosion, oxygen, short, spark, heat are all ingredients to a fire. I’m not an engineer, but playing this scenario in my head seems probable. You only need one run away cell to ignite and several others will likely join the inferno. And the heat generated in that closed space will render the coolant insignificant to arrest combustion. The entire pack would have to be flooded to potentially stop a run away pack. But you would still have smoke and signs of a fire.
On top of all of that, you need electrolysis to continually lower the water content out of the coolant for a few years. As the water content falls, so does the flashpoint of the coolant until it's eventually so low it can be ignited easily. Coolant is very flammable, but water is added to it that making it difficult to ignite unless you happen to have something like dendrites puncturing cells and creating uncontrollable electrical sparks that not only convert water into hydrogen and oxygen gas but also provide an ignition spark.
I do find it interesting that the a couple fires ago (the one that burned the Porsche too) there were comments pointing out the fire was stopped more easily than a lithium battery fire and was probably someone else, but when the NHTSA is investigating coolant fires that would fit that fire's observations suddenly it isn't something else any more. A few people here just disagree with everything. I've looked at every bit of evidence and tried to piece together what we know - fires and Tesla's admission of guilt - to come up with some kind of hypothesis. Coolant is one that works with a long drawn out set of circumstances, and to me the kicker that Tesla thought it was coolant last year was when they asked if teh car was parked at an incline. That doesn't make any sense unless they were worried about liquid inside the pack contacting the cells.
It doesn't really matter if coolant is the cause of the fires - if Tesla can recall batteries with dendrites without saying their batteries had a fundamental flaw by design it's best for everyone. Almost every manufacturer has been recalled for coolant leaks but none have been recalled for lithium ion battery design flaws like this. If the recall replaces my dangerous battery I don't care what they call it, and Tesla gets to keep lying. Everybody gets what they want.
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Moderator Note: This post was reported as being inaccurate. Citation needed.
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I do find it interesting that the a couple fires ago (the one that burned the Porsche too) there were comments pointing out the fire was stopped more easily than a lithium battery fire and was probably someone else, but when the NHTSA is investigating coolant fires that would fit that fire's observations suddenly it isn't something else any more. A few people here just disagree with everything. I've looked at every bit of evidence and tried to piece together what we know - fires and Tesla's admission of guilt - to come up with some kind of hypothesis. Coolant is one that works with a long drawn out set of circumstances, and to me the kicker that Tesla thought it was coolant last year was when they asked if teh car was parked at an incline. That doesn't make any sense unless they were worried about liquid inside the pack contacting the cells.
It doesn't really matter if coolant is the cause of the fires - if Tesla can recall batteries with dendrites without saying their batteries had a fundamental flaw by design it's best for everyone. Almost every manufacturer has been recalled for coolant leaks but none have been recalled for lithium ion battery design flaws like this. If the recall replaces my dangerous battery I don't care what they call it, and Tesla gets to keep lying. Everybody gets what they want.
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Moderator Note: This post was reported as being inaccurate. Citation needed.
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[* citation needed] As multiple others have asked, please point us to the source of this from Tesla. I'll wait. Oh, right... you can't, because this is fabricated.
While the vast majority of what you post is basically gibberish that might make it sound like you know what you're talking about to people with little to no knowledge on the topics at hand (and... well, much less so to those of us who do know what we're talking about), and I doubt that will change... I think at the very least you should probably specifically stop with statements like the one quoted unless you can specifically point to a source where Tesla actually said this. You making a long biased stretch on a guess for their reasoning DOES NOT equate to the statement "Tesla thought." While the most of the nonsense you post is just ignorance and straw grasping compounded by whatever compels you to try and find something wrong with Tesla, stating the above as if it were fact is pure intentional misinformation. It's also not the first time you've tried to use this particular false point, either, and it's getting kind of old.
I think my record speaks for itself that I'm quite unbiased on Tesla issues. Don't believe me? I suggest you check my post history. (691 HP anyone? AP1 anyone?)
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To the topic of coolant exposed to cells causing issues:
First, I'll play devil's advocate here. Let's say some coolant leaked in and around some cells. If some cells were sitting in coolant, this is very detectable by the BMS. The BMS monitors all cell groups closely, and any deviation from expected values is detected. For example, if even a single cell in a group were sitting in coolant and basically performing electrolysis on the coolant, this would be consuming energy from the cell (and the rest of its parallel brick). This would cause a downward deviation in capacity of this group. Electrolysis is not a cheap process on the energy side. Since this is a downward drop, the BMS would detect this as one of a few potential issues. If the draw is under 100mA, then it would be detected over the course of a couple of charge cycles down as low as a few mA delta (Edit: Heading off the FUDsters, if it is lower than this it'll still be detected, it'll just take more charge cycles... at which point if I did the math on it right, we're talking virtually non-existent amounts of coolant at that point). If it fits the usage of a balancing circuit (only a 100mA or so), it could believe there is a stuck balancer. If it's greater than this, then this is a different error entirely (actually renders the car unusable when tripped). These are all solid faults that are user presented as a "Contact Tesla Service" error. (Edit: Also, the tolerances on these things have been well refined over the years to be very tight. You couldn't even run something like a tiny LED draining off a cell group without the BMS knowing about it and tripped a fault.)
Aside from that, again, even when sitting in coolant for months these things don't burst into flames... so, meh.
Finally, let's just occam's razor this whole thing away here: If there was in fact a coolant leak problem with Tesla batteries........... how is it that we're not all low on coolant? I mean, the coolant cant regenerate itself. It can't poof back into existence on its own. Moving forward with this, let's say there was a coolant leak in the pack. Well, the battery packs all have vents down both sides of the pack. They're lightly sealed with a rubber "valve" of sorts so that they allow flow outward from the pack only (a safety design to vent any potential battery fire through the channel to allow safe egress). If you spill even a small amount of coolant on these, it'll leak through out of the pack and into the channel. So um... where's all the coolant leakage on our cars if the batteries have a coolant design flaw? I mean, these are moving vehicles. In a turn, if there were coolant in the pack, it'd eventually make it to these vents at some point and leak out the channel. And eventually you'd need to add coolant to top off the system. It's not infinite. Even a small drip will eventually drain it. So... what gives?
So what's more likely here?
On the one hand we have a mess of speculation and conspiracy theories that must (sarrrrcasm) mean that there's some kind of battery coolant problem that's persisted for years and years... yet no one can present any real evidence of it.... and all of a sudden it's causing catastrophic failures of the most monitored component in the vehicle without any warning.
On the other hand, we have a few relevant facts: We have a large group of individuals and entities that directly benefit from negative publicity on Tesla. This same group provably amplifies any negativity as much as possible. Separately, we also have people who commit insurance fraud to avoid their obligations, be it by torching their house, their car, or other methods.
Seems to me it's more logical that the two groups above either have overlapped, or otherwise have happened to benefit one another coincidentally. The shorts benefit from the negative publicity, the fraudsters benefit from the FUD stirred up about battery fires. I mean, really, given how much misinformation there is about EVs bursting into flames... it's the perfect scam right now it seems.
My guess on this remains that a few people committed arson to collect on insurance, and the usual Tesla FUDsters are amplifying those events beyond the scope of reality, as usual. It's just the simplest explanation.
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"Fabricated" by last year's San Francisco garage fire owner long before the NHTSA started talking about coolant? That is possible, but in that case why is the NHTSA telling multiple news outlets they are aware of the issue? The usual Tesla FUDsters might work at the NHTSA and those news outlets conspiring for the past year too, but I don't agree with you that this is the most local leap to make. Especially considering on the other hand your own testimony in this thread tells us Tesla is willing to break the law for at least a year to avoid reporting safety concerns to the NHTSA. Knowing this fact, and your other uncited claims like Tesla was looking for one thing before they found another (all we know is they failed to report either to the NHTSA within the legal time frame, again making them willing to break laws to keep secrets), if we accept what you've claimed without citation as more than "gibberish" it establishes a pattern of behavior that shows Tesla avoids submitting safety concerns to the NHTSA, and has been for years. Logically, if Tesla does that for the past few years it may have been doing it in the previous years when it was in more dire financial trouble.
I completely agree with you about the unlikely train of circumstances that are needed to cause coolant to lose enough water to combust in a car is long and unlikely, but it was discussed a year before this topic was raised, and apparently came from Tesla themselves. While uncited hearay, your own uncited hearsay in this thread is proof enough that you're OK with secrets being kept when people beg for those much needed citations.
We're begging and pleading with you.
In simplest science, Tesla uses a Propylene Glycol mixture as coolant. On its own, it's a combination of alcohols that burns pretty much like you'd expect with a flashpoint of about 212F (99C). However, the G48 mixture Tesla uses doesn't burn easily at all - you seem to have a practical understanding of this fact so no need to explain more. However, electrolysis is the process by which an electrical current submerged in liquid converts H2O into hydrogen atoms and Oxygen atoms. It's generally a slow process, and inside a Tesla battery would need the end of a cell (or multiple cells) to be submerged, allowing electron transfer and creation of microscopic amounts hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, all the while lowering the combustion temperature (this is the flashpoint) of the coolant as it is converted to gas. You bring up how little coolant is in the entire system, so you know there isn't enough for this to ever be a real issue unless the car spends a great deal of time parked at an incline where cells would be submerged. This incline line of questioning was something discussed a year ago, long forgotten, and only rediscovered when I was googling for how something impossible like coolant causing fires might happen. It is unrealistic but chemically possible, and would take years if it has even happened once so this would probably only happen on old cars. No FUD to the science here, this discussion started with Tesla investigating a garage fire a year ago - another internal investigation they didn't report to the NHTSA within 5 days reinforcing your uncited claims from last year regarding their illegal coverup of this problem. You made an uncited claim they were investigating one thing - coolant fires - and found something else - lithium dendrites.
Lithium dendrites are a fire hazard all by themselves, but in the coolant electrolysis experiment they can hypothetically increase the chances of a fire by acting as a faster source of electrolysis as well as a combustion source for the hydrogen gas (Burns at 900F or 500C). and oxygen gas (burn temp 5000F or 2800C). I don't know if this is actually going to happen inside a battery in practical terms but the academics are easy to see, and clearly not gibberish.
The NHTSA has issued safety recalls for coolant leaks in the past. Searching their website, it's surprisingly common and I think Tesla should use that excuse to recall batterygated batteries. As long as the problem is replaced, the batteries are safe. I don't know if they will get that choice with so many recalls in motion right now, but in my opinion a recall that replaces unsafe batteries with safe ones is a win, and in Tesla's opinion the truth must remain hidden for years. We both get what we want if Tesla uses a lie to make their batteries safe again.
If academics remain gibberish we can turn this into a practical experiment and demonstration of burning coolant. It will be fun and educational! I linked electrolysis above, substitute the water for propylene glycol in that experiment and introduce an ignition source to the bubbles above. When enough water has been converted to gas, the coolant will burn. How lond do you think it will take? Years? What if we had started this experiment in 2012?
I completely agree with you about the unlikely train of circumstances that are needed to cause coolant to lose enough water to combust in a car is long and unlikely, but it was discussed a year before this topic was raised, and apparently came from Tesla themselves. While uncited hearay, your own uncited hearsay in this thread is proof enough that you're OK with secrets being kept when people beg for those much needed citations.
We're begging and pleading with you.
In simplest science, Tesla uses a Propylene Glycol mixture as coolant. On its own, it's a combination of alcohols that burns pretty much like you'd expect with a flashpoint of about 212F (99C). However, the G48 mixture Tesla uses doesn't burn easily at all - you seem to have a practical understanding of this fact so no need to explain more. However, electrolysis is the process by which an electrical current submerged in liquid converts H2O into hydrogen atoms and Oxygen atoms. It's generally a slow process, and inside a Tesla battery would need the end of a cell (or multiple cells) to be submerged, allowing electron transfer and creation of microscopic amounts hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, all the while lowering the combustion temperature (this is the flashpoint) of the coolant as it is converted to gas. You bring up how little coolant is in the entire system, so you know there isn't enough for this to ever be a real issue unless the car spends a great deal of time parked at an incline where cells would be submerged. This incline line of questioning was something discussed a year ago, long forgotten, and only rediscovered when I was googling for how something impossible like coolant causing fires might happen. It is unrealistic but chemically possible, and would take years if it has even happened once so this would probably only happen on old cars. No FUD to the science here, this discussion started with Tesla investigating a garage fire a year ago - another internal investigation they didn't report to the NHTSA within 5 days reinforcing your uncited claims from last year regarding their illegal coverup of this problem. You made an uncited claim they were investigating one thing - coolant fires - and found something else - lithium dendrites.
Lithium dendrites are a fire hazard all by themselves, but in the coolant electrolysis experiment they can hypothetically increase the chances of a fire by acting as a faster source of electrolysis as well as a combustion source for the hydrogen gas (Burns at 900F or 500C). and oxygen gas (burn temp 5000F or 2800C). I don't know if this is actually going to happen inside a battery in practical terms but the academics are easy to see, and clearly not gibberish.
The NHTSA has issued safety recalls for coolant leaks in the past. Searching their website, it's surprisingly common and I think Tesla should use that excuse to recall batterygated batteries. As long as the problem is replaced, the batteries are safe. I don't know if they will get that choice with so many recalls in motion right now, but in my opinion a recall that replaces unsafe batteries with safe ones is a win, and in Tesla's opinion the truth must remain hidden for years. We both get what we want if Tesla uses a lie to make their batteries safe again.
If academics remain gibberish we can turn this into a practical experiment and demonstration of burning coolant. It will be fun and educational! I linked electrolysis above, substitute the water for propylene glycol in that experiment and introduce an ignition source to the bubbles above. When enough water has been converted to gas, the coolant will burn. How lond do you think it will take? Years? What if we had started this experiment in 2012?
How do you know they didn't? It isn't like all communication with NHTSA is public...
More false information. There are no recalls in motion. There isn't even a formal investigation into anything other than the failing MCUs at this point.
Guy V
Member
I think it is all well and good that Chaserr has provoked you into a detailed and apparently expert explanation to convince us of something our battery problem isn't.[* citation needed] As multiple others have asked, please point us to the source of this from Tesla. I'll wait. Oh, right... you can't, because this is fabricated.
While the vast majority of what you post is basically gibberish that might make it sound like you know what you're talking about to people with little to no knowledge on the topics at hand (and... well, much less so to those of us who do know what we're talking about), and I doubt that will change... I think at the very least you should probably specifically stop with statements like the one quoted unless you can specifically point to a source where Tesla actually said this. You making a long biased stretch on a guess for their reasoning DOES NOT equate to the statement "Tesla thought." While the most of the nonsense you post is just ignorance and straw grasping compounded by whatever compels you to try and find something wrong with Tesla, stating the above as if it were fact is pure intentional misinformation. It's also not the first time you've tried to use this particular false point, either, and it's getting kind of old.
I think my record speaks for itself that I'm quite unbiased on Tesla issues. Don't believe me? I suggest you check my post history. (691 HP anyone? AP1 anyone?)
---
To the topic of coolant exposed to cells causing issues:
First, I'll play devil's advocate here. Let's say some coolant leaked in and around some cells. If some cells were sitting in coolant, this is very detectable by the BMS. The BMS monitors all cell groups closely, and any deviation from expected values is detected. For example, if even a single cell in a group were sitting in coolant and basically performing electrolysis on the coolant, this would be consuming energy from the cell (and the rest of its parallel brick). This would cause a downward deviation in capacity of this group. Electrolysis is not a cheap process on the energy side. Since this is a downward drop, the BMS would detect this as one of a few potential issues. If the draw is under 100mA, then it would be detected over the course of a couple of charge cycles down as low as a few mA delta (Edit: Heading off the FUDsters, if it is lower than this it'll still be detected, it'll just take more charge cycles... at which point if I did the math on it right, we're talking virtually non-existent amounts of coolant at that point). If it fits the usage of a balancing circuit (only a 100mA or so), it could believe there is a stuck balancer. If it's greater than this, then this is a different error entirely (actually renders the car unusable when tripped). These are all solid faults that are user presented as a "Contact Tesla Service" error. (Edit: Also, the tolerances on these things have been well refined over the years to be very tight. You couldn't even run something like a tiny LED draining off a cell group without the BMS knowing about it and tripped a fault.)
Aside from that, again, even when sitting in coolant for months these things don't burst into flames... so, meh.
Finally, let's just occam's razor this whole thing away here: If there was in fact a coolant leak problem with Tesla batteries........... how is it that we're not all low on coolant? I mean, the coolant cant regenerate itself. It can't poof back into existence on its own. Moving forward with this, let's say there was a coolant leak in the pack. Well, the battery packs all have vents down both sides of the pack. They're lightly sealed with a rubber "valve" of sorts so that they allow flow outward from the pack only (a safety design to vent any potential battery fire through the channel to allow safe egress). If you spill even a small amount of coolant on these, it'll leak through out of the pack and into the channel. So um... where's all the coolant leakage on our cars if the batteries have a coolant design flaw? I mean, these are moving vehicles. In a turn, if there were coolant in the pack, it'd eventually make it to these vents at some point and leak out the channel. And eventually you'd need to add coolant to top off the system. It's not infinite. Even a small drip will eventually drain it. So... what gives?
So what's more likely here?
On the one hand we have a mess of speculation and conspiracy theories that must (sarrrrcasm) mean that there's some kind of battery coolant problem that's persisted for years and years... yet no one can present any real evidence of it.... and all of a sudden it's causing catastrophic failures of the most monitored component in the vehicle without any warning.
On the other hand, we have a few relevant facts: We have a large group of individuals and entities that directly benefit from negative publicity on Tesla. This same group provably amplifies any negativity as much as possible. Separately, we also have people who commit insurance fraud to avoid their obligations, be it by torching their house, their car, or other methods.
Seems to me it's more logical that the two groups above either have overlapped, or otherwise have happened to benefit one another coincidentally. The shorts benefit from the negative publicity, the fraudsters benefit from the FUD stirred up about battery fires. I mean, really, given how much misinformation there is about EVs bursting into flames... it's the perfect scam right now it seems.
My guess on this remains that a few people committed arson to collect on insurance, and the usual Tesla FUDsters are amplifying those events beyond the scope of reality, as usual. It's just the simplest explanation.
On the other hand, since you purport to know and now seem to strongly want to set the record straight, why don't you just tell us what the problem really is?
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