LITHIUM BATTERY DANGERS If 2020 were a disastrous year for lithium battery recalls, the summer of 2021 is not shaping up any better. Michael Halls reports.
The Great Lithium Battery Summer Recall August and July have been disastrous months for public perceptions of electric vehicles and lithium batteries. The months have been scarred by two giant lithium battery fires, two huge recalls and a report that suggested that roughly a fifth of EV fires happened when the engine was parked and there was no explanation for the destruction. The latest bombshell came on August 20 when GM announced that: “out of an abundance of caution GM was to replace defective battery modules in Chevrolet Bolt EVs and EUVs with new modules with an expected additional cost of approximately $1 billion.” GM identified the problem as coming from defects in LG’s manufacturing processes in Korea. The move was
another blow for LG which was struggling with another recall away from the world of EVs. Around 10,000 residential storage system lithium batteries by LG Chem subsidiary LG Energy Solutions have been recalled because of a fire hazard, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced on August 4. The RESU 10 (Type-R) batteries were recalled after warnings were issued that they ‘can overheat, posing a risk of fire and emission of harmful smoke’. Five reports were received of the wall-mounted batteries, which store energy generated by solar panels, causing property damage and one injury, the CPSC said. The batteries this time had been
made in LG Chem’s factory in Nanjing, China, between 2017 and 2018, according to Korean media. In December 2020, around 1,815 units of the same model were recalled for the same reason, the CPSC having received five reports of fires resulting in minor property damage, but no injuries.
Fires in Australia, US
The latest recall came just two days after a four-day lithium battery fire was put out at a utility-scale Tesla battery site in the Australian state of Victoria. International media reported that a 13-tonne lithium battery caught fire inside a shipping container and could easily have spread to other battery containers, but was kept under control and then finally put out.
ONE-IN-THREE EV FIRES OCCUR IN PARKED VEHICLES WITH One in three electric vehicles fires has occurred with ‘no obvious cause’ while the car was parked, according to the latest report issued in August by research consultancy IdTechEx. The startling figures show that 17% of EV fires occur in regular driving and a quarter occur when charging. More predictably, 20% of fires occur in a crash situation or 4% when immersed in water when the reactive lithium is exposed to the air or water. IdTechEx’s report —Thermal Management for Electric Vehicles 2021-2031 — also points out that the cost of recalls to solve problems continues to be hugely expensive and sometimes intractable to solve. GM’s first recall of the Bolt in 2020, for example, entailed a call back of 69,000 cars produced between 2017-2019 for potential battery fires.
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“The ‘solution’ was a software update limiting the battery capacity to 90% and an inspection of the battery,” says the report. “In 2021, two more Bolts have caught fire, both of which had the recall. “Continued investigation between GM and LG Chem has determined the cause is the ‘presence of two rare manufacturing defects in the same cell’. This has prompted another recall by GM to replace the battery modules. “This recall is said to have cost GM around $11,000 per vehicle, totalling nearly $800 million.” Other carmakers have faced similar bills. Hyundai, for example, recalled 82,000 EVs due to battery fire risk at an estimated $900 million. Much of this was paid for by LG Chem, the report says. “Ford’s Kuga plug-in hybrid also faced issues with cells supplied by Samsung, resulting in a recall of 33,000 cars costing Ford approximately $400 million,” it says.
The effects of EV fires tend to be far more severe than fires in conventional ICE vehicles. One Hyundai Kona fire in 2020, for example, blew the roof off the garage in which it was stored. And, as with the recent lithium explosions and blazes in Chicago in the US and in late July in Victoria, Australia, these fires are a lot harder to contain and put out. A Tesla Model S fire in April required nearly 30,000 gallons of water to extinguish it because “it kept reigniting, burning continuously for over four hours,” says one media report. By comparison, a typical car fire involving a ICE can be extinguished with about 300 gallons. One effect of these highprofile fires and their severity is their press coverage, which runs contrary to the desire of governments and OEMs that have recently been setting out bold
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