16 Fisker Karmas waiting at a New Jersey port caught fire, with all 16 cars burning to the ground.
Photos of the aftermath were obtained by Jalopnik, which also obtained this statement from Fisker
“It was reported today that several Fisker Karmas were damaged by fire at the Port of Newark after being submerged in sea water during Superstorm Sandy. We can report that there were no injuries and none of the cars were being charged at the time.
We have confidence in the Fisker Karma and safety is our primary concern. While we intend to find the cause as quickly as possible, storm damage has restricted access to the port.
We will issue a further statement once the root cause has been determined.”
Anyone with a science background (or anyone that got better than a C in Chemistry…): how do the vehicles go up in flames after being submerged in sea water. Anyone? Buller?
Thank God these weren’t Model-S Performance models!
“Anyone with a science background (or anyone that got better than a C in Chemistry…): how do the vehicles go up in flames after being submerged in sea water. Anyone? Buller?”
– I wonder if the investigator from the insurance company is wondering the same thing.
As if we needed proof that Karma truly is a bitch.
Salt water and lithium batteries. I suspect they may not have been submerged, or at least not for long.
Lithium + water = bad things.
Lithium-ion batteries contain no elemental lithium (which reacts strongly to water). They use lithium carbonate, which has no such reaction.
Think about elemental sodium and water. Then think how much sodium chloride you ingest daily.
Salt water is extremely conductive, even more so since it was probably contaminated with who knows what else. You have a few hundred volts worth of lithium batteries just waiting to short-circuit through the water.
Oh the humanity, I mean, what would Tom LaSorda say now?
What’s the big deal, after all, I recently learned that a submerged Honda will automatically lower the windows to allow escape.
If the Honda can do that, then Fisker’s trick is obviously some kind of premium feature.
It catches on fire, Like that you do’t get too cold in the water!
One word: “Sealed connectors”… Ok, that’s kinda like two words, but I could seal the gap between them with a hyphen…
In other news Fisker plans to celebrate when they get a check for the lost 16 cars – it will help keep the lights on for two extra days.
You win the thread.
Awesome… Just awesome…
u know insurance people are not exactly something with a 40IQ, it ain’t easy when it comes to open their pocket book.
they some how really enjoy to the feelings of making u squirm.
usually the excuse is they need time to rule out arson.
Shakespeare wrote a Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Fisker board should commission a sequel: A Midsummer of Madness to memorialize the foolishness that is the manufacture of electric vehicles.
You sir must think you know it all, given the successful outcome of your life story, no?
Were I the ins co, I would check to see just how soon before the hurricane the cars arrived at the port, and how long before that the actual orders and ship to port documents were created.
I remember, back in High School Chemistry lab, my teacher placing a small sodium rock in water and it catching on fire. If I am not mistaken, lithium would have similar behaviour.
Exactly. I remember this demonstration with potassium.
And yet you get both inside a bottle of energy drink. Ain’t science wonderful?
The most probable cause is shorted connections. While the connections are sealed, salt water has nasty effects on rubber seals.
It’s wrong but I thought this was funny. Thankfully no first responders had to handle this toxic mess. I’d be nervous in a carwash.
Or just driving in the rain…
Or the neighbor’s kid with a super soaker.
BigMeats, your super soaker comment is vying for winning the thread. IMHO. Which is pretty darn H.
@JimothyLite
Shucks, couldn’t pass up a little Luddite giggle at this.
Plus, what 13 yr-old boy wouldn’t see this and think “super soaker!”?
Metallic potassium and metallic sodium oxidize very rapidly in the presence of pure water, freeing up hydrogen from the water. The reaction generates a lot of heat, which usually ignites the hydrogen.
Lithium, like potassium and sodium, is an “akalai metal” and, like them, the pure metal reacts strongly with water. The lithium reaction is not as hot at that of potassium or sodium, but, perhaps there are other factors — such as the presence of chloride ions in the salt water — that cook things up.
Not sure of the chemistry of these batteries . . . but the old lead/acid car batteries they’re not.
AB ran a story in 2009 about how the Volt and i-MiEV were both tested for immersion in seawater. You’d think other EV makers do the same thing.
Search on “what happens if the chevy volt sleeps with the fishes”.
http://green.autoblog.com/2009/08/26/qanda-what-happens-if-the-chevy-volt-sleeps-with-the-fishes/
Something is seriously wrong with the Karma for all 16 of them to have fried. Maybe their gasoline ignited, which is much more likely – this happened during the Japan tsunami. But again, having them ALL do this is extremely unlikely.
Yes but being parked so close to each other means that only one had to start the fire and then it spread to the others.
Agreed.
The concerns about mixing lithium and water are true, but you have to penetrate the sealed metal case that contains the lithium jelly for a fire to occur. You’d think driving an EV through a mud puddle would make this happen, based upon the comments here.
I’m still guessing it had something to do with the gasoline.
I think most people are thinking too hard.
IMO, Fiskars are just poorly & incompletely designed.
Control Experiment: Were any Tesla’s around that also got flooded?
Did any burn up?
(They are pure electric, and have no gasoline.)
——————
Yes, because most of the armchair experts pretend to know something about what happened, it is clear that Fiskers are poorly and incomplete designed.
Verbatim from a 2007 report written by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council on the effects of salt water to these types of batteries:
“Treat lithium batteries as potential bombs and give them a high level of respect.”
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/about/work/policy/safety/documents/guidance_lithium_batteries.pdf
The UK buggy whip and carriage lobby put out a similarly worded document in 1903 about gasoline.
This is a Natural Environment Research Council report, but nice straw man.
@CJinSD
That’s what Dorothy said to the Scarecrow.
Oh, look search “lithium” and “water” on Youtube and you get incredibly stupid links like this:
I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this is a lithium-water “thermal event”.
It’s certainly possible, but I guarantee that some form of water resistance/safety shut-off was designed into the battery system. These cars aren’t the only lithium-powered systems out there. Do they catch fire every time someone drives through a puddle? Does your laptop catch fire when you spill a drink on it? Does your phone explode when you drop it in the toilet?
Maybe the complete submersion did overwhelm the battery safety systems, but I wouldn’t rule out a different cause entirely.
It very well may have had nothing to do with the batteries. Where I used to work we made a 12VDC power distribution circuit board for a truck mfgr. This board was conformal-coated to protect it from the elements (even though it was mounted in a supposedly-dry location on the vehicle). The board handled most of the vehicle’s power distribution so it was designed to carry approx. 80A total.
We had several reports of thermal events from the field (usually in mid to late winter). We analyzed hundreds of returned boards and had the dried substances we found on the boards analyzed – road salts!
So we did our own testing, and found that by spraying the (conformally-coated) energized circuit board with a salt water solution, we could consistently produce a thermal event in under an hour (sorry, didn’t save any video but it was like watching the 4th of July fireworks in miniature right on the PCB).
Add the much higher voltage potential of the main battery pack in an EV, and it’s easy to see how this could happen. Salt water + any electrical equipment never works out well . . .
Agreed it had to be the salt water. You can almost entirely forget the “water” part and focus entirely on the “salt.”
Power companies have problems in beach areas with salt spray buildup on power line insulators. If beaches go too long without rain to wash the salt off the insulators they have to systematically shut off power and spray the insulators with water to prevent the system from leaking power to ground and browning out (or tripping out) the local grid. When my father was a distribution engineer for the power company growing up he had to initiate just such a project deep into the peak of beach season in Ocean City, MD one year.
This is only a story in some people’s minds because some Karmas have caught on fire in the past. If memory serves me correctly it’s something that happens to Lamborghinis and Ferraris quite frequently, as well. That it happened in saltwater flooding conditions is merely interesting. I’ll await the official findings before jumping to any conclusions.
Then people are arguing that A123 batteries are safe and reliable.
The car falls in a pond of water, and it catches fire… What about rain or a car wash? Electric cars are very dangerous vehicles.
Continuing to say this won’t make it true.
How many gallons of gas does your car hold?
I’ve heard that gasoline burns rapidly if exposed to spark or high temperatures.
Yes, why I was reading how Thomas Edison hooked up an elephant to alternating current and the poor beast fried like my aunt Emma’s chicken. I ain’t ever gettin’ no ‘lectricity in my house. Safe, reliable kerosene lanterns are for me.
Benjamin Harrison? Is that you?
I think it has less to do with lithium than with the fact that saltwater conducts electricity.
Canadian navy found out the hard way with a fatal sub fire.
pretty sure any water conducts electricity. That’s old news.
Distilled water is a pretty good insulator. It’s the ions from dissolved impurities that give water its conductivity. Salt water is a better conductor than freshwater.
The biggest problem with the loss of 16 Karmas is the financial toll. I assume Karma’s insurance company will pay the claim, or maybe someone associated with the port or transport company.
The good news is it gives Karma’s plant some work to do, backfilling the lost product.
yes, what daiheadjai said. This is not Li + H2O –> LiOH +H2 (or if you want to balance it 2Li +2H2O –> 2LiOH + H2)
This is just a short circuit. The same thing happens to laptop batteries…less spectacularly (unless it’s on an airplane).
If you want to try something fun, bridge the connections on a plain old 12V car battery with a wrench or other piece of metal. That is a short circuit. Now image doing it with a battery pack hundreds of times as powerful. You don’t even need a wrench, sea water is plenty conductive when dealing with hundreds of volts and thousands of amps.
The battery chemistry is irrelevant, same thing could happen with a big lead acid battery. And has.
I do think that they need to figure out the hows and whys of what caused the short. Something is not as sealed as it should be. But I would worry no more about an electric car than my current one with 17 gallons of gasoline in the tank.
Hell, just drop a standard 9V battery in salt water and watch the show.
Generally speaking, submersion is not likely scenario during normal driving. The regular 12v car battery does not short out on wet salty roads and neither will the Fisker. Completely submerge either a Fisker or a standard 12v car battery and the story is very different.
A Russian friend (well, classmate actually, if you catch the difference) reported from Brooklyn that a large number of conventional cars burned down while flooded. Presumably the short-circuiting of good old acid batteries was enough to start fires. Fisker is no different, although perhaps lithium aggravated the situation somehow. Or maybe not.
I have lived almost all of my life in the Florida Panhandle and on the Alabama Gulf Coast. I have been through numerous major hurricanes and have never heard of any cars catching fire as result of being immersed in storm surge. They are often found partially buried in the sand, but they don’t spontaneously combust. There must be something different in the water in NYC.
You may be right. I just noticed at the following link that both burnt cars are KIAs (it’s a different Russian from the one I mentioned, I don’t know him personally):
http://xoxol-xoxlovich.livejournal.com/117434.html
Meaning, all those other cares are not fire-prone. Well, KIA is still a gasoline car, and it may suggest that if Fisker designed their car more like Lexus than KIA, then it would not burn despite being electric. But there’s no telling.
I think part of my instinctive schadenfreude is due to the price of these cars. Something similar impacting a crop of any other Elite-mobile would probably be equally funny.
Plus the sheer absurdity of their melted-plastic look is a hilarious rejection of their formerly highfalutin airs.
Collectively they exude the pathos of those aircraft parked wingtip to wingtip and destroyed on the ground during Pearl Harbor.
This could certainly be a plus in flood- prone , hurricane – prone areas like Florida , Louisiana , Mississippi , or the Texas Gulf Coast area ( Houston ) where I live .
The important take away message from the burning vehicles is not to park them in large pools of salty water. I’ll keep that in mind and avoid doing so in the future. Before today I had no clue it could be a bad idea.
It’s a good thing these cars were burned. Now they cannot be cleaned up and sold to unsuspecting buyers like many of the flood cars from Hurricane Katrina.
The more TTAC hates ’em … the more I like ’em. Given the build numbers these things will become collectibles in no time. I think after reading this “article” I’m going to officially put the Karma on my “keeping an eye on used prices” list.
You’ll probably have to sell your Bricklin and your DeLorean to afford one….
Honestly, this looks like something I’d have drawn in my maths notebook in primary school before I knew better, before I knew about production costs and coefficients of drag and curb weights, before I knew why every shmuck with an idea in his head and the desire to have his name spelled out across someone’s grille didn’t just go ahead and release “the best car in the world.” This car looks practical at a first glance, but it is doomed to be a fashion statement and nothing more. Not that there’s anything wrong with fashion statement vehicles; I think they’re great. But when you have taxpayers breathing down your throat and you’re trying to prove electric technology, perhaps it would be a prudent idea to build something that delivers on at least one of its promises. Tesla did much the same thing with the Roadster, but it was blatantly a niche car, rather than something that peddled itself off as a sedan fit for ordinary use, and it had performance specs that made its electric-drivetrain an asset. The Roadster said to the world, “We’re just getting started.” The Karma says, “This is honestly the best we can do.”
Perhaps, then, this catastrophe was nature’s way of eradicating a pointless car. All of that svelte bodywork and sophisticated trimming–wasted, because Fisker put an underwhelming, uneconomical, fire-prone drivetrain beneath it.
On the plus side, the cars that haven’t burned themselves to the ground will become retirement plans once they skyrocket in value on the grounds of rarity.