Richard Hammond Apparently Unable to Be Killed by Automobiles

If he didn't acclimate himself with the track before running those speeds then shame on him. Regardless of the cause, no doubt it was an "accident"- who would intentionally overshoot a corner at break neck speeds....but there needs to be some level of responsibility here and it can only fall on one individual.

You don't watch too many races, do you Jan? Cars burn when they're crashed hard enough, no matter what kind they are. But worse, gasoline cars burn very frequently even without the help of a flying leap off a cliff. It usually takes something pretty extreme to cause a battery to burn, something like dead short across enough cells to cause an overheating condition. People overheat gasoline cars all the time. The BEV is still safer than gasoline .

@Vulpine Now, YOU have to explain where all that heat came from to make rubber, paint, seat foam, textiles, GRP, CRP, vinyl, aluminum or magnesium (but no oil or gasoline) catch fire virtually explosively in a car sliding down a mountain meadow. If you need a hint, try to (carefully) short-circuit your car battery. Then, repeat with 100 parallel car batteries and run for your life. In my 50+ years on the road in 25 cars, I have yet to see a burning gasoline car. I don’t even believe that a crashing airplane would catch fire if the fuel tanks were empty.

@Jan: Did you even read my statement? You basically told me exactly what I told you, that it had to be an extreme event for the BEV to catch fire. Under normal conditions, a BEV will NOT short its batteries enough to cause an "explosive" fire. Just as an example, none of the Tesla battery fires was ever "explosive" in nature, giving the occupants plenty of time to pull off the road and exit...sometimes even before the fire became visible. All this fire demonstrates is that the fire delayed at least long enough for Hammond to get out of the car on its own and that the battery pack of the vehicle driven may not have had the same battery configuration as Tesla's, meaning a potentially higher risk of shorting under rollover conditions (as compared to multiple Teslas having suffered major accidents with no fire, albeit others where the battery pack was compromised and bursting into flames.) And yes, a plane crashing, even with empty tanks, COULD catch fire because the tanks would still be filled with fumes, which is the explosive part of the fuel. It just wouldn't burn for as long or be as severe, though it might be a more powerful blast because it would be all vapor and little liquid.

@Jan If you've never seen a burning gasoline car in 50+ years you can't have travelled that far or paid good enough attention or both. Just yesterday I was travelling south on I-24 and saw the burnt out shell of a gasoline car on the hard shoulder. As for your rather odd aeroplane scenario. Be assured the plane would crash *because* its fuel tanks were empty. As for actual aircraft disasters due to exploding fuel tanks....... - The first was in 1990 when a Boeing 737-300 operated by Philippine Airlines exploded on the ground while taxiing [1] - Then in 1996, was the tragic incident when a Boeing 747-131 operated by Trans World Airlines exploded in midair some 12 mins after take off from JFK [2] - The next one was in 2001, when a Boeing 737-400 of Thai Airways exploded, half an hour before scheduled take off. [3] - And the last one I'm aware of happened in 2006, when the left wing fuel tank of a Boeing 727 of Transmile Air Service exploded in Bangalore while being towed on ground. Reference https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/fuel-tank-explosions-in-aircrafts.149631/ Any vehicle that has a large store of potential energy, be that gasoline or a BEV it will burn if the stored energy is released quickly enough as a result of a catastrophic event.