Hyundai’s Plan For Underground EV Fires: This Firefighting Robotic

• Hyundai is creating an unmanned firefighting automobile to fight underground fires.
• A rash of a number of EV fires in Korean parking garages has damped the nation’s electrical market.
• The Korean authorities can be engaged on measures to extend transparency on the place these batteries come from and what’s inside them. 

Over the previous few weeks, South Korea has been gripped in one thing of a panic over a spate of electrical automobile fires in underground parking garages. Whereas these have been lower than a handful of incidents—a Mercedes-Benz EQE, a Kia EV6 and a Tesla Mannequin X all caught hearth in and round Seoul inside just a few weeks of one another—it’s comprehensible why they’d put the nation on edge. 

In spite of everything, most Koreans in main city facilities reside in these enormous, high-rise buildings, and whereas an EV hearth is a nasty affair on a great day, one underground is even worse. The smoke from the Mercedes hearth broken 140 vehicles and despatched two dozen folks to the hospital, and all incidents have been notoriously troublesome for firefighters to extinguish. 

This isn’t one thing that tens of millions of Koreans wish to cope with, and as such, it is led to a precipitous drop in EV gross sales. And that isn’t a headache Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group desires to cope with. It has enormous international ambitions for EVs and even right here within the U.S., it is rising as maybe the highest risk to Tesla’s market share. 

No marvel, then, that Hyundai Motor Group is bringing a gun to this knife battle. Or somewhat, a roving firefighting robotic. 

That is definitely one technique to do it.

Korea’s Yonhap Information Company reviews that Hyundai is working with the nation’s Nationwide Hearth Company to develop and deploy an remote-controlled firefighting automobile beginning in 2026. The robotic is depicted in handout illistrations as a six-wheeled brilliant crimson tank-like automobile. It’s reportedly primarily based on an present multipurpose unmanned automobile platform from Hyundai Rotem, the conglomerate’s industrial automobile arm. (That is additionally a great reminder that the Hyundai Group is gigantic in scope to the purpose the place it virtually makes vehicles as a form of facet hustle.) 

The automobile is claimed to have water cannons and enhanced warmth resistance, which it will want since lithium-ion battery fires can attain temperatures of 5,000 levels Fahrenheit. 

However that is precisely the purpose. An uncrewed automobile designed particularly to battle these sorts of fires ought to be capable to do a job that’s doubtlessly too harmful for human firefighters. When a EV hearth occurs in a densely packed underground parking storage, room to maneuver is restricted, smoke fills the area rapidly, warmth will get trapped and the blaze will unfold rapidly to different vehicles. And lithium-ion battery fires take large quantities of water and retardant to extinguish. This will likely simply be a job higher suited to machines. 

Statistically, EV fires occur far much less than these of gasoline-powered vehicles. However after they do occur, they are often catastrophically troublesome to place out. 

The robotic is not the one step that automakers and the Korean authorities are taking to fight fires and reassure the general public about EV security. The latter entity (which has closely incentivized its EV trade as a technique to surpass different international rivals) will quickly mandate battery transparency guidelines in order that EV consumers know precisely what’s of their energy pack and the place it’s from.

At present, EV batteries are a little bit of a black field; it is typically troublesome to know who even provides them, not to mention the place their varied elements are sourced. After the Mercedes hearth was traced again to the automobile’s Farasis-made battery, some Koreans are already pointing the finger at China for a few of these incidents. (Because the Korea Herald notes, “no stable proof suggests” Chinese language-made automotive batteries are considerably much less secure or extra fire-prone.)

Regardless, battery transparency guidelines ought to assist clients know which batteries could be extra of a danger than others whereas they’re purchasing, and we may see such guidelines get adopted worldwide. 

As for Hyundai’s firefighting robotic, trials are set to start within the second half of subsequent yr. No phrase but on the robotic’s battery dimension, vary or estimated charging speeds. 

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