The rise of the new hybrid and electric vehicles we’re seeing more and more of on public roads today will have a drastic effect on all sorts of areas you wouldn’t expect. One of the more interesting departments though will be in the field of putting out fires. To be more precise, batteries and the fires they can start, are a whole lot more dangerous and harder to put out. Fire brigades have to undergo special training sessions to learn how to deal with them, which makes things a bit more interesting and leads us to the story at hand.
Last week a BMW i8 that was put up for display inside a showroom in the Netherlands started smoking for unknown reasons, according to the Tilburg fire department. As people started freaking out and phones started calling the emergency services, the car apparently didn’t explode, but the firefighters did proceed to use a rather unusual means of making sure the fire was put out. As you can see from the photos, the car was simply dunked in a container filled with water.
According to the local fire department, the reason why this decision was made was because putting out a fire on an electric car requires a lot of water for a longer period of time partly because the battery packs are hard to reach. This is apparently why the car was simply dunked in this container and kept there fir 24 hours: it’s a more efficient way to deal with it. The foam we see in the pictures is a result of the water mixing with the chemicals inside the car’s battery packs.
The fire department also claims that the mixture resulted was disposed of responsibly and that they are perfectly prepared to handle such situations in the future as well. All we can say is we hope we don’t get to see BMW i8 models taking such a bath too often.
