> I guess it’s harder to put out a battery fire than a gas fire?
Yep. With a gasoline car, dump water and foam onto the wreck and that's it. If you're really fancy install a sprinkler system in your garage - you can just DIY it if you want, hook up a water pipe to your water mains with a backflow prevention valve to prevent stagnant water from flowing back, add a few heads like [1], and there you go - assuming your water mains has decent pressure, that should be enough to keep a gasoline car fire in check for long enough so that the firefighters can show up and deal with it properly.
A battery car fire however? That one is much, much harder to extinguish and it burns way hotter. You need much more volume of water to cool it down enough to approach the vehicle safely, it will cause a lot more damage to surrounding structures, and fire departments haven't gotten nearly as much experience as they have with gasoline car fires.
That said, if I needed a car, I'd still go for an electric one, I'd just not park it in a garage directly connected to a home and certainly not in some basement garage.
People with ebikes generally charge a .5kwh-1kwh battery indoors every day. Any spare batteries after the initial bike purchase come from Amazon. At that energy density, is there any point to trying to contain a potential fire by, say, setting the battery inside a dutch oven? Or on a stack of sheet rock? Or would it burn well-past hot enough to ignite things outside it?
(edit: Dutch Oven has some thermal mass, but too much heat conductivity. Luckily, there is an actual product for this: UL-rated battery storage/charging boxes)
If you want to contain it a bit and you don't have a metal-fire extinguisher, dump a bucket of sand or fine salt over it. Commercial metal-fire extinguishers are nothing more than a dozen kilograms of dry, fine salt and a special low-pressure nozzle that allows depositing a "layer" of salt on the burning metal fire that melts and thus contains the fire. However it's hard to keep dry enough that it doesn't aggregate over time, reducing the effectiveness.
Personally, I recommend anyone charging serious amounts of unprotected or questionably protected lithium cells in a residential structure to, first of all, not charge them while you are asleep, and to keep a 10-20 liter bucket of sand nearby. Throw it on the burning battery if you can (you should be able to hear the battery go off maybe 30 seconds before it does go off), then run for your life.
Right; a battery box isn't for throwing a battery in after it starts combusting; it's for putting it in every time when you charge it, so you don't burn down the entire apartment building while running away.
Yep. With a gasoline car, dump water and foam onto the wreck and that's it. If you're really fancy install a sprinkler system in your garage - you can just DIY it if you want, hook up a water pipe to your water mains with a backflow prevention valve to prevent stagnant water from flowing back, add a few heads like [1], and there you go - assuming your water mains has decent pressure, that should be enough to keep a gasoline car fire in check for long enough so that the firefighters can show up and deal with it properly.
A battery car fire however? That one is much, much harder to extinguish and it burns way hotter. You need much more volume of water to cool it down enough to approach the vehicle safely, it will cause a lot more damage to surrounding structures, and fire departments haven't gotten nearly as much experience as they have with gasoline car fires.
That said, if I needed a car, I'd still go for an electric one, I'd just not park it in a garage directly connected to a home and certainly not in some basement garage.
[1] https://koka-shop.de/universal-sprinklerkopf-brandschutz.htm...