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

• Hyundai is growing an unmanned firefighting car 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 car fires in underground parking garages. Whereas these had 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 a number of 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 dwell in these large, high-rise buildings, and whereas an EV hearth is a nasty affair on an excellent day, one underground is even worse. The smoke from the Mercedes hearth broken 140 automobiles and despatched two dozen individuals to the hospital, and all incidents had been notoriously troublesome for firefighters to extinguish. 

This isn’t one thing that thousands and thousands of Koreans wish to take care of, and as such, it is led to a precipitous drop in EV gross sales. And that’s not a headache Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group desires to take care of. It has large world 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 struggle. Or moderately, a roving firefighting robotic. 

That is definitely one option to do it.

Korea’s Yonhap Information Company studies that Hyundai is working with the nation’s Nationwide Fireplace Company to develop and deploy an remote-controlled firefighting car beginning in 2026. The robotic is depicted in handout illistrations as a six-wheeled shiny purple tank-like car. It’s reportedly based mostly on an present multipurpose unmanned car platform from Hyundai Rotem, the conglomerate’s industrial car arm. (That is additionally an excellent reminder that the Hyundai Group is gigantic in scope to the purpose the place it virtually makes automobiles as a sort of facet hustle.) 

The car is alleged 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 car designed particularly to struggle these sorts of fires ought to have the ability 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 proscribed, smoke fills the house shortly, warmth will get trapped and the blaze will unfold shortly to different automobiles. And lithium-ion battery fires take huge quantities of water and retardant to extinguish. This may occasionally simply be a job higher suited to machines. 

Statistically, EV fires occur far much less than these of gasoline-powered automobiles. 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 option to surpass different world opponents) will quickly mandate battery transparency guidelines in order that EV patrons know precisely what’s of their energy pack and the place it’s from.

Presently, EV batteries are a little bit of a black field; it is usually 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 strong proof suggests” Chinese language-made automotive batteries are considerably much less protected or extra fire-prone.)

Regardless, battery transparency guidelines ought to assist prospects know which batteries could be extra of a threat than others whereas they’re procuring, 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 12 months. No phrase but on the robotic’s battery measurement, vary or estimated charging speeds. 

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