- Hyundai is growing 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 also 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 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 enormous, high-rise buildings, and whereas an EV hearth is a nasty affair on 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 enormous international ambitions for EVs and even right here within the U.S., it is rising as maybe the highest menace to Tesla’s market share.
No surprise, then, that Hyundai Motor Group is bringing a gun to this knife combat. Or fairly, a roving firefighting robotic.
That is definitely one approach to do it.
Korea’s Yonhap Information Company studies 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 shiny pink tank-like automobile. It’s reportedly primarily based on an current multipurpose unmanned automobile platform from Hyundai Rotem, the conglomerate’s industrial automobile arm. (That is additionally reminder that the Hyundai Group is gigantic in scope to the purpose the place it nearly makes automobiles as a form of facet hustle.)
The automobile is claimed to have water cannons and enhanced warmth resistance, which it could 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 combat these sorts of fires ought to be capable to do a job that’s probably 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 house rapidly, warmth will get trapped and the blaze will unfold rapidly to different automobiles. 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 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 business as a approach to surpass different international 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 parts are sourced. After the Mercedes hearth was traced again to the automotive’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 clients know which batteries may be extra of a threat than others whereas they’re buying, and we might 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 measurement, vary or estimated charging speeds.
Contact the creator: [email protected]
