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 fireplace in and round Seoul inside just a few weeks of one another—it’s comprehensible why they’d put the nation on edge. 

In any case, most Koreans in main city facilities dwell in these large, high-rise buildings, and whereas an EV fireplace is a nasty affair on an excellent day, one underground is even worse. The smoke from the Mercedes fireplace broken 140 automobiles and despatched two dozen folks to the hospital, and all incidents had been notoriously tough for firefighters to extinguish. 

This isn’t one thing that hundreds of thousands of Koreans need 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 needs to cope with. It has large 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 surprise, then, that Hyundai Motor Group is bringing a gun to this knife struggle. 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 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 brilliant crimson tank-like car. It’s reportedly primarily based on an current 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 type of facet hustle.) 

The car 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 car designed particularly to struggle these sorts of fires ought to be capable of do a job that’s doubtlessly too harmful for human firefighters. When a EV fireplace occurs in a densely packed underground parking storage, room to maneuver is proscribed, smoke fills the area shortly, warmth will get trapped and the blaze will unfold shortly to different automobiles. And lithium-ion battery fires take large quantities of water and retardant to extinguish. This may increasingly simply be a job higher suited to machines. 

Statistically, EV fires occur far much less than these of gasoline-powered automobiles. However once they do occur, they are often catastrophically tough 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 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.

At present, EV batteries are a little bit of a black field; it is usually tough to know who even provides them, not to mention the place their varied parts are sourced. After the Mercedes fireplace 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 prospects know which batteries may be extra of a threat than others whereas they’re procuring, 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. 

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