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

• Hyundai is creating 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 fireplace in and round Seoul inside a couple 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 fireplace is a nasty affair on a very good day, one underground is even worse. The smoke from the Mercedes fireplace broken 140 vehicles 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 wish to cope with, 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 needs to cope with. It has enormous 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 reasonably, a roving firefighting robotic. 

That is actually one technique to do it.

Korea’s Yonhap Information Company reviews that Hyundai is working with the nation’s Nationwide Fireplace 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 purple 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 a very good reminder that the Hyundai Group is gigantic in scope to the purpose the place it virtually makes vehicles as a sort of aspect 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 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 restricted, smoke fills the area shortly, warmth will get trapped and the blaze will unfold shortly to different vehicles. And lithium-ion battery fires take huge 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 vehicles. However after 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 business as a technique 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 numerous elements 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 secure or extra fire-prone.)

Regardless, battery transparency guidelines ought to assist clients know which batteries could be extra of a danger 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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