this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
194 points (88.5% liked)
Memes
45887 readers
1317 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wait until you see a gas tank spontaneously combust (you won't). The same way you won't see a gas tank explode when overfilling it or puncturing it.
Have you never heard of the Ford Pinto
Except you totally would. If you punctured a gas tank, it'll get gasoline on hot components that'll cause it to ignite.
There is nothing hot under the gas tank. Just the exhaust, which is not hot enough to ignite the gas. Also, the car in the picture seems like it was stationary. Please tell me, how anything in a combustion engine vehicle could be hot enough after about an hour.
Do you think the gas tank is IN the engine bay or something? The hottest thing underneath a gas tank might be the exhaust... The ignition temp of gas is something like 500F/260C... Without spark... it's not going to happen just out of the blue. An Exhaust CAN get that hot.. But under most normal uses, basically all normal cars won't get that hot (racecars and other "performance cars" probably will get hotter than the ignition temp of Gasoline).
I was thinking in terms of a crash or a huge object intrusion. That'll be pushing all sorts of things to places they're not supposed to go, such as hot break pads or even parts of the other car.
Just like in normal operation you wouldn't be able to catch a gas tank on fire by puncturing it, you wouldn't get a puncture on a battery either in normal operation. It's the extreme crash scenarios you need to worry about. Both batteries and gasoline are very energy dense and potentially dangerous. And both have a lot of mitigation strategies to keep them from being a hazard. Batteries aren't inherently lots more dangerous like the original comment seemed to be implying.
Batteries at this point are almost universally the base of the car... It's not hard for debris on the road to kick up and puncture the underside of a car.
A fuel tank would simply leak it all out... Unless there was a spark. A battery cell being exposed to air will self-immolate. It all depends on how it's packaged... Which we're learning in the Florida hurricane here... They're not that well packaged...
That's why they have a thick belly pan. It's all mitigation.