A racetrack in rural Wales, the Anglesey Trac Môn Circuit, just became the first in the United Kingdom to ban electric vehicles. More important, at least to this column, is that Anglesey’s ban will also include battery-powered motorcycles, but also hybrids like the new Ninja 7 Kawasaki is bringing to market. Although the track has released no specific reason for the new dictum, the problem would seem to be safety, namely that battery-powered vehicles could pose a fire risk that small tracks, like Anglesey, are unwilling to accept.
Now, before anyone starts protesting that I’m being unfair to electric vehicles, let me state that fires in gasoline-fueled vehicles, be they two-wheeled or four, are much more common than conflagrations fueled by lithium-ion. Perhaps even as much as 50 times more common.
But, while said battery may be 50 times less likely to catch fire, those fires are also much more difficult to put out. It may take but a few thousand gallons of H20 — the average fire truck carries somewhere between 500 and 1,500 gallons — to put out a gas fire in an ICE-powered vehicle, but it can take as much as 40,000 gallons of water to completely — more on those italics in just a moment — to extinguish a lithium-ion blaze. Just for a little context: a smaller house fire can take as little as 1,500 to 3,000 gallons to extinguish and even a real whopper of McMansion firestorm — you know, the ones that warrant multiple ladder trucks — won’t take more than 20,000 gallons. In other words, you’d best hope that, should your battery-powered vehicle — two-wheeled or four — catch fire, it does so near some major metropolitan area with multiple fire departments.
And, even then, the fire might not be out. EV battery fires are notorious for smouldering for hours before reigniting. So much so that the International Association of Fire Chiefs suggests that not only must towing services be alerted to the possible dangers of reignition, but that there should also be “50 feet of clear space around the vehicle once stored.” One salvage operation in California found that out the hard way: a Tesla Model X, its flames long thought extinguished, re-ignited six days after it was tossed onto the junk heap. So difficult, in fact, are EV conflagrations to put out that some European fire departments actually bring dumpsters with them, fill them with water and then simply dump the blazing Tesla into them for a long, wet nap.
The reason that car battery fires are so hard to put out is two-fold. For one, “runaway thermal events” burn much hotter than simple gasoline fires. Complicating the matter even more, though, is that an EV fire happens within the battery’s cells that are housed in modules which then fit into a casing. In other words, while the inferno rages inside, firefighters are busy blasting water at the battery pack’s outer cover. Hence why so much water is needed. Or why the darned things keep reigniting. Traditional fire-fighting techniques never directly attack the heat source, just its perimeter.
New methods are being developed to minimize the amount of water needed to control an EV fire. They are, however, relatively complex and costly since, besides the ability to spout water, they must also be able to pierce the battery case so that the incoming fluid can cool the offending battery cells directly.
A Swedish system called Cobra uses an Ultra High-Pressure Lance (UHPL) with more than 4,000 pounds of water pressure along with an abrasive material to cut through the battery casing to get direct access to the inflamed battery cells. Another, the Rosenbauer Battery Extinguisher System Technology (BEST), uses pressurized air to punch a spike through the casing through which water can be injected. In either case, the procedure uses less water — the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency claims the Cobra can put out an EV fire with just 60 gallons.
But such equipment is very specialized, would be rarely used and is all but unknown in local fire departments. In other words, it’s not surprising that a small track like Anglesey has banned everything battery-powered. Nor are they the only ones. Here in North America, Summit Point Motorsports Park in West Virginia announced that it was taking a “technical pause” with EVs until it can develop an emergency response policy and Carolina Motorsports Park, in South Carolina, also has a no EVs policy.
Let us also not forget that the entire Jerez Moto-E paddock went up in flames in 2019, taking 18 Energica race bikes with it, and a similar runaway EV blaze took down the Felicity Ace cargo ship in 2022, leading to some shipping lines refusing to board battery-powered vehicles.
The only good news is that, here in Canada, so few full-sized electric motorcycles have been sold that there is little demand from enthusiasts to “race” their electric bikes. Nonetheless, if we really are to transition to a battery-powered two-wheeled future — and that would seem to be ever more questionable — dramatic changes will need to be made and, like pretty much everything about our supposed electric revolution, it’s complicated.
