“Moreover, it’s especially dangerous if there’s an EV, golf cart, or scooter in a storm ravaged home,” Patronis stated. “The battery system can become compromised, prompting a fire, which is again, something we really don’t experience with combustion engines.”
Patronis urged Floridians to not activate EVs, or plug them in or unplug them, and to hunt skilled help to maneuver the automobiles.
“Improperly moving an EV can recharge the batteries, potentially creating a fire,” Patronis stated.
More than 9,700 EVs are registered to drivers inside Lee, Collier, and Charlotte counties, a number of the worst affected areas by the hurricane, which made landfall as a class 4 storm in late September. Car producers haven’t offered information on the place these automobiles had been positioned previous to the hurricane.
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Approximately 3,400 Teslas might have been inside a 50-meter influence zone, in areas that had been “inundated” by salty storm surge waters, FLOIR stated.
The CFO has reached out to EV producers and continues to have “conversations” with Tesla, which has requested FLOIR promote its web site in order that drivers can entry additional data, Patronis stated.
“As I have stated, we have a real-world experiment ongoing in Florida with saltwater and EVs, and it’s in the manufacturer’s interest to do something about it before we have further loss of property, or heaven forbid life, in Florida – or in other parts of the nation,” Patronis stated.
“Due to fire reignition risks, it’s a concern for the rest of the nation if EVs compromised by saltwater are resold, and we’ve already gotten unconfirmed reports of these causing fires outside of Florida.”
The warning comes two months after AXA’s Swiss unit apologised for staging a faux EV battery hearth at a crash take a look at occasion. The Tesla car didn’t have a battery in it on the time of the crash, with the fireplace as a substitute simulated by pyrotechnics.
Read extra: AXA unit makes apology on again of Tesla crash take a look at controversy
The crash take a look at blaze was simulated to display the “extremely tricky” nature of EV fires, AXA stated in its apology, because it conceded that its statistics confirmed that EVs didn’t catch hearth greater than automobiles with combustion engines.