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Saturday, February 1, 2025

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 hearth 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 reside in these big, high-rise buildings, and whereas an EV hearth is a nasty affair on an excellent day, one underground is even worse. The smoke from the Mercedes hearth broken 140 vehicles and despatched two dozen folks to the hospital, and all incidents had been notoriously troublesome for firefighters to extinguish. 

This isn’t one thing that thousands and thousands of Koreans need 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 desires to cope with. It has big world 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 marvel, then, that Hyundai Motor Group is bringing a gun to this knife combat. Or slightly, a roving firefighting robotic. 

That is definitely one solution to do it.

Hyundai Fire Robot

Korea’s Yonhap Information Company experiences 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 vivid crimson tank-like automobile. It’s reportedly primarily based on an present multipurpose unmanned automobile platform from Hyundai Rotem, the conglomerate’s industrial automobile arm. (That is additionally an excellent reminder that the Hyundai Group is gigantic in scope to the purpose the place it nearly makes vehicles as a sort of aspect hustle.) 

The automobile is alleged 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 combat these sorts of fires ought to be capable to do a job that’s probably too harmful for human firefighters. When a EV hearth 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 occasionally 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 troublesome 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 solution to surpass different world rivals) will quickly mandate battery transparency guidelines in order that EV consumers 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 troublesome to know who even provides them, not to mention the place their varied parts are sourced. After the Mercedes hearth 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 could be extra of a threat than others whereas they’re purchasing, 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 dimension, vary or estimated charging speeds. 

Contact the creator: [email protected]

 

 

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