Predictably Made In China Electric Cars Are Catching On Fire, Chinese Batteries Are The Reason

Range is one crucial criteria of electric vehicles (EVs) that all the EV makers are trying to improve upon. This basically means that everyone is running for larger capacity batteries to power their vehicles. But what if this pursuit starts compromising on the safety of the vehicles?

This seems to be the case with a Chinese EV maker. BJEV, one of China¡¯s biggest manufacturers of battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Within 2019, three of the company¡¯s vehicles (same model) have caught fire while charging. The most recent fire broke out last week in Shenzhen.

The vehicles that caught fire were the Beiqi Weiwang 407 EV, as per a report by the National Business Daily. There has been no comment on the incidents from the company¡¯s end as of now. But it is noteworthy that BJEV topped the sales of battery passenger cars in China last year, selling 150,000 units in total.

(Representative Image: Reuters)

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Now the incidents might sound horrendous, and one can only feel glad that no casualties have been reported in any of these fire breakouts, but this a very practical threat that many EVs face. Consider it this way, most of the BEVs in use around the globe run on lithium-ion batteries, the same ones that power your smartphone or laptop. Now we all have heard of incidents of smartphones of different makes catching fire due to some reason or the other. The recent incidents in China just take the responsible chemical reactions to a whole new level. Nothing unheard of but still a whole new level of risk.

The risk increases proportionally to the energy density of the battery. And as China advances rapidly towards manufacturing high energy density batteries to be used in EVs globally, the potential at stake here is of gigantic proportions. Know that China is currently the largest manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries, having procured the largest quantity of cobalt and other related elements required in the production of these batteries. More than 90 percent of EV makers procure their batteries from Chinese plants.

Beiqi Weiwang 407 EV

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No doubt, there are safety checks in place to avoid such a mishap, both by the battery manufacturers as well as the auto makers. But so should have been the case in these fire outbreaks. And with only a recent increase in the use of EVs around the world, we as humans are yet to learn the impact of climatic conditions on electric automobiles and their batteries. One such adverse effect was faced by EV owners in the US during the recent winters, when many of them were left stranded due to a sharp drop in the range of the batteries due to extreme cold.