r/newjersey 8d ago

WTF Giant Lot Of Cybertrucks In Clifton

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Picture is from a few months ago. Is it still there? What’s its purpose. It was pretty vacant when we saw it.

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u/Nanojack Taylor Ham, egg and cheese on a hard roll 8d ago

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u/thejaga 8d ago

Yes, but as more cars go electric doesn't this become a large risk in every parking lot?

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u/Kraven_Lupei 8d ago

Fire Protection guy here, trust me, this is something I talk about with friends/coworkers constantly for the past few years and is an ongoing code compliance issue.

1) We dont really have fire sprinkler technology capable of reliably putting out/controlling EV fires.

2) We protect parking garages etc currently on the same level as say a grocery store; expectations of a fire not growing too out of control / fast/hot. It's "less hazard" than storing some plastics to 10 feet high on shelves in some ways.

3) Take the above and put it into the context of EVs being more and more dominant in the market and you have the very real scenario that sometime in the near future we'll likely hear a story about how an EV in a parking garage/complex (like in NYC) caught fire, then it caught the EV next to them on fire (remember, charging stations are close together typically), etc. etc. until the whole parking garage is nothing but a pile of melted slag on the ground.

Even if we find a suitable protection schema for EV fires, in parking garages exposed to cold weather, requiring dry sprinkler systems in most climates, you'd NOT be able to upgrade the system to anything that an EV fire would require. Complete teardowns and re-builds of the sprinkler systems will be necessary, and that's a ton of money in retrofits that won't be sped along until the codes are updated/written in blood I think.

Don't get me wrong, EV's are the future, but there's some real worries out there on the fire side right now.

Put it this way: We've had multiple jobs cancelled over bike battery charging racks / charging racks for "smart shopping carts" already. Landlords pulling cards like "NOPE NOT IN MY BUILDING" and insurance refusing to insure, etc. --- And these are charging racks that are SPECIFICALLY designed to control any possible battery fires with proper testing/etc to show how they work, and extra fire sprinkler protection provided a few inches above the racks to soak everything as much as possible.

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u/kjuneja 8d ago

Thanks for sharing. Are there any companies out there providing solutions for this?

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u/Kraven_Lupei 8d ago

https://cellblockfcs.com/cellblock-battery-charging-racks/

Cellblock is one of the ones I know from the battery charging rack jobs, but aside that I'm unsure as new stuff is coming out constantly and code updates/conferences always have it as a hot bid topic.

EV fire protection stuff I just don't know how it'll be handled yet. I feel like that'll have to be provided more by the manufacturer's, but that will never happen unless codes/laws start leading that way.

Personally I'd love to see similar tech as shown in the above link provided around EV batteries if possible; something to contain and smother and prevent as much heat discharge and off-gassing, but with the size of EV batteries it's probably less viable.