More Than A Dozen Fisker Karma Hybrids Caught Fire And Exploded In New Jersey Port After Sandy

...wow that's not good

 

I remember a Fisker in Texas caught fire and burned down a garage after being parked. That is an engineering design problem. But no one designs a car to survive natural disasters.

Bob Wilson

 

Wish there is a way to protect the electrical / batteries from the ravages of water, especially sea water. Perhaps a hermetic seal or coating to minimize fire and explosion.

Hopefully this gets resolved.

DBCassidy

 

This photo really doesn't prove anything. We'll see.

 

More bad Karma for Fisker

 

Why did they leave the cars there in the first place ? We knew it was coming for almost a week.

 

Maybe someone has to explain to them what a fire sale is.

 

While I don't think fisker needs to make the cars survive being submerged in salt water, the bad publicity is going to hurt.

JCI has not bought A123 yet in bankruptcy, and this could complicate the sale.

 

I wonder why some of them burned and others didn't.

 

They didn't believe the majority of the computer models that had the hurricane hitting the northeast coast were accurate.
Instead, they put their full faith in the couple of computer models that had it going out to see.
They must have figured the scientists behind the majority of the "alarmist" models were just doing it for the lucrative research grant funds.

 

Remember Fisker is that company helped by Al Gore.

 

Here are some pertinent technical questions about this:
(1) What is the nature of the fire - chemical reaction or just one big electrical short? If chemical- what is happening?
(2) Would a PiP do the same thing? How about a Gen2 Prius NiMH?

 

I'm going to speculate that ONE fire started and spread to the adjacent cars. If simply dipping a Fiskar into salt water causes a fire, all of them should have gone up since all of them got a dip. Maybe someone did a remote start to check up on them while they were being dipped?

 

For a car to be unusable after being submerged is normal, for the car to catch on fire isn't normal or acceptable.

 

I wonder if conventional ICEVs would've caught fire in the same circumstances. After all, there were car fires in large lots as a result of the tsuanmi in Japan.

http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2011 ... japan?lite has a pic that I was able to quickly dig up. I do remember seeing pics or videos of probably the same lot w/flames. Unfortunately, the video at http://www.autoblog.com/2011/03/11/tsun ... -shipping/ been removed for some reason. I found a working video at

.

As a side note, Tsunami Reveals Durability of Nissan’s Leaf - NYTimes.com reports that no Leafs caught fire in Japan after the tsunami, but their pack is sealed. http://www.nhtsa.gov/pdf/ev/Nissan_Presentation-Bob_Yakushi.pptx mentions a 1 hour immersion test on the Leaf's battery pack.

 

Instead they put their faith in non-scientists who went on about hype...

 

Get a little perspective folks:

They don't design cars to survive tornadoes either.

Bob Wilson

 

well Fisker at 5000-lbs might hold its ground better in that case