Happened in San Francisco. Thieves allegedly extract 180-pound battery from Prius parked in Pac Heights - SFGate
Cripes! With the HV Traction battery being a 180 pound version - here’s a question; did they steal the battery from a Prius Prime, or just a standard Prius Hybrid? The standard Lithium Ion HV battery surely isn’t worth $10,000 is it? Hence my questioning whether it was stolen from a Prius Prime. If it was a standard 2017 Prius, did it have an Lithium ion battery or a Nickel Metal Hydride type battery? I’ll assume it had a Lithium Ion pack. I could just about appreciate them stealing the battery from a Prius Prime.....but from a standard 2017 Prius hybrid? What on Earth are they going to do with a stolen 1.0KhW Lithium Ion Battery? That’s quite a scary new development! iPhone 6s +
Only thing that makes this a "scary new development" is how horrible the news reporting and editorial oversight of this report is... Fundamental basics of journalism entirely ignored in this garbage reporting! You need to confirm people's basic claims with multiple sources / reality (police, car dealer, insurance company, etc). But no, instead they're using nextdoor.com crime&safety section as their sole source. This section has drawn many a lawsuit, has a horrible reputation for racial profiling and fearmongering. It's the classic outlier incident and now a bunch of people, including the local TV news that should know better, are blowing it up into more than an isolated with no basis in reality, even the basic weight of a lithium Ion battery is too much for them to research and a crime victim is of course an expert on such things, right? This is why the whole country is turning into so much failure in a far more competitive global arena moving forward... We need to start thinking clearly about facts, reality and how to report on them in a more responsible way.
I really don't see this becoming a widespread thing as stealing a charged traction battery is a recipe for electrocution. Far more dangerous than sawing off a catalytic converter.
As someone who's familiar with moving around high voltage batteries on a regular basis, once the pack is disarmed the risk of electrocution is very low... However, what you said about electrocution is what most people think and because of this I've many a times bought perfectly healthy battery packs for Honda and Toyota hybrids for $50 each at the wrecking yard... And at that price why would you need to steal 'em? Of course that's probably just a west coast thing....
Oh, I agree, they are (mostly) safe when handled properly. I just think that thieves, who are likely rushing to avoid getting caught, are going to cut corners or even forget to disarm the pack. And if in their haste they damage the battery pack? Then all bets are off regarding electrocution.
If you look in the very first frame of the video, what appears to be a Gen 4 safety disconnect is sitting on the floor of the car. In the big scheme of things, any competent person who has worked on one of these batteries knows that as long as the car isn't in ready mode, the main relays are off. That means the high voltage cables are dead. You can cut them any time you feel like it. Someone stealing a HV battery isn't just your average guy who blows out a window to steal change from the center console.
Yea, but out here on the West Coast, especially in California thieves are really chill and laid back when it comes to getting the expensive stuff. No doubt there were plenty of people that saw this person casually working away at it and did nothing. This isn't a smash and grab, more like a 10 minutes of trying to look like you're legitimately working on your own car, probably early in the AM...
