The Dangerous Car Designs and Lithium Ion Batteries and more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on Maine's WGAN Saturday Show [10-26-19]

Welcome Back!  

Cool looking cars may be stylish but are they safe? Also, the dangers of Lithium ion batteries.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

---

Related Articles:

They Look Cool but How Safe Are They?

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

 

Craig Peterson
Hello Everyone, Welcome Back. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. We've been talking about lithium-ion batteries and some of the problems with them. I've got here my lithium polymer batteries now I had turned these on putting them on a charge which is just in this case just plug the batteries directly into micro USB connectors. If you're watching this on video, you can see it and you can see one of them's got a little red stripe on it. It's been kind of alternating the battery This is a triple-A if you can imagine this okay very small battery. It not only has built into it this micro USB connector, but it has a hold of the charging circuits logic and everything else. This can be used as a regular triple-A battery. It's called pale blue. You will have seen it on Kickstarter as well. And I'm right there on Kickstarter. It's so cool. They've got all kinds of neat stats about it. So they sent me a few of them to play with. I'm going to play with them and I'll let you know how it goes. But this is another generation of lithium batteries. Lithium Polymer batteries is what these are called a very rapid charge. But we've been talking about the lithium-ion batteries and some of the problems with them when they start to swell and of course, that's the sum of the internal components short out. There is an incredible amount of energy in those batteries, particularly if they're close to fully charged. And then when they short out, of course, it heats up and they catch fire. Now, this is all tied into this Tesla death and an article that I got from Yahoo here actually it's from Bloomberg. But you know, through Yahoo. And here's what happened. This guy, a 48-year-old anesthesiologist, he was driving his least Tesla in February, when he lost control on a South Florida Parkway, and the car slammed into a palm tree. Now they filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Broward County because the police could not open the doors to the Tesla. Now if you own a Tesla, you know this, but if you haven't seen how this works, you're probably not familiar with it. Normally in the car, you walk up to the car and you can grab the door handle. Personally, I have refused to buy cars that don't have a handle like you know Ford cars have that Solid handle that you can grab on to you can put your whole hand around it. And you can pull directly right, though those little stupid little handles that you put in your fingers kind of into underneath the handle and you pop it out. I don't like those I don't think those are safe. I've never thought they were safe. And the reason why is I was involved in emergency medicine, and we would get to the scene of a vehicle. And if the vehicle had that kind of handle like my, my forks do, where you can grab that handle, and you can yank it. You can get people out of the car, you most of the time, you know, sometimes it's tough to cut the doors open, but that you have the leverage you have something to hold on to those stupid little handles that you stick your fingers under and flip forward to open the door. There is no leverage right? At that point, you have to break the window, and you try and grab the door. And you certainly have a little bit of leverage here. But it's much easier to hold a handle. that's meant to take some abuse while you're trying to pull the door open. And seconds can mean the difference between life or death or be maimed permanently or just having a temporary injury. So I have never liked that kind of handle. Well, what does Tesla have on it? Well, it has an even worse handle. Now I've talked on the show before about how Tesla with the safety crash tests that were done on them. The Tesla Model S did phenomenally well. It broke the testing equipment that the test ratings, you know where it's five stars on this and five stars on that. It scored higher than five stars on some of these tests. Well, that's kind of cool when you get right down to it. Wow, that is a Really nice, safe car. But those tests were designed for normal vehicles.

They've got a normal engine upfront. And that normal engine course might come into the passenger compartment. You don't want it to the Mercedes, I think was the first one to have a design where if there was a collision involving the front end, the engine would kind of drop-down so that it didn't end up in your lap and an accident. Well, Tesla doesn't have an engine sitting up front. Electric cars have electric motors, usually right by the wheels. So there's no way you're going to get an intrusion into the passenger environment. And you have all of that space up front to crumble a huge crumple zone that can protect the occupants. That's absolutely fantastic. I love that right. I love that concept. But here's part of what wasn't tested. It was the door handles the emergency responders the firemen em mass, right? All of us getting to the scene. The police officers the police are usually first on the scene because they're already out driving around. You can't yank that handle because it's got the stupid little handle. But even worse than that, if the vehicle is damaged in the wrong way, they will the handles are completely recessed. And that's what happened to this 48-year-old in Florida. She normally you walk up to a Tesla, you have the fog in your pocket. You get near the door, and the little handle pops out. Oh, isn't that cute? Look at that pop. So it's going to save me over the life of this car because of the lack of wind resistance is going to save me all of $5 over the next hundred thousand miles. I don't get it right it's designed thing it's ascetics. Always, not pretty. Right. That's what it was all about. Well, this lawsuit is saying that fire and golf the car and burned Dr. Juan beyond recognition, all because the Model S has inaccessible door handles no other way to open the doors and then unreasonably dangerous fire risk. Now the complaint list the cause of death is smoke inhalation and the state said the doctor existing no internal injuries are broken bones in the crash. In other words, he should have survived the crash. So Problem number one, no handle that you can yank and get serious leverage on problem number two, no handle in this guy's case, right? Because it didn't present itself. By the way. Tesla calls it an auto present. Auto present door handle No door handle at all. And the police officer gets there. And he and the bystanders are standing there helplessly as the car filled with smoke and flames and the doctor was burned. No internal injuries, no broken bones, he probably survived the crash. And then he died from inhalation from the smoke and then was burned. There's no coming back from that one right. Now let's talk about the other problem. We were just talking a lot about the problems with lithium-ion batteries. And how now, by the way, airlines do not allow you to have a lithium-ion battery in your checked luggage. And there's a very good reason for that. Don't be an idiot and put a lithium-ion battery in your checked luggage. Because here's what could happen. Let's say it's an electric razor. It might be a laptop. It could be anything that has a lithium-ion battery in it. And that battery is sitting down in the luggage hold of the airplane. And that battery decides that because of air pressure changes, it was already defective, whatever it might be that battery decides it is now time to catch fire. So what we end up with is the whole passenger compartment starting to fill with smoke, toxic, nasty smoke and fire and the airplane catches fire and it's very difficult to fight now, the flight attendants are trained to be able to go down below and try and fight a fire down in that compartment.

And there are fire suppression systems for it. But a fire suppression system is unlikely to completely extinguish Fire caused by a lithium-ion battery. That's why any lithium-ion batteries need to be with you in the passenger compartment. So they can isolate it. If it catches fire, they might just set it in the middle of the floor and let it burn. Because there's nothing much else they can do about it, but at least it's not catching other things on fire, it can be controlled. So what happens now, if you do form a lithium-ion battery? Myth Busters just did a really good one on that. In their new show their Myth Busters, Jr. I think it's called they just re-addressed it. But lithium-ion battery, let's say you throw one out in the trash, and the Trashman comes and gets it and puts it in the trash truck, and the trash truck compresses it. And what happens with compressed tamale it sharks out potentially, and if it short touted causes that fire in the trash truck, you've heard about these right Trash trucks now catching on fire. So what do you think happens when a car that is full of hundreds of lithium-ion batteries? isn't an accident. All you have to do is deform some of those batteries and they will catch fire and that's exactly what happened here. That Tesla continued to burn for hours according to Bloomberg, reigniting several times, even after firefighters extinguished the flames in the car had been towed. This isn't By the way, the only case where Model S is lithium-ion batteries have have burned I've seen a lot of pictures of these before. Another doctor I think it was in Beverly Hills had a car that just caught fire Tesla when they were stopped at a stoplight. the family has an 18-year-old lost control of his Tesla crashing a concrete wall last year. Expect a version of the battery before his death entirely survivable crash. This is going to be interesting. We're going to kind of follow this. But this isn't the only one that's having these problems. So we're going to talk about what Ford's doing. And some other automakers, they're working with our friends over at Bosh on helping to solve some of this problem. So we'll talk about that when we get back we got a lot of other articles here, more spying going on. And VPN, we got to get back to a VPN, which of course was the subject of our masterclass. This past week, so stick around you're listening to Craig Peterson. Here on WGAN. And online at Craig Peterson dot com. That is Peter s-o-n with an O, stick around because we'll be right back.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553