It's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. The big standard for gasoline wrecks is "is it leaking any fluids?" If it is leaking any fluids, the vehicle gets towed away and no attempt is made to start it. An EV does not have so obvious an indicator. A wreck could expose some high voltage wiring, hold shut the overpressure caps, dent some cells, sever a few parallel connections, etc. For all of these the EV might run just fine, might even look fine, but not be safe.
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2014 at 12:52 PM From: "Roger Stockton via EV" <[email protected]> To: "Electric Vehicle Discussion List" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [EVDL] EValert: !Don't buy a salvaged Tesla EV to repair &drive! (video) ... The energy content of gasoline is 32.4MJ/L, and 1MJ=0.28kWh; so, a 10 (US) gallon tank of ordinary gasoline contains 343kWh of energy, and yet every other auto manufacturer has *millions* of vehicles on the road with a manually-resettable-by-anyone inertia switch to disable this energy source in the event of a sufficiently serious accident. Yes, a means of automatically disabling/disconnecting the traction pack in the event of an accident makes sense for ~any~ EV, however, there is no obvious justification for this feature not being manually resettable without the assistance of the manufacturer. It seems reasonable that the vehicle might have the intelligence to refuse to re-enable should its onboard diagnostics determine that something is unsafe or defective with its systems (in the same way that a manually-resettable circuit breaker will immediately re-open if the a fault condition persists), but again it is not obvious that there is any need for the involvement of the manufacturer. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
