Luton airport...

JonRGV250 said:
Fortunately quite a rare occurrence, but easy enough to cure, just stall the engine.
I’ve had a few go on me, and it’s entertaining to say the least.
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I've seen lorry drivers do that, hold the engine on the brakes but people ignorant of what is happening are likely to just pull over, put it in neutral and turn off the ignition, the worst thing you could do. Hmm could you even stall an automatic? Never tried it.
 
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The problem here is when has this ever happened before? Even if it wasn’t an ev there would have been a few in the car park.

EV now make no sense to me and I used to be a fan, the whole charging infrastructure, the lithium battery issues, the range still seems to be hopeless and they cost a fortune.

If kids start torching them there’ll be carnage.
 
fez said:
I don't know if that relates to you can being burned to the ground. These airport parking places are not cheap either. It was more expensive to park our car at Stanstead for 3 days than it was for 2 of us (and 2 nippers) to fly to Ireland. Outrageous.
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Yeah I had that a few years ago at Stanstead, parking the car was more expensive than the flights to Germany. Complete rip off.
 
Slam62 said:
The problem here is when has this ever happened before? Even if it wasn’t an ev there would have been a few in the car park.

EV now make no sense to me and I used to be a fan, the whole charging infrastructure, the lithium battery issues, the range still seems to be hopeless and they cost a fortune.

If kids start torching them there’ll be carnage.
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It was a diesel. Anti EV crowd going mad over nothing.
 
Slam62 said:
The problem here is when has this ever happened before? Even if it wasn’t an ev there would have been a few in the car park.

EV now make no sense to me and I used to be a fan, the whole charging infrastructure, the lithium battery issues, the range still seems to be hopeless and they cost a fortune.

If kids start torching them there’ll be carnage.
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I'd hope that last one is pretty rare! :D

Also, someone provided stats and EVs were pretty safe.
 
Colonel_Klinck said:
More difficult but diesel engines can have a runaway event if oil leaks in the turbo. Hot engine oil gets blown into the air intake and acts like diesel, they are very similar. Turning off the ignition does nothing because the engine only needs air and fuel and the turbo is now feeding it both. The engine now just revs until it destroys itself and can catch fire. Many industrial diesel engines have a way to cut off the air supply if this happens, cars do not.
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The reason diesel engines can go into an uncontrolled over rev condition is because nearly all have no air throttle, unlike petrol engines. So if a source of fuel becomes uncontrolled, be it sump oil pumped up into the combustion chambers via worn piston rings and bores, or from the release of the pressurised oil supply to the turbo(s) on supercharged power units into the engine via a knackered turbo housing or shaft, the engine just goes into a self fulfilling uncontrollable state.

It's impossible to stop ring pumping or, in the short to medium term, turbo oiling sources externally, the only way to stop 'em is to block off the air intake with something well sealing, (your hand if you feel brave) or hydraulic lock the engine with water or similar into the air intake, which will definitely stop 'em, but also almost certainly do very serious damage :)

Not to say runaway can't also cause some serious or terminal damage in itself...


Runaway diesels, not had one for years, awesome on big truck engines :)
 
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413x said:
I'd hope that last one is pretty rare! :D

Also, someone provided stats and EVs were pretty safe.
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It is at the moment, if you wanted to create carnage in central London though.

The stats could get a lot worse if mass ownership and cheap production ramps up.

I’m sure someone will have the stats but I bet it’s less than 1 in 200 cars are ev
 
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I think you lot have been smoking something. My immediate thought was EV fire because they are quite brutal and very hard to extinguish and considering how often this happens and how many diesel cars are about, the natural conclusion is EV fire.

I like EVs. Thinking it was probably an EV when there was no more information isn't a conspiracy. :rolleyes:
 
The end result also wouldn’t be any different, the car park would still be destroyed.

Fighting these fires are ultimately a case of suppressing the spread and letting what’s on fire burn out. You are not putting out a fire like that once it’s taken hold. The building was always a total loss.
 
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As an aside if you want to stall a runaway engine in a manual transmission vehicle put the transmission in the highest ("top") gear, so there's no torque multiplication in the gearbox to overpower the brakes at the drive wheel end. You can't do anything about torque multiplication in the drive axle unless it's a big old truck with a two speed axle ratio shift.

A modern car may well have an overdriven top gear, which will actually reduce engine flywheel torque at the gearbox output shaft.

Enough, too much like work :)
 
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