Sahara Electric Scooter catches fire in Mumbai [Video]

SaharaEVOLS’s X1 electric scooter recently caught fire in Andheri, Mumbai. A video of the scooter burning has gone viral on the internet. The video is uploaded on YouTube by Gaming Loonie and it is almost 3 minutes long.

In the video, we can see an electric scooter that is burning. According to the reports, it was the X1 model by SaharaEVOLS. The road is covered with some white powder so it seems like someone has already used a fire extinguisher.

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But still, there is still smoke coming from the scooter, then suddenly smoke increases significantly like a pressure cooker and then the scooter catches fire. A person brings a bucket of water to extinguish the fire. Even after throwing the whole bucket of water on the scooter, the fire does not stop. This is not really the right way to extinguish an electric fire but Tesla suggests for their vehicles suggest that a lot of water should be used so that the batteries stay cool.

A person then brings a fire extinguisher and uses it on the scooter and the scooter still continues to burn. Finally, the fire is extinguished when a person brings another bucket of water and throws it on the scooter. Even then the scooter continues to smoke.

The batteries are not made in-house, they come from a third-party vendor. The scooters are manufactured by Super Eco in Madhya Pradesh. Super Eco blamed the third-party vendor for this mishappening.

In an interview with ET Auto, a spokesperson from Super Eco said, “As we make vehicles only and do not make batteries in-house, batteries come from a third party vendor. We have taken up this matter with the battery supplier and it is under scrutiny to identify the root cause.” India currently does not produce lithium-ion batteries and they are being imported to our country through various other countries such as China and Korea.

Electric vehicle fires are rare but are difficult to control

Electric vehicles have fewer moving parts which mean less maintenance and fewer parts that can get damaged. Mostly, it is the battery that catches fire in electric vehicles. In fossil fuel vehicles, once the fuel is empty the fire will stop automatically.

However, in electric vehicles, the batteries are made up of multiple cells. For instance, a Tesla Model S battery is made up of 7,104 lithium-ion battery cells that are divided into 16 modules. Once a battery cell catches fire, the energy chemicals that are stored in the battery is being used as the fuel for the fire. So, the battery is its own fuel. Once the battery runs out it starts the fire in the next battery cell and then that starts burning. Like this, a chain reaction is started. We can see a glimpse of the reaction in the video. Multiple times, the fire slows down but then starts again with another explosion. This happens when a new battery cell starts burning. Because of this, fire in an electric vehicle can keep on burning and burning.

Via ET Auto

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