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About 16 Fisker Karmas, luxury hybirds powered by lithium batteries, caught fire and burned to the ground on Saturday after they were submerged with sea water during Hurricane Sandy.
Jalopnik—a Gawker media site which is running off Tumblr while it gets its servers back online—has the photos of the cars, which were parked in Port Newark, New Jersey.
The Finnish plug-in hybrids cost over US$100,000 each. The company has no comment on what might have caused the fire.
Fisker Automotive has suffered series of setbacks. Last year it had to issue a recall due to battery coolant leaks.
After the Hurricane Sandy news the car maker released the following statement:
It was reported today that several Fisker Karmas were damaged by fire at the Port of Newark after being submerged in sea water during Superstorm Sandy. We can report that there were no injuries and none of the cars were being charged at the time.
We have confidence in the Fisker Karma and safety is our primary concern. While we intend to find the cause as quickly as possible, storm damage has restricted access to the port.
We will issue a further statement once the root cause has been determined.
2 Comments
Mark Harder
Ummmm… Lithium, which liberates hot hydrogen and burns on contact with water, is being used in batteries that caught fire in a flood. Fisker, how do you weatherproof your batteries?
John P. Saunders
Hey …I don’t think we need to go as far as Lithium reactions to find the initial cause: Sea water is a wonderful conductor and would have caused a magnificent short when in contact with the positive and negative circuits.
The only way to prevent this would be to have high powered battery circuits physically isolated and the batteries protected from water. In any case …the cars should never have been shipped with charge in the batteries ….would have prevented the fires but not the underlying design flaw.