“Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk says the batteries that have burst into flame on Boeing’s new Dreamliners are “fundamentally unsafe.”
Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, specifically designed its batteries to prevent this problem.
In an email to the aviation publication Flightglobal, Musk said the following:
“Unfortunately, the pack architecture supplied to Boeing is inherently unsafe. Large cells without enough space between them to isolate against the cell-to-cell thermal domino effect means it is simply a matter of time before there are more incidents of this nature.”
Flightglobal’s Zach Rosenberg explains this in more detail:
Both Boeing and Tesla use batteries fueled by lithium cobalt oxide, which is among the most energy-dense and flammable chemistries of lithium-ion batteries on the market. While Boeing elected to use a battery with a grouping of eight large cells, Tesla’s batteries contain thousands of smaller cells that are independently separated to prevent fire in a single cell from harming the surrounding ones.
“Moreover, when thermal runaway occurs with a big cell, a proportionately larger amount of energy is released and it is very difficult to prevent that energy from then heating up the neighboring cells and causing a domino effect that results in the entire pack catching fire,” says Musk.
“They [Boeing]…”
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