Here is John Cadogan pouring petrol on the Luton Airport fire.
It is a mixture of speculation about the original vehicle being a hybrid (since disproved), fear around EV fire risks, humour about the need to ban Land Rovers / Range Rovers and some sensible discussion of car park design and improvements.
This guy frustrates me a fair bit: a huge number of people down under take their cues from him, he's technically savvy, but still holds a lot of weird views about EVs.
I had a look, and the weird thing is he seems to mostly get it. He knows that fires in diesel cars don't start with the diesel, that something else sparks it, lots of inflammable stuff in the car becomes alight, and eventually the tank gets too hot to survive. Yes, quite. But he's presenting that as an argument
against the official explanation, as if he thinks that's supposed to be that the diesel itself spontaneously combusted. No, they just said it was a diesel car mate, and you just explained precisely how diesel cars catch fire!
He says the colour of the smoke is inconsistent with a diesel fire, that it's a more efficient burn. But he's missing the point that at that stage it wasn't the diesel that was burning, it was other things such as plastics in the car.
He shows the fireball explosion, saying that diesel wouldn't go up like that. Perhaps not, but EV batteries wouldn't do that either. The overwhelming probability is that the fireball explosion was the fuel tanks of nearby
petrol cars exploding!
He knows very well that Land Rovers have form in this department. He keeps saying so. So why does he have to invent the possibility that it was a hybrid? The reputation that Landys have for going up in flames wasn't acquired by incidents with hybrid cars.
Then he leaps to the conclusion that these fires will get worse and worse as EVs increase in popularity. Not considering that in fact EVs catch fire so infrequently compared to ICE cars that the frequency will
decrease. Or that EVs don't explode the way petrol tanks do. Or that the difficulty in extinguishing EV fires is to a large extent because the fire responders aren't used to or equipped to deal with that type of fire. Once techniques for fighting battery fires have been refined and rolled out, the situation will be a lot better.
His point that the best thing the authorities can do is mandate that Land Rovers be parked in isolation away from other cars is probably very valid, but he's so carried away by that time that he doesn't realise he's negated his entire argument. The Land Rover reputation for incandescence wasn't built on hybrid fires.
