A fossil fuel fire can be extinguished by snuffing it. By a fire extinguisher if it's caught small enough, or by a fire department with sufficient quantities of water.
Lithium Ion battery fires are self sustaining. Like with thermite, they produce their own oxidizer - they can't be snuffed. You might be able to flood one and cool it to the point where it self extinguishes (creating a flood of heavy metal contaminated water), use special equipment to drown it, or just let it burn itself out (spewing toxic gasses and at least three times the heat of petroleum fires) but once they are going, they are far more of a disaster than other kinds of common fires.
And even if put out they can re-ignite later forcing salvage yards to keep them physically isolated; causing all kinds of follow on problems that don't exist with traditional vehicles or other battery tech.
As others noted, this study did NOT explore these follow on effects, which is unfortunate. Perhaps they really aren't as bad as they appear - it would be nice to see them studied as well.
Lithium Ion battery fires are self sustaining. Like with thermite, they produce their own oxidizer - they can't be snuffed. You might be able to flood one and cool it to the point where it self extinguishes (creating a flood of heavy metal contaminated water), use special equipment to drown it, or just let it burn itself out (spewing toxic gasses and at least three times the heat of petroleum fires) but once they are going, they are far more of a disaster than other kinds of common fires.
And even if put out they can re-ignite later forcing salvage yards to keep them physically isolated; causing all kinds of follow on problems that don't exist with traditional vehicles or other battery tech.
As others noted, this study did NOT explore these follow on effects, which is unfortunate. Perhaps they really aren't as bad as they appear - it would be nice to see them studied as well.