Mediawatch: Angst over EVs blows up in headlines
Last week The New Zealand Herald reported a retirement village on Auckland's North Shore - Fairview - had banned new electric vehicles... "One resident who did not want to be named told the Herald he was pulled into a meeting with other residents where 'management tried to scare us' (about) the supposed fire risk electric vehicles posed," the Herald reported...
"As soon as there's an EV that blows up or catches fire, it's on the front page or it's on the six o' clock news. If it's a diesel or a petrol car, you won't hear about it," Retirement Village Residents Association chief executive Nigel Matthews told Checkpoint.
Good to see the 'mainstream' news media countering the hysteria over EV batteries. But is it enough to cancel out the hysteria it helped create?
When 28 cars were set alight in Whangarei Hospital's car park a month ago, it was
dry grass on a hot exhaust that started the blaze. But plenty of
online speculation suggested an overheated EV could have started it.
http://Alarmed by what he called 'm... the electric bus's batteries were undamaged.
A day later the driver of an electric bus died after it was engulfed in flames following a collision with a petrol powered car on Tamaki Drive in Auckland... Alarmed by what he called 'misinformation' about the Tamaki Drive crash - and "
bizarre anti-EV propaganda" - Auckland City Councillor Richard Hills then took to social media himself. He pointed out that... the
fire started from the petrol vehicle that hit that bus on Tamaki Drive, and bus company Kinetic found the electric bus's batteries were undamaged.
IMO they are not doing enough. A bus and car collide. The car catches fire and sets the bus alight. But the headline says '
Electric bus catches fire". Many readers never get past the headline, and those who do often don't read the whole article - but they still form an opinion based on this incomplete information. Then they take to social media and spread misinformation.
The media may print clarifications like the one above, but by this time it's way too late - the lie was already half way around the world before the truth got its boots on. What should they do for penance? Report
every gas car fire that occurs (~2,000 per year in New Zealand). But they won't do that because it's not 'news'.
Apart from lying by clickbait, they also lie by laziness.
NZ Autocar: EV Fires – a hot topic
There are approximately 110,000 EVs in New Zealand and there have been six fires recorded, with no injuries or fatalities. None has occurred during EV charging. Two resulted from crashes and two were caused by a fire in a house where the EV happened to be parked.
Well done, you helped counter the anti-EV narrative. Just one problem - the photo above this line appears to show a Tesla Model S spontaneously combusting, but this not true. It was actually
literally torched by firefighters doing a training exercise. Yes, you provided an attribution, but finding the actual video wasn't easy. Why not add a description and/or a link to the video?
In the training video we see that firefighters applied a 400,000 btu gas torch at 3,000 degrees directly onto a battery module for 13 minutes, whereupon the left front of the vehicle caught fire and two battery modules went into thermal runaway. 6 minutes later they had put the fire out, then applied cooling water for a further 10 minutes. This is a far cry from constant bleats from the media that EV fires are almost impossible to extinguish. A different technique may be required, but firefighters are being given the required equipment and training so there's
no reason to panic.
Even in their attempts to debunk the narrative, the media still fuels it. It gets worse though, because this duplicity causes people to lose trust in mainstram media and turn to alternatives like YouTube or Facebook, which are chock full of misinformation - mostly created by 'ordinary' people who are more concerned about boosting their egos than setting the record straight.
