At around 11:3 a.m. on August 11, 2020, a Xpeng G3 electric car smoked and caught fire in the Pazhou Science and Technology Building in Haizhu District, Guangzhou, accompanied by an obvious mild explosion.
The live video showed that there was a large amount of obvious thick smoke coming out from the bottom of the vehicle. When the firefighters first tried to put out the fire, there were several mild explosions in the power battery position of the vehicle chassis. See It's still very dangerous to get up.
Then Xpeng Motors officially responded: The staff rushed to the scene as soon as possible, and the fire fighters put out the fire in time. The occupants were safe, no one was injured, and the vehicle was quickly and safely transferred. After preliminary on-site inspection by company personnel, the appearance of the vehicle was in good condition. After lifting and inspecting the battery in the store, it was found that there were obvious and serious knock marks on the bottom of the battery box, causing serious damage to the battery. It was initially determined that this was the cause of the accident. The company will conduct further detailed investigation and analysis of the accident.
Due to the scattered battery suppliers, Xpeng G3 has many power battery versions, and it is currently impossible to determine the ownership of the battery cell supplier where the accident occurred. The early 365km endurance version of Xpeng G3 was equipped with 18650 ternary batteries provided by BAK or LG, and was adapted to a 90KPa liquid-cooled battery temperature control system.
The subsequent Xpeng G3?520 version is the 2019 model. Most vehicles are equipped with CATL NCM?811 square batteries, some use Yiwei lithium energy batteries, and the same one is used for cooling. Set of liquid cooling temperature control system.
It is worth mentioning that Xpeng Motors also applied for a patent for a technology to prevent thermal runaway of electric vehicle batteries two months ago.
The patent applied by Xpeng Motors mainly shows that when a car experiences thermal runaway, the fire extinguishing device installed in the car can automatically sense and directly extinguish the power battery, thus reducing the risk of car explosion. Patent information shows that Xpeng Motors' thermal runaway protection system mainly consists of a sensor integration device, a liquid storage tank, a pressure relief valve, a power unit, an internal fire-extinguishing material storage device, and an activation control unit.
According to the principle, when the sensor senses the thermal runaway detection signal of the power battery, it will determine whether the power battery has misfired based on the thermal runaway detection signal. If it is determined that there is no misfire, the vehicle controller will upload the signal to Cloud center; if it is determined that there is a fire, the fire extinguishing device will be activated to extinguish the power battery.
Of course, this technology has not yet been applied in mass production.
As of the end of July 2020, Xpeng G3 has delivered a total of 18,741 units, with impressive sales figures. Another more popular new car, the Xpeng P7, has delivered 1,641 units in the first month of official delivery, with total sales of 1,966 units. As a result, Xpeng Motors’ cumulative delivery volume has reached 20,707 units. The spontaneous combustion accident of G3 is the first publicly reported power battery fire accident in China. In addition, Xpeng Motors is also the third new car manufacturer planning to be listed in the United States after Weilai and Ideal. In the early morning of August 8, Beijing time, Xpeng Motors submitted IPO documents to the SEC and planned to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the stock code "XPEV". Underwriters include Bank of America Securities, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase, etc. In the prospectus, Xpeng claims to be the only company among new car-making forces to develop two major platforms at the same time, and based on this, it has developed two models: SUV and sedan. At the same time, Xpeng Motors is the first company among the new domestic car-making forces to independently develop and commercialize autonomous driving software (the hardware is based on NVIDIA Xavier, which supports L3 level autonomous driving).
This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.