Local Police officers check the scene of a passenger bus accident in Mestre, near the city of Venice, Italy, on Oct. 4.Italy’s transport minister is questioning the spread of electric vehicle technology following the fiery crash of a fully electric shuttle bus that killed 21 people in mainland Venice. But the battery chemistry used by the Chinese bus maker makes it less prone to catastrophic fires, experts said.
The bus maker, Yutong Group of China, uses lithium-iron-phosphate batteries in nearly all its models. Experts say that mix is generally less prone to extra-hot, fast-spreading blazes than other chemistries, including nickel-manganese-cobalt oxides, which is used in many electric passenger cars. In batteries that use nickel or cobalt, oxygen can be released if the temperature gets too hot, fuelling a fire. But in a lithium-iron-phosphate battery, there is a strong bond between oxygen and phosphorus, keeping the oxygen in place, said Reeja Jayan, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Battery researchers are working on getting more range out of lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, Jayan said, and they are also figuring out how to make nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries safer. Salvini, who heads the right-wing Lega party, was criticized for focusing on electric vehicle technology when one of the elements under investigation is the guardrail that gave way, which falls under his purview as infrastructure and transport minister.