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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Do you think the gas tank is IN the engine bay or something? The hottest thing underneath a gas tank might be the exhaust... The ignition temp of gas is something like 500F/260C... Without spark... it's not going to happen just out of the blue. An Exhaust CAN get that hot.. But under most normal uses, basically all normal cars won't get that hot (racecars and other "performance cars" probably will get hotter than the ignition temp of Gasoline).
I was thinking in terms of a crash or a huge object intrusion. That'll be pushing all sorts of things to places they're not supposed to go, such as hot break pads or even parts of the other car.
Just like in normal operation you wouldn't be able to catch a gas tank on fire by puncturing it, you wouldn't get a puncture on a battery either in normal operation. It's the extreme crash scenarios you need to worry about. Both batteries and gasoline are very energy dense and potentially dangerous. And both have a lot of mitigation strategies to keep them from being a hazard. Batteries aren't inherently lots more dangerous like the original comment seemed to be implying.
Batteries at this point are almost universally the base of the car... It's not hard for debris on the road to kick up and puncture the underside of a car.
A fuel tank would simply leak it all out... Unless there was a spark. A battery cell being exposed to air will self-immolate. It all depends on how it's packaged... Which we're learning in the Florida hurricane here... They're not that well packaged...
That's why they have a thick belly pan. It's all mitigation.