Originally Posted by
globalexpress
Why not? What battery technology do you want to see before you buy an electric car?
I would assume that if you wanted any significant amount of battery capacity, they would be placed in the wings. That would provide enough vibration protection. Temperature protection....air cooling might be pretty sufficient considering how fast aircraft fly. 1/2 the battery capacity in each wing, there's the parallel redundancy. Not sure about needing a pressure container. The batteries are sealed. Full runaway protection....yeah that would be a concern I guess. There are lots of electric cars driving around, and I have only heard of two or three thermal runaways. All were caused by some sort of catastrophic penetration of the battery case caused by the car being crash tested, being involved in a car accident, and a pretty good chunk of road debris. Perhaps they could engineer some sort of venting if a segment of the cells over-pressurizes, similar to what Boeing did with the 787.
I suspect (don't know) that li batteries are susceptible to small mfg defects which might be aggravated by vibration or pressure changes. Tight control of the physical environment, and mfg tolerances, might make them reliable enough to get certified for that sort of heavy duty. I don't think the 787 batteries had a gross design or mfg defect, I think they just turned out to be more sensitive to the operational environment than expected.
At the energy density and quantity required for propulsion it would hard to contain a runaway without impractically heavy structures.