Oh and Mich even Elmo is saying it was an explosion. In fact he and his cronies are bragging it contained the explosion. Ironic since the last thing you would want is to be in a car that will lock in a fire or explosion 100% frying you to death. (Which happened last week)
I saw the video- it wasn't an explosion. Elmo is making an excuse for something else.
It could have been intentional, but what I saw was the battery going up quickly, but not exploding. Even the secondary pops looks like battery cells quickly failing. It could have been some kind of tampering, but it was not some kind of explosive device. And explosion means that the flame front was going the speed of sound in the material- which is what causes the sonic boom/shock waves you see around explosions. Mind you, many people have joked about the Pinto, and that wasn't an explosion situation either- you get rear ended, ruptures the fuel tank, and that catches on fire. A very big and fast fire that could really hurt people, but it was a fire.
And yes, I'm being a sticker for accuracy here, but as I see it, it matters a lot. (I'm coming at this from a combustion standpoint- lots of people think there's an explosion in an ICE combustion chamber, and it's not- it's rapid combustion. When there is an explosion, it causes lots of damage in the combustion chamber- and it happens, it's what knock is)
If it were either an IED or an actual bomb that set it off- there would have been a LOT more damage than that. Even if it was a small explosive that started the battery to do that. The shock wave from even a small explosive would have shattered the glass that close by and bent the truck into a much different shape than a bulging battery pack.
What I saw was something that looked more like a dead short on the order of the power of a cybercoffin- a somewhere around 500V with a few hundred amps to get things hot really quickly setting off the rest of the battery.
Elmo claiming it was an "explosion" tells me that 1) he's deflecting a possible flaw in his product and/or 2) he's dumb enough to not know what an actual explosion really is. I can understand the media hyping it up, as they are looking for eyeballs and they probably have no idea what an explosion is. Elmo should be aware of how a battery will dramatically fail and how combustion is much different than an explosion- as he's seen enough really fast combustion event accompanying space x failures.
Again, I have no idea if that was intentional or not, but it wasn't an explosion. There was no shock wave to cause damage (which is the actual intent of an explosion). And not being an actual explosion matters because it means a flaw could have caused that.
