Luton Airport Fire

Has caused thousands of pounds of improvements.

No, gawd bless, but old gags should be recycled.

Nevertheless, complete carnage, on the ground, in the schedules and on social media where an absolute ding dong is kicking off over media reports that a diesel Range Rover was the cause. Tin foil hats are on from those insisting that it had to be an EV.

Clearly it was a Range Rover and electric or fossil, that’s good enough for me to call for a total ban on them.

https://news.sky.com/story/luton-ai...ws-respond-to-huge-blaze-at-car-park-12981928

 

Have never and will never fly out of that shythole airport.

 

I had to do so often for work. Started off grim and the more ‘improvements’ they put in the worse it got.

 

We used to use it to fly to visit the mother-in-law in Inverness twenty-odd years ago. Back then it was quite fun because it was so small - not much bigger than the one in Inverness, in fact. For a very brief time after it was expanded it was Ok because the extra capacity hadn’t kicked in, but then it became nasty, with all the little money-making extortions that were added on. We haven’t used it since ma-in-law died in 2010 - and we don’t live very far away.

 

I have visited recently and you literally need a second mortgage to park there for over 1 hour. Scandalous prices.

 

It had to be an electric car!!! Did you see the size of the explosion?

Either that or it was a bomb!!!

 

How much do you think the car insurance of the vehicle that started the fire is going to pay out. More than or less than £25 million? I think it’s going to be more than £25 million, once you add to the rebuild costs, the loss of revenue claim for the car park and the shuttle from the Airport owners; airline claims after rerouting and compensating passengers, other car insurers claims for the money they pay out to their customers, etc.

 

Too much time on Twitter?

It’s not as if car fires have been uncommon. How often over the years have you heard about traffic delays caused by a car fire?

So two questions.

What do the statistics say about EV vs Diesel/Petrol fires?

In your view, what would be the motivation for the Beds Fire and Rescue Service (who are pretty down on things that cause fires) to lie?

 

I'm pretty certain it was a blue Renault EV. Don't ask me how I know.

 

According to today’s Independent: “100,000 such incidents happen a year, the vast majority in diesel rather than petrol vehicles and only 2.4 per cent are in battery electric-powered vehicles, entirely proportionate to the numbers on the road.”

 

I'm no expert but a couple of things come to mind.

The first is that a standard car insurance policy is unlikely to offer unlimited liability. I just double checked and my Direct Line one is capped at £20m liability for property damage. Anything over that I'd personally be on the hook for - although clearly also unable to make any significant contribution to. Suspect that's around the industry standard.

And second is that the car insurer will argue they're not responsible for all of the consequences. They'll no doubt point to things like the car park not having a sprinkler/fire suppression system, argue the toss about the need to cancel flights for so long and, depending on what caused the fire itself they might point to the car manufacturer having some liability too. In short, the good times will be rolling for the lawyers for many years to come!

 

How do you know?

 

Regardless, I look forward to all our premiums going up to cover it.

 

Despite not owning one, EVs irrationally annoy me because the papers tell me to be annoyed at them. So it’s definitely them that done it.

 

Esso?

 

Unfortunately, you may be wasting your time quoting facts. Facts are increasingly called into question. It suits some people to encourage others to take Homer Simpson seriously: “Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true!”

 

Hopefully they use the 'claims in your local area and neighbouring postcodes have been very high in the past year' excuse and load most of it onto Luton residents.

 

Woke cars.

 

The clearest explanation is that the car’s electronics had reached some basic level of sentience, realised it had to spend a whole week parked in Luton and spontaneously combusted to put itself out of its misery.

 

Damn. I was really hoping no-one was going to ask me that.
I'm sworn to secrecy but let's just say my tank of unleaded is pretty full atm .

 

Personally I feel really sorry for everybody involved. Very stressful and disruptive. Not nice at all.

 

Must have been very recently parked there, otherwise there's no way any EV left in an airport car park would have enough charge left in it to start a fire.

 

Too true. ‘Facts’ tend to be trotted out by ‘experts’ and we all know there’s no place for them in our Brexitland Utopia.

 

Didn't know they needed a reason to increase premiums. I've been driving for 33 years, no claims, no accidents and no points. Still goes up every year without fail

 

How many Vickers Vimys were destroyed?

 

Picked my boy up on Saturday, Forty min queue to get to the mid term carpark as the fire was above the pick up point. Complete ball ache.

 

Reports are it was a Diesel Range Rover that went up. So the anti EV lobby getting on the bandwagon may have done so prematurely.

Diesel doesn't generaly ignite unless under pressure or extreme temperature so my theory is maybe an oil leak on to a hot turbocharger started it.
If this is the case then lack of maintenance is a possible contributory factor. But then a manufacturing fault copuld also be. Driving into a crowded garage with a car on fire would be a negilgent contributory action of course. Sprinklers are unlikely to have helped much when you've got a mix of petrol, diesel and electric cars parked up. You would likely have needed foam or similar to cut out the oxygen supply.

Electric cars only tend to flare up if there's a battery fault and I would think this would tend to happen when charging, possibly on regen of course but I would think more likely on rapid charging.

The only certainty is that lawers will profit whilst all concerned parties try and point the blame at each other and we'll all end up paying more for our insurance as a consequence.

 

Why not? It's very handy.

 

Because no self respecting Watford fan would contribute towards the local economy of that shythole.

 

Definitely worth driving miles and miles out of your way to go to another airport and and get on an EasyJet flight (who sponsored Luton Town for a while) somewhere else instead. That makes a lot more sense!

 

I'm 100% with you on that and avoid lu*on airport if I can, but there's another reason as well, it's an absolute dive of an airport. You know you're in trouble when they charge you for the transparent plastic bags.

 

Makes flying away on holiday even more enjoyable as you see what you are leaving behind.
Makes coming home even more miserable....

 

The smaller and nearer the airport the better. Also unlike Stansted, you can park a motorbike for free a few hundred yards away.

 

When I can get Mrs D's 23KG suitcase on the back of a motorbike I'll be back.

 

Have never and will never fly with that shyt airline.

Any company headquartered in that utter cesspit of a town will have a fair few of those mutants working for them. I avoid them all like the plague.

What self respecting Watford fan would contribute to the salary of those grotesque neanderthals?