Ford Grounds Electric Vans After 2nd Fire

Ford Motor Co. grounded its fleet of electric vans Friday following an early-morning fire that erupted in a vehicle battery as it was being charged at a California Air Resources Board facility in El Monte.

The fire is the second to occur in the last month in a Ford Ecostar, the company’s electric-powered test vehicle. On May 2, a Ford electric vehicle was damaged by a similar battery fire in Palo Alto.

No one was hurt in either incident. In Friday’s fire, damage was mostly confined to the batteries, which are at the rear of the vehicle under the van bed.

The vehicles are powered by sodium-sulfur batteries made by ABB, a Swedish electrical engineering firm with battery operations in Canada and Germany.

Sodium-sulfur batteries provide good range and acceleration. But safety has been a concern throughout their development, because the batteries must be kept at a constant temperature of 600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ford has 34 electric vehicles being tested nationwide by 12 customers, mostly utilities. In the wake of Friday’s incident, it has asked the customers not to use the vehicles and to park them outside until the cause of the fires can be determined.

After the first fire, Ford said the problem had been traced to faulty welds in the battery cells. But the second fire is forcing Ford and ABB to re-evaluate. “We thought the first fire was an isolated incident,” Ford spokeswoman Pam Keuber said. “We want to proceed very cautiously.”

Other batteries built using the same procedure have not been placed in service.

ARB spokesman Bill Sessa said the agency--the driving force behind California’s requirement that auto makers sell zero-emission vehicles in the state by 1998--had been testing the Ecostar for a couple of weeks. An employee discovered the fire upon arriving at work about 6:40 a.m. The local fire department extinguished the fire.