01 CAt Man Do

Sorry, I'm just now seeing that no one responding to this comment. You need to understand that anything made by man that uses or produces electricity can fail. While failure rates are generally very small they still exist and always will. Then there is the factor of misuse to consider or someone just forgetting to follow common safety precautions. This is why we have Fire Depts.

Li-ion batteries can fail for a variety of reasons but when they do it is usually without a catastrophic consequence.
Now as to the Boeing debacle; The only people who know the actual reason for the battery fire are the Boeing people. That said I'm thinking that some designer or some person responsible for the installation of the batteries did or forgot to do something that needed to be done to operate the batteries properly. The sad result was the knee-jerk reaction and ban on shipping Li-ion via air and the world-wide paranoia about anything having to do with Li-ion cells. Now it's almost impossible to order Li-ion cells and have them shipped via air freight ( which is completely mental because it's perfectly "okay" to bring a laptop or a phone on board a plane, go figure ). (..you can also bring loose cells on board a plane but the contacts must be protected with a non-conductor. ) Still, it continues to be almost impossible to get Li-ion cells or battery packs shipping world-wide via air.

Within the next 5-10 yrs we will all likely be driving either hybrids or totally electric cars. Hopefully the people who will be building and designing these vehicles will build in a variety of fail-safes. Not to mention that hopefully the people who a designing the next generation of Li-ion batteries are making them more safe and less likely to fail ( although as I said before, when considering the millions of li-ion batteries being used world-wide, Li-ion failure rate is very, very low. ).

noglider 

@01 CAt Man Do, I wasn't scared to begin with, and you just made me feel even better.