'Green' car ignites in ball of flames.

Smoking kills...

He's an idiot for lighting up after refuelling.

And BTW- there's nothing "new" about LPG vehicles. Been around for 50 years. I thought this was going to be a story about Li-ion batteries in a hybrid.

Yes, this is true, and I might add that I have seen people do the same thing at gasoline stations and they are just as much idiots.

For the most part the safety stuff built into the new batteries is pretty good. Imagine fusible links built into the battery pack itself.

--scott

Exactly, which is why I was expecting something newsworthy. Its actually more sophisticated than just fusible links- there are diodes to prevent an individual cell in a pack from ever "reversing" as well as monitoring systems built into some battery packs. The battery pack in your laptop probably has a monitoring ASIC embedded in it, for that matter.