Quote:
Originally Posted by August
With all the stories about EVs being useless after being submerged I was just wondering.
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You have to differentiate between the motor/drive train and the power source.
1) Both a combustion engine and an electric engine can survive prolonged periods submerged (and have done so in many cases), and as I said it's much more a question of the level of corrosion rather than the type of engine whether it can be used again with little effort.
2) For the power source it depends on the damage received, but in general electric power sources are more at riks in water compared to combustion engine fuel. The reason for that is rather simple: fuels (diesel, gasoline/petrol, kerosene or whatever you choose) are organic and usually hydrophobic and don't mix well with water (they are nonpolar substances), while the materials used to produce electric energy in batteries are hydrophilic (components need to be polar/ionic) and are more likely to be soluble in water. Any polar fuel (like ethanol/alcohol, for example) suffers from the same problem.
However, I doubt that any non-polar fuel that has been in direct contact with water for a prolonged time can directly be used to power an engine.