I got this from a gxxd friend. GPS was placed in its bracket in the windshield and left in the sun. The battery overheated and exploded! See attached pictures! Sorry, I got punked by someone who claimed this happened to him. .
Lithium batteries are shipped everyday. We use them in machines. They can not be shipped fully charged though. They are shipped with only a partial charge, and finished on site.
Do the pictures happen to look like the ones here? GPS Explodes After Overheating–Fiction! Or here? snopes.com: GPS Fire YMMV. AT
I don't know about the heat tolerance for modern enclosed lithium batteries, but back in the day (a lot of days ago) we used some of the early lithium batteries in our radios and intercept equipment. The batteries had a receptacle in them, into which a plug from the various devices would connect. The battery was about the size of a brick. I want to say that the battery's nomenclature was 4396. I never saw it myself, but we were told that if salt water seeped into those batteries that they would rapidly melt down, and create some bad voodoo for whomever was carrying them in their pack. Not wanting to test the veracity of that particular warning, we always wrapped them well in plastic prior to any sort of amphibious landing. So I can't tell you whether they would have reacted badly or not. I CAN tell you that body surfing ashore in Egypt, after a really crappy amphibious insert attempt, with radios which have not been properly water proofed will indeed result in bad voodoo for the electronics therein.
