Wow, 5 & 6 cell lip's in cars. You must have been running 1/8 scale. I've seen plenty of melt downs racing 1/8 scale yet none of them have exploded. Fires yes, but no explosions. I have a few rc airplanes that use 5 cell lipos. The batteries never scared me mainly because I've been into rc cars and airplanes for the last 25 years and have a great deal of experience and knowledge when dealing with batteries. I believe lipo's get a bad rap because of lack of the users knowledge and experience. Once again, this is just my opinion.
Team losi LST2, Truggy, and Buggy. All were 1/8 scale. I dabbled in the 1/5 then ended up selling everything. Haven't done it in about 5 years now.
They all had to be custom converted with parts I built as brushless was not really popular yet. They originally were all nitro. Was using boat ecs until the mamba monster max came out.
Talk about power though. The LST2 could be doing about 35-40 mph and if I went full throttle from a cruise at that speed it would literally wrinkle the rear tires and pull the fronts off the ground. I used to destroy all my friends running nitro trucks. But having multiple batteries got very expensive.
Anyways back on topic, I'm loving this cana mod. Running the igo w4 at 21-25 watts with a single 1.5 ohm ten wrap 28g coil and its amazing.