Well, well, what do we have here? Another story of the drawbacks of electric cars.

On By rushbabe49In Authoritarianism, business, Culture, Economics, environmentalism, government, Media and the Internet, Nature, Politics in the Age of Trump, Progressive "Thought", social media, technology, transportation

This article appears on the Web Site HotAir.com. Its subject is the fact that car-shipping companies are increasingly avoiding ocean shipping of electric vehicles. I have written about this multiple times in the past, emphasizing that electric vehicles, with immense Lithium-ion batteries, are extreme fire hazards. Electrical fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish, and a large ocean-going vessel carrying them as cargo has a fairly high probability of one battery catching fire, and being entirely consumed by fire, and sunk. I am publishing this article in its entirety, for the benefit of my readers.

We’ve covered enough of these rather spectacular shipboard fires here that I’d imagine most everyone has a pretty good idea what this is in reference to.

Boats packed to the gills with thousands of vehicles, even if only a small percentage of them aboard are electric, become floating, unquenchable volcanic islands when the lithium batteries in one or more of the EVs overheat or explode, and start burning. Almost invariably, they take the entire ship with them.

Even when EVs are not the cause of the fire, as is still being debated in the case of the 2023 Fremantle Highway ship disaster, their presence onboard makes firefighting nearly impossible. In Fremantle’s case, the fire on the ship prevented the crew from reaching their lifeboats, and one crew member perished in the mad dash jumping overboard into the open sea.

After the string of car carrier fires began, a Norwegian ferry operator banned them from their boats primarily due to the risk of being caught at sea when one started.

Well, that and that there’s no way to extinguish it once it starts.

The latest EV-related car carrier fire in the news was just a month ago, when the Morning Midas out of Yantai, China, and loaded with vehicles – 800 of them electric – caught fire off the coast of Alaska. Thankfully, merchant vessels in the area diverted and came to her aid immediately, and the crew were all able to abandon ship safely.

Apparently, that’s enough fire and brimstone for one of the largest United States shipping firms operating in the Pacific. The company is not going to allow EVs and plug-in hybrids on its vessels anymore.

The risks are too great, and the firefighting technology to handle lithium-ion batteries when they’re in thermal runaway or actually on fire is just not there yet.

Matson Suspends Electric Vehicle Shipments Over Battery Fire Concerns

…“Due to increasing concern for the safety of transporting vehicles powered by large lithium-ion batteries, Matson is suspending acceptance of used or new electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid vehicles for transport aboard its vessels,” the company stated in a customer advisory.

The decision follows several high-profile maritime incidents involving lithium battery fires, including the recent sinking of the Morning Midas in the North Pacific this June. The 600-foot vessel was carrying 3,159 vehicles, including 65 fully electric vehicles and 681 partial hybrid electric vehicles when smoke was detected from a deck carrying electric vehicles.

Despite crew efforts to deploy emergency firefighting protocols, the intensity of the fire forced all 22 crew members to abandon ship.

This incident echoes the February 2022 Felicity Ace disaster, where the car carrier caught fire in the mid-Atlantic and eventually sank with nearly 4,000 vehicles on board. Speculation has focused on lithium batteries in electric vehicles as the potential cause.

Maritime safety experts point to thermal runaway as the primary hazard with lithium-ion batteries. This phenomenon occurs when a battery enters an uncontrollable, self-heating state that can result in the ejection of gas, shrapnel, or particulates along with extremely high temperatures.

The Coast Guard has already issued new warnings on the ‘extreme risks’ of loading damaged EVs on commercial vessels, such as those that’d suffered saltwater intrusion like during Hurricane Ian. I’m assuming those were sold as ‘used’ or salvaged vehicles, and yeah. That could be bad, if you recall what happened with some of the EVs from Ian which were swamped during the storm surge or inland flooding. They looked fine, had maybe even dried out, and then their battery would suddenly cook off.

Bad enough if it was still under what was left of your house. Much worse if it was one of thousands of cars stacked in the hold, and the ship is in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the big blue around it.

As you might imagine, not every shipbuilder or EV manufacturer is quite as fussy about safety controls and the health or environmental risks involved in moving their product. If it ends up at the bottom of the ocean, there’s always more product and ships to carry it where that came from.

Consequently, the Chinese are going gangbusters building both.

What a surprise.

So you see the problem. Communist China has such a good reputation for building good, cheap electric cars, that they are fine with accepting a fairly large wastage when an entire cargo burns up and ends up at the bottom of the sea. They also have a huge amount of excess manufacturing capacity, enabling them to build and build, if only to keep their employees in jobs. My guess is that this will go on until the rest of the world wakes up from their “climate change caused by humans” delusion and stops promoting electric vehicles for everyone. America is already waking up and ending EV mandates and subsidies (thank you President Trump!!!), but Europe is still in its thrall.

I do feel somewhat vindicated, though, and retail my dislike of hoaxes and electric firetraps in our garages.

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