I'm not too happy about very large lithium ion batteries as a mass market product in low-end vehicles. Lithium iron phosphate, which doesn't have the thermal runaway problem but stores less energy per kilogram, may be more appropriate there. Both BYD and Tesla are going that route at the low end.
Light electric vehicles (bikes, scooters, skateboards) are now causing a sizable number of fires in NYC.[1] It's mostly a battery quality problem, apparently. FDNY reported 28 battery fires in 2019, 44 in 2020, and 104 in 2021. Bike and scooter shop fires tend to result in multiple batteries cooking off.
One thing would stop much of this: making Amazon criminally responsible for selling power electrical devices which do not have verifiable UL certification.
Can we stop it with this absurd fear mongering already? There's millions of EVs on the road now. I have had my Leaf for 8 years and keep seeing this same tired FUD online. The incidents of fires from electric cars are extremely low.
The scooters and other cheap vehicles you cite are a separate problem from just being Lithium-Ion batteries. They're cheap procucts with bad electronics and poor protection of the battery. Gasoline powered products of such low quality would be similar fire hazards, if not worse.
Lithium-Ion batteries work fantastic for EVs. My 8 year old, 50k+ mile Leaf still has its origial battery and it still has 100% capacity. Something anti-Lithium-Ion FUD pushers told me was literally impossible.
Let me add that such "gasoline powered dangerous cheap products" aren't hypothetical. I remember the era when it was legal to hook a 2 stroke up to a bike or a scooter platform, those things were hideously loud and had plastic exposed bottles full of gas attached to them.
We banned those, we can demand adequate quality control on electric vehicles as well.
It's anything but FUD, it's just that most vehicles have very well designed battery packs, but not all of them do and when you get out of the car domain to scooters and other personal mobility devices the quality drops like a stone.
> Gasoline powered products of such low quality would be similar fire hazards, if not worse.
And they're heavily regulated so that they cannot reasonably be sold in most countries. Calling for similar regulation for EVs and other electrically powered devices just makes sense in my book.
Fire isn’t the hazard we need to be concerned about for Lithium-ion, it’s the destructive mining and the subsequent hazmat disposal that should be worrying everyone. The lithium mining companies are filing claims all over my county and the proposed large scale excavation of extremely sensitive desert dry lake habitats is just disgusting. I’m no fan of oil, but at least there you drill a hole and not remove a few cubic miles of the earth. Seeing the battery lifecycle up close has left me depressed about our options…
I always wonder where this is coming from. I'm sure there are certain well funded industries that would have interest in such FUD.
From what I can see, this technologie is the future to a green world. We could ultimately have a distributed power system where every home has its own battery with solar panels on top. How fucking awesome would that be. Not even an eletrical grid failure would be a problem anymore.
It's not FUD. Emergency responders and wrecking yards have already had problems with EV fires. An EV wreck with a damaged battery can catch fire days or weeks later. They have be stored with extra room around them just in case. Battery fires are a whole different thing than gas fires. This is a serious issue.
It is possible both for a technology to be incredibly safe and yet occasionally have huge risks. I'm typing this on a device with li-ion batteries. Most of us accept the slight risk involved. Yes the parent comment is a bit weirdly skeptical, but calling it FUD isn't accurate either.
The 2019 and 2020 fires were mostly because of a 'misunderstanding' between US consumers and Chinese manufacturers.
Manufacturers wrote in the product manual 'do not charge device for more than 4 hours'. US consumers left it charging overnight. The devices reliably caught fire when charging for more than about 15 hours. They just didn't have circuitry to stop charging when full.
The same used to be the case in the 1960's in the USA - many of us remember the instructions on battery chargers how to calculate the number of charging hours required and to set an alarm or timer to stop the charge at the right time. If you screwed that up, they were nicd batteries so they'd just split open and hiss.
That is now resolved for new devices - you can't easily buy a device from China which has a lithium battery and doesn't have a battery overcharge protection circuit.
> The 2019 and 2020 fires were mostly because of a 'misunderstanding' between US consumers and Chinese manufacturers.
Do you have any source articles about that? I can't quite tell your intended level of sarcasm around "misunderstanding".
Because that design, where a device that's left plugged in too long then just ignites, is ridiculously stupid from any side of the equation, especially since over the past 20 years people have been trained with things like cell phones to just plug it in and leave it. I wonder how this "self igniting" design got through any regulatory constraints at all.
Battery quality in consumer electronics is horrible and it's a small miracle that there aren't many more fires. The things I've come across while servicing/disassembling/rebuilding e-bike batteries would set your hair on end. More than one wire that simply evaporated inside the casing and fortunately did not set off some kind of chain reaction. Balance wires crossing and recrossing, having their insulation eaten away by vibration. Single cell fires that miraculously did not spread to the cells around them.
Li-Ion battery behavior is very predictable these days. With a good battery management system (BMS) that includes temperature control, current limiting, charge monitoring, and cell monitoring the things work very well and very safely.
Good news: Most EVs have very good BMSs.
Bad news: Lots of small consumer devices with Li-Ion batteries have lousy BMSs or none at all. Which is why their batteries don't last long and sometimes catch fire. If cheap manufacturers would stop trying to skimp on the BMS the problem would be over.
Elon Musk has said that he believes a significant portion of the industry will move to LFP (Lithium iron phosphate) chemistry due to its lower cost, fewer supply constraints, and better safety and stability properties.
It was recently reported that Ford is working on LFP packs for their Mustang and F-150 Lightning EVs.
So they say, but the main gripe of switching to EVs has always been their too small range. Your average Li-ion 21700 cell has a capacity of 4-5Ah, whereas one with an LFP chemistry only gets 2-3Ah. That's almost a 50 % reduction in spatial density, not to mention their abysmal C rating.
Perhaps they would fit for PHEV usage, but for pure EVs they would be rather shite imo.
LFP is also a more stable chemistry which makes them safer but also it has more than double the cycle life and can be charged to 100% while still keeping that long cycle life. No need to choose to charge to 80-90% for daily use vs 100% for long distance, Tesla recommends charging the LFP to 100% all the time.
LFP's where getting ridiculously cheap recently, you can get 19" rack mount batteries with built in BMS for less than $300 / kWh to your door. I think most UPS are going to move over to LFP, they will be 20 year batteries in controlled environments.
I put some 12v replacements in my RV getting 4X the capacity of my lead acid at half the weight for about 3x the cost but the batteries will last 10+ years.
The main downside is a lower energy density than NMC which seems to be getting better I believe its about 20% less kWh/kg at this point. No nickel or cobalt is another advantage, iron is plentiful.
How many fires did it take to learn lessons about dispensing, storing and carrying petrol?
We’re quite happy with ships have huge reserves of flammable liquids (“fuel”) so why are batteries such a concern? Gas (methane, LPG, etc) doesn’t get this level of attention so why do batteries?
This article is not about if EVs are safe. It's about the fact that putting out a fire when batteries are involved is hard.
Every week there is a fire on a cargo ship. Most are not caused by the cargo. But when the cargo catches fire you want to be able to put it out before the whole ships turns into scrap.
Why is it hard to put out a fire when EV batteries are involved? If the fire doesn't start in the EV battery why would the battery catch fire?
It might sound like an odd question, but we have experience with this in Norway, and the results are counterintuitive. Cars in a large airport parking garage caught fire, and it had many EVs in it. Not a single battery pack caught fire. Only the interior of the EVs did. If they were all EVs the fire would likely be less severe, or not have started at all (an ICE car started it)
Battery packs are very well insulated against fires.
Assuming the fire doesn't go completely out of control, I don't see a reason to worry much about battery packs catching fire.
One of the problems is that lithium ion batteries can't be discharged fully without destroying them. Effectively, the batteries are a very large energy source that can never be fully turned off. Another problem is that (if I understand correctly) lithium ion battery fires tend to produce their own oxygen. Another problem is that a manufacturing defect in one cell could cause the whole pack to catch on fire. According to the article, a fourth problem is that roll-on/roll-off car carriers just store a bunch of cars in one big space, and there aren't barriers to prevent one car from starting all its neighbors on fire.
Putting out an EV battery fire basically entails dumping enormous amounts of water on it to keep the temperature under control until it's cool enough that it doesn't auto-ignite as soon as you stop. That can take hours.
I tend to agree that the risk of EV fires is overblown. ICE cars catch on fire all the time and we don't usually hear about it because it's not all that rare or unusual. It just doesn't make the news. EV fires are a novelty so we hear about them. (Not that any amount of vehicle fires is okay.)
I do think though that if you're moving thousands of cars together on a ship, then that's maybe creating a different kind of risk profile.
I look forward to wider adoption of LFP batteries. They aren't immune to fire; I think the electrolyte is still flammable. They just aren't nearly as energetic when they burn, and they're harder to ignite in the first place.
Exactly. The reason is that manufacturers actually go through a lot of trouble to prevent batteries catching fire. They do crash tests, puncture tests, etc. As a consequence, actual battery fires in cars are pretty rare. But they do happen occasionally of course. They are chemical fires so the procedures for dealing with those fires are a bit different than say an ICE car that is on fire. That's all.
In any case. Fire risk on ships is a matter for insurers. There are a lot of EVs that are going to be shipped around in the next decades. And the shipping business is big business. I'm sure they'll figure it out. Lots of ships catching fire would get costly. So, the prudent thing would be to do the math and take appropriate counter measures. But I seriously doubt any insurers are losing much sleep over this incident.
There are also ships that carry the fuel for ICE cars around; or at least the raw ingredients for it (oil). Or liquid gas. Highly flamable stuff. Very toxic. Nasty when it gets out. Oil tankers do untold amounts of damage to the environment when they sink and spill their load. Happens fairly regularly. Insurers are all over that kind of thing as well.
If you actually genuinely care about cars spontaneously combusting, there are hundreds of people that die in ICE car fires every year. ICE car fires are so common that it's one of the most common reasons for fire trucks to be called. Hundreds of thousands of times per year in the US apparently. ICE cars are not safe at all; they never have been. They catch fire in all sorts of situations. In your garage, while they are parked, when you crash them, or when you drive on the motorway. It happens to old cars; it happens to new cars. So, where's the big outrage over good old ICE car fires? There is none. Double standards. Or rather there's a lobby interested in talking about one thing but very much not about the other thing.
Which is of course what is going on here. This article is on a web site aimed at ICE car enthusiast that no doubt depends on advertising, sponsoring, etc. by various car manufacturers. Spreading FUD about EVs whenever they can. Just so the fearful masses keep on buying ICE cars.
If neither the EV batteries, nor high-power wiring energized by them, are actually involved in the fire - then you can* put the fire out normally.
Once the fire actually involves "serious" electricity...well, then you've got (1) "can't blow out" birthday candles from Hell, (2) "spray water on it and you may die by electrocution" issues, and (3) the fire has Unlocked a whole new way to Level Up fast, which does not depend upon the traditional "fire triangle" (fuel, oxygen, and heat).
*Or maybe you can't. Ask any fire fighter whether things get magically easy if there's no electricity involved.
EVs are safe if you remove batteries. If batteries can not be easily removed and serviced, it is unsafe design.
We need basic regulations around safety here.
EVs catch fire drastically less than combustion fueled vehicles because they don't involve explosive materials. Also we ship giant ships full of oil and gas all over the world every single day which is vastly more combustible than batteries.
> Also we ship giant ships full of oil and gas all over the world every single day which is vastly more combustible than batteries.
I see what you are saying, but the way we mitigate the fire and explosion hazards on oil and gas transport ships is not really applicable to roll-on/roll-off ships.
The oil tankers and LNG ships use a technic called innert atmosphere to protect their cargo from fire hazard. The idea is that they fill the ulage spaces with a gas low in oxygen to make sure an explosive mixture can’t form.
It would be very hard to innert the whole cargo space of a RO/RO ship the same way, might damage the cargo, would be hazardous to the operators and wouldn’t actually help with a potential thermal runaway of a battery anyway. I will discuss these points in detail:
How do they generate this innerting gas usually? There are two main options. You either use nitrogen, or you pipe in the exhaust gas of the engines. Nitrogen would probably be cost prohibitive. The RO/RO ships are cavernous. The exhaust gas based sytem would cost less, but would damage the cargo. Nobody would want a car which reeks like an ashtray.
The innerted atmosphere is obviously incompatible with human occupancy, yet the cars are usually driven on and off these carriers by a small army of operators. So you need to have processes to vent the innert atmosphere before the vehicles can be embarked/dissembarked, and you need other processes to ensure the venting worked properly otherwise your shore crew will suffocate. This adds complexity, and risks to the operation. This is not a problem on tankers because there nobody needs to enter the tanks during normal operations.
And then finaly why it might not help after all? The nature of electric vehicle battery thermal runaway is such that it doesn’t require oxygen from the atmosphere. It is an exotermic reaction, but not a “fire” in the fire-triangle sense.
So all in all, the one big trick of the tankers can’t be used with vehicle carrying operations. Thus the analogy is less than useful. Not saying that we can’t carry EVs safely, just that our ability to carry fuels safely does not in any way correlate with our ability to carry EVs safely.
Maybe we should demand same safety standards from EVs. Fill those parts that could cause fire with inert gas if that helps. Yearly or as often checks that these systems operate correctly.
ICE vehicles aren't filled with fuel when shipped, and oil and gas both have to aerosolize in an oxygen rich environment before ignition is possible. Batteries just have to get hot, and that can occur from simple mechanical damage.
They say not securing the cars properly can cause impacts that cause fire. But these cars are impact tested for passenger safety. The only vulnerability for the battery pack will be a bottom impact which should not occur on Roll on-Roll Off Carrier.
Ships do need to adapt their firefighting process for Lithium-Ion batteries. But I'm not convinced about impacts causing fire.
There's a couple videos on YouTube of vehicles on a carrier ship where the vehicles are bash around a fiar bit beyond what might happen in a passenger safety impact test.
My parents had their car parked right behind a caravan with a bike rack on the back - they didn't notice anything when driving off the ship, and so it was kinda too late to do anything about it by the time they noticed the impact damage to their car's hood from the bike rack bouncing up and down.
Initial manufacturing defects are likely a decent cause. And you only need one in ten or hundred thousand to still have issues if such can affect other vehicles tightly packed around.
One way in which battery packs catch fire: initial weld looks good and passes inspection but turns out to be faulty after all. It disconnects, then the pack i s charged (this should not happen to cars intended for overseas transport), vibration causes the bad connection to temporarily make contact, then the current welds the contact more solidly and large amounts of current start to flow from the charged cells into the one uncharged cell. Depending on pack geometry this can be 20:1 without any kind of protection mechanism in between. The one cell then catches fire, which in turn can set off the cells around it.
This is why per-cell fusing is a thing in newer designs and why weld quality is super important during manufacture.
I'm not sure what the inside of a car carrier looks like, but I think the idea isn't just that a little jiggle that causes the suspension to flex slightly is the concern but rather a car coming loose and falling on another car, or something similarly serious and unplanned that isn't supposed to happen if everyone is doing their job correctly. If it does happen you wouldn't want it to be a risk to the whole ship.
There's also the possibility that a battery just catches on fire all by itself because of a manufacturing defect. It can happen.
Speculation about risk is literally what insurance companies do; how they determine the terms of insurance.
I learned a lot from this. One, shipping is pretty fly-by-night. Operators are winging it and trusting to luck in a lot of cases; failing to secure cargo for expediency for example. That's more corroboration than new knowledge. Two, fires are common on cargo ships: 14 times a year some cargo ship starts burning for some reason, car carriers being among the more frequent. Small fires that are quickly contained aren't included in that figure because they don't get reported. Three, car carrying ships aren't prepared to deal with cascading lithium battery fires. They can handle ICE fires but haven't yet adapted to the electric vehicles they're actually starting to carry in quantity. Four, the people that have to analyze the risks involved because they're liable for the costs are more candid about electric car fires; they say straight up that "lithium-ion batteries—they can ignite a lot more vigorously as compared to any other cars" and "a high impact on these cars and a lithium-ion battery can ignite them." A refreshing change from the obligatory handwaving and cognitive dissonance one gets at all other times.
In electronics there is the concept of a bathtub curve. The frequency of component failure is high when the components are new. The frequency decreases afterwards and later increases again with old age.
Applied to cargo ships full of electric cars with millions of brand new battery cells, obviously the risk that some battery will ignite and sink the ship has to be considered. And it will be considered -- if only by insurance companies -- whether electric car proponents like it or not.
It isn't just speculation, it has already occurred [1], the fire has had an impact on availability of Porsche cars in Europe as more are being sent to the US to replace the ones lost.
They're providing background, which they have more than enough relevant expertise to provide. I found it a useful perspective; in particular an un-connected party can often speak more freely about issues.
What exactly did you identify as FUD in this article?
Probably to some extent, but there are limits. If the charge is too low it damages the battery, and self-discharge is a thing. So, if you're moving cars with a low charge you're under a self-imposed time limit to get them where they need to go and recharged before their cell voltages drop below their normal operating range.
My car's manual says storing it at under 80% charge for more than a few weeks is a fire hazard. It's about five years old.
If I remember right, lithium ion batteries explode if over discharged. I have no idea why self discharge doesn't cause old forgotten laptops to routinely catch fire.
Tangentially, I wonder about the environmental impacts of a container full of large Li-ion batteries, such as those found in electric cars, lost in the sea. Cargo ships are known to dump containers* (and oil**, incidentally) into oceans.
If it's safe to ship tons of LNG on big ships there's almost certainly a way to ship batteries safely. It might take a few 'incidents' though before best practise becomes clear.
In a similar direction, I was thinking of the zillions of gallons of petroleum products that have accidentally ended up in ecosystems during transport.
Since the normal container ships often have many refrigerated containers and the crew manage to control their temperature. Maybe roro ship crews will get access to the battery temperature data and will be able to prepare suspicious cars for offloading straight into ocean. Loosing few cars is probably better than whole shop with thousand cars.
That would affect capacity quite badly. My understanding is that these big roro ships really don't have room or height to maneuverer things around. Instead anything is backed as tightly as possible.
Readit News
Light electric vehicles (bikes, scooters, skateboards) are now causing a sizable number of fires in NYC.[1] It's mostly a battery quality problem, apparently. FDNY reported 28 battery fires in 2019, 44 in 2020, and 104 in 2021. Bike and scooter shop fires tend to result in multiple batteries cooking off.
One thing would stop much of this: making Amazon criminally responsible for selling power electrical devices which do not have verifiable UL certification.
[1] https://www.firerescue1.com/fdny/articles/fdny-massive-fire-...
The scooters and other cheap vehicles you cite are a separate problem from just being Lithium-Ion batteries. They're cheap procucts with bad electronics and poor protection of the battery. Gasoline powered products of such low quality would be similar fire hazards, if not worse.
Lithium-Ion batteries work fantastic for EVs. My 8 year old, 50k+ mile Leaf still has its origial battery and it still has 100% capacity. Something anti-Lithium-Ion FUD pushers told me was literally impossible.
We banned those, we can demand adequate quality control on electric vehicles as well.
And they're heavily regulated so that they cannot reasonably be sold in most countries. Calling for similar regulation for EVs and other electrically powered devices just makes sense in my book.
From what I can see, this technologie is the future to a green world. We could ultimately have a distributed power system where every home has its own battery with solar panels on top. How fucking awesome would that be. Not even an eletrical grid failure would be a problem anymore.
Manufacturers wrote in the product manual 'do not charge device for more than 4 hours'. US consumers left it charging overnight. The devices reliably caught fire when charging for more than about 15 hours. They just didn't have circuitry to stop charging when full.
The same used to be the case in the 1960's in the USA - many of us remember the instructions on battery chargers how to calculate the number of charging hours required and to set an alarm or timer to stop the charge at the right time. If you screwed that up, they were nicd batteries so they'd just split open and hiss.
That is now resolved for new devices - you can't easily buy a device from China which has a lithium battery and doesn't have a battery overcharge protection circuit.
Do you have any source articles about that? I can't quite tell your intended level of sarcasm around "misunderstanding".
Because that design, where a device that's left plugged in too long then just ignites, is ridiculously stupid from any side of the equation, especially since over the past 20 years people have been trained with things like cell phones to just plug it in and leave it. I wonder how this "self igniting" design got through any regulatory constraints at all.
Good news: Most EVs have very good BMSs.
Bad news: Lots of small consumer devices with Li-Ion batteries have lousy BMSs or none at all. Which is why their batteries don't last long and sometimes catch fire. If cheap manufacturers would stop trying to skimp on the BMS the problem would be over.
It was recently reported that Ford is working on LFP packs for their Mustang and F-150 Lightning EVs.
Perhaps they would fit for PHEV usage, but for pure EVs they would be rather shite imo.
LFP's where getting ridiculously cheap recently, you can get 19" rack mount batteries with built in BMS for less than $300 / kWh to your door. I think most UPS are going to move over to LFP, they will be 20 year batteries in controlled environments.
I put some 12v replacements in my RV getting 4X the capacity of my lead acid at half the weight for about 3x the cost but the batteries will last 10+ years.
The main downside is a lower energy density than NMC which seems to be getting better I believe its about 20% less kWh/kg at this point. No nickel or cobalt is another advantage, iron is plentiful.
We’re quite happy with ships have huge reserves of flammable liquids (“fuel”) so why are batteries such a concern? Gas (methane, LPG, etc) doesn’t get this level of attention so why do batteries?
Every week there is a fire on a cargo ship. Most are not caused by the cargo. But when the cargo catches fire you want to be able to put it out before the whole ships turns into scrap.
It might sound like an odd question, but we have experience with this in Norway, and the results are counterintuitive. Cars in a large airport parking garage caught fire, and it had many EVs in it. Not a single battery pack caught fire. Only the interior of the EVs did. If they were all EVs the fire would likely be less severe, or not have started at all (an ICE car started it)
Battery packs are very well insulated against fires.
Assuming the fire doesn't go completely out of control, I don't see a reason to worry much about battery packs catching fire.
Putting out an EV battery fire basically entails dumping enormous amounts of water on it to keep the temperature under control until it's cool enough that it doesn't auto-ignite as soon as you stop. That can take hours.
I tend to agree that the risk of EV fires is overblown. ICE cars catch on fire all the time and we don't usually hear about it because it's not all that rare or unusual. It just doesn't make the news. EV fires are a novelty so we hear about them. (Not that any amount of vehicle fires is okay.)
I do think though that if you're moving thousands of cars together on a ship, then that's maybe creating a different kind of risk profile.
I look forward to wider adoption of LFP batteries. They aren't immune to fire; I think the electrolyte is still flammable. They just aren't nearly as energetic when they burn, and they're harder to ignite in the first place.
In any case. Fire risk on ships is a matter for insurers. There are a lot of EVs that are going to be shipped around in the next decades. And the shipping business is big business. I'm sure they'll figure it out. Lots of ships catching fire would get costly. So, the prudent thing would be to do the math and take appropriate counter measures. But I seriously doubt any insurers are losing much sleep over this incident.
There are also ships that carry the fuel for ICE cars around; or at least the raw ingredients for it (oil). Or liquid gas. Highly flamable stuff. Very toxic. Nasty when it gets out. Oil tankers do untold amounts of damage to the environment when they sink and spill their load. Happens fairly regularly. Insurers are all over that kind of thing as well.
If you actually genuinely care about cars spontaneously combusting, there are hundreds of people that die in ICE car fires every year. ICE car fires are so common that it's one of the most common reasons for fire trucks to be called. Hundreds of thousands of times per year in the US apparently. ICE cars are not safe at all; they never have been. They catch fire in all sorts of situations. In your garage, while they are parked, when you crash them, or when you drive on the motorway. It happens to old cars; it happens to new cars. So, where's the big outrage over good old ICE car fires? There is none. Double standards. Or rather there's a lobby interested in talking about one thing but very much not about the other thing.
Which is of course what is going on here. This article is on a web site aimed at ICE car enthusiast that no doubt depends on advertising, sponsoring, etc. by various car manufacturers. Spreading FUD about EVs whenever they can. Just so the fearful masses keep on buying ICE cars.
Once the fire actually involves "serious" electricity...well, then you've got (1) "can't blow out" birthday candles from Hell, (2) "spray water on it and you may die by electrocution" issues, and (3) the fire has Unlocked a whole new way to Level Up fast, which does not depend upon the traditional "fire triangle" (fuel, oxygen, and heat).
*Or maybe you can't. Ask any fire fighter whether things get magically easy if there's no electricity involved.
But you are right that it's maybe harder to set the battery on fire in the first place.
So you ship the EVs without batteries, and then... you ship the batteries?
I see what you are saying, but the way we mitigate the fire and explosion hazards on oil and gas transport ships is not really applicable to roll-on/roll-off ships.
The oil tankers and LNG ships use a technic called innert atmosphere to protect their cargo from fire hazard. The idea is that they fill the ulage spaces with a gas low in oxygen to make sure an explosive mixture can’t form.
It would be very hard to innert the whole cargo space of a RO/RO ship the same way, might damage the cargo, would be hazardous to the operators and wouldn’t actually help with a potential thermal runaway of a battery anyway. I will discuss these points in detail:
How do they generate this innerting gas usually? There are two main options. You either use nitrogen, or you pipe in the exhaust gas of the engines. Nitrogen would probably be cost prohibitive. The RO/RO ships are cavernous. The exhaust gas based sytem would cost less, but would damage the cargo. Nobody would want a car which reeks like an ashtray.
The innerted atmosphere is obviously incompatible with human occupancy, yet the cars are usually driven on and off these carriers by a small army of operators. So you need to have processes to vent the innert atmosphere before the vehicles can be embarked/dissembarked, and you need other processes to ensure the venting worked properly otherwise your shore crew will suffocate. This adds complexity, and risks to the operation. This is not a problem on tankers because there nobody needs to enter the tanks during normal operations.
And then finaly why it might not help after all? The nature of electric vehicle battery thermal runaway is such that it doesn’t require oxygen from the atmosphere. It is an exotermic reaction, but not a “fire” in the fire-triangle sense.
So all in all, the one big trick of the tankers can’t be used with vehicle carrying operations. Thus the analogy is less than useful. Not saying that we can’t carry EVs safely, just that our ability to carry fuels safely does not in any way correlate with our ability to carry EVs safely.
Ships do need to adapt their firefighting process for Lithium-Ion batteries. But I'm not convinced about impacts causing fire.
This one shows the result of a ship passing nearby a Category 3 hurricane and teh aftermath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EqGzO_qsc
No risk of that happening here >:D
This is why per-cell fusing is a thing in newer designs and why weld quality is super important during manufacture.
Deleted Comment
There's also the possibility that a battery just catches on fire all by itself because of a manufacturing defect. It can happen.
Speculation about risk is literally what insurance companies do; how they determine the terms of insurance.
I learned a lot from this. One, shipping is pretty fly-by-night. Operators are winging it and trusting to luck in a lot of cases; failing to secure cargo for expediency for example. That's more corroboration than new knowledge. Two, fires are common on cargo ships: 14 times a year some cargo ship starts burning for some reason, car carriers being among the more frequent. Small fires that are quickly contained aren't included in that figure because they don't get reported. Three, car carrying ships aren't prepared to deal with cascading lithium battery fires. They can handle ICE fires but haven't yet adapted to the electric vehicles they're actually starting to carry in quantity. Four, the people that have to analyze the risks involved because they're liable for the costs are more candid about electric car fires; they say straight up that "lithium-ion batteries—they can ignite a lot more vigorously as compared to any other cars" and "a high impact on these cars and a lithium-ion battery can ignite them." A refreshing change from the obligatory handwaving and cognitive dissonance one gets at all other times.
In electronics there is the concept of a bathtub curve. The frequency of component failure is high when the components are new. The frequency decreases afterwards and later increases again with old age.
Applied to cargo ships full of electric cars with millions of brand new battery cells, obviously the risk that some battery will ignite and sink the ship has to be considered. And it will be considered -- if only by insurance companies -- whether electric car proponents like it or not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicity_Ace
What exactly did you identify as FUD in this article?
If I remember right, lithium ion batteries explode if over discharged. I have no idea why self discharge doesn't cause old forgotten laptops to routinely catch fire.
* https://therevelator.org/container-ship-accidents/
** https://www.dw.com/en/exclusive-cargo-ships-dumping-oil-into...
[1]: https://gcaptain.com/a-short-list-of-major-oil-spills-from-s...