Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

autoweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 185 posts

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#61

Post by jillesvangurp »

audunw wrote: post #34
blenderdt wrote: post #22

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 the…

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.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#62

Post by Reason077 »

Animats wrote: post #58

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…

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.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#63

Post by londons_explore »

Animats wrote: post #58

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…

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.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#64

Post by [deleted] »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #9

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.

[deleted]

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#65

Post by hutzlibu »

jbay808 wrote: post #44
throw93232 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm all for serviceable batteries, but I don't see how it solves the shipping safety issue. So you ship the EVs without batteries, and then... you ship the batteries?

I think that might be done at some point.

So most shipments of cars are hazard free and cheap (to insure).

And then you have high risk battery shipments. With lots of expensive measures to minimize risks and fail safe.

(This is already today a thing, as you can ship items without batteries for less money.)

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#66

Post by pletnes »

kgwgk wrote: post #49
audunw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Among many other differences, I imagine cars are packed more densely in a cargo ship than in an airport parking.

Also, the parking did burn down completely. This scenario would be similar to losing a whole ship to the fire, possibly sinking it. Not exactly a good thing, neither economically nor ecologically.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#67

Post by jhugo »

montanalow wrote: post #23
jhugo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? Of course the avoidance of a human tragedy is great but the cost of this incident (to the shipping company, automotive manufacturers, insurers, environment) was enormous. It makes perfect sense to try to understand it better.

My point is that the ships telemetry was not an issue. Blaming electric vehicles with no basis, or lack of telemetry with clear evidence to the contrary is…something.

Of course it's an issue; the cost of finding out why it sank is huge because it didn't have telemetry.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#68

Post by terom »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #52
boundlessdreamz wrote: post #9

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. 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

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.

No risk of that happening here >:D

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#70

Post by galangalalgol »

elihu wrote: post #57
Ekaros wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, but I am starting to think that battery fire is more like nuclear reactor or used fuel cooling than putting out of fire. That is you need to have enough water continuously applied to combat generated heat. Where as with fire just removing heat or oxygen one time is enough.

Yeah, I get the impression that's true. There's an electrochemical reaction that's going to take place whether you want it to or not, and you have to keep adding water until the reaction is finished. I kind of wonder if it would help to pack batteries with something that requires a huge amount of energy to vaporize, so that the heat from a battery fire just goes into a state transition of some inert substance. (You c…

I've heard about large packs on boats catching, sinking, and continuing to burn while wholly submurged, and remote control aircraft being left to burn out because its safer and easier yo just repair the runway afterwards. I'm not sure how you soak that much energy. I've seen metal cabinets where people put iffy packs in case they go. It was clear it had been in a fire at least once. I think the normal way to dispose of such a thing is a controlled burn. Repair is too dangerous, its like defusing an explosive device.
Post reply on HN