Norwegian shipping company bans electric cars on board classic ferry route
ctif.org
ctif.org
> An electric car fire gets very hot, and there may be a risk of explosion where toxic gases will be released
You know what? That's the case with _every_ car fire in enclosed spaces.
Explosions in car fires are very rare (tires will regularly pop), but every fire will release toxic gases. Especially car fires with lots of highly refined materials in the interior. That's why we wear heavy protective equipment when dealing with fires.
> electric cars, hybrid cars and also hydrogen cars will not be allowed on board
Well, the future does not look bright for this shipping company.
I can see how “just give it a few days to burn itself out isn’t a viable strategy on a boat.
How you push a column of cars around a raging fire is another problem. I don't know what I'd do.
There are hundreds of these ferries operating in Europe (and other places with large islands or short seas/lakes), from tiny ones that carry 2-4 cars, to large ones with multiple decks.
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/car-ferry.html?sortBy=rele...
Tiny (UK): https://www.alamy.com/the-dartmouth-to-kingswear-car-ferry-l...
Small (Germany): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-car-ferry-harbour-friedric...
Medium (Brazil): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-car-on-board-the-ferry-mak...
Large (UK/France): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-vehicle-deck-of-a-cros...
Note these are public passenger ferries. You arrive at the port, buy a ticket, drive on and (usually) get out of the car for the journey.
From the article:
>Last year a cargo ship carrying 4,000 luxury cars caught fire and sank off the Azores. Lithium-ion batteries in the cars caught fire and firefighters needed specialist equipment to put out the fire.
Ah 25 Evs on it...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/one-dead-cargo-ship-fir...
Answer: Electric cars are different from ICE cars in that the fire must be put off differently. We are trained to handle an EV fire by using a “blanket” method wherein a boxy containment zone will be erected to completely enclose the burning EV limiting ability of that chemical reaction to break out in a larger way. We have the tools, and the necessary practice for it, and treat it no different than a regular petrol car.
First part is checking whether the battery pack is affected after all. Not all EV car fires lead to problems with the battery pack and sometimes you can just extinguish the fire like any other.
We check the battery by inspecting it with thermal cameras (remove any protection on the bottom of the car first - not easy). If the temperature of the pack rises after the initial fire has been put out, the battery pack seems to have a problem.
In that case, permanent cooling is the way to go. You will start doing this by sprinkling the battery with a hose to keep temperatures stable. At some point, you'll want to release the personell and need a more permanent solution.
That's where troughs come in to play. You will fill that up with water until you can completely submerge the battery pack in water. Either place the car in first or lift it in afterwards, that doesn't matter, it's just a handling thing. The car stays in there for several days until the chain reaction in the battery has stopped.
I can see how this might be somewhat more complicated on a ship in the middle of nowhere, but you wouldn't want to have a burnt-out non-EV car standing on your ship for an extended period of time, too. So you'll have to reach shore quickly anyway and get more help.
But the problem seems to be more of how to get a burning car out of the pile of cars in your ferry. Doesn't matter if EV or not, you want to have it out of there at some point and that seems to be tricky.
The battery is done at that point anyway, but submerging it will stop flames and toxic fumes from forming from an "open" fire. The cells will "melt" and react with each other on and on until they're done, you can't really stop that.
The same thing is done with gas bottles. Once they have been subject to flames or enough heat, they are considered unsafe and will have reactions going on in the inside. You can measure those due to a rise in temperature on the outside, too.
Gas bottles are also put into containers full of water, for at least 24 hours, until the reactions on the inside are done.
Cooling them prevents them from heating up until they burst though. Same goes for EV battery packs.
(Ok, serious question about the portable-barrier-and-pump solution: could there be any chemical risk from using sea water, rather than fresh water?)
The discussion with EV fires now, we had 15 years ago with solar panels. People were panicking that firefighters would not be able to reach the burning roof under the solar panels, houses would burn down like nothing or that firefighters would die to electric shocks when taking care of those fires.
Reality is that some regulation was put in place (roof-mounted solar systems need an emergency breaker in Germany) and people found that the solar panels were most likely already gone in fully developed fires or that they could be rather easy and safely be ripped from the roof, when necessary.
They will then need some equipment to get EVs out of their parking position (forklift maybe?!?) and have some container ready to drop them into. It's a problem that can be solved with the right equipment.
ICE cars have gasoline in their tanks, because that is what they use to drive on the ferry and that is how they drive off the ferry.
It's impossible to operate a forklift on the tightly packed cargo deck of a ferry, especially while the space is filled with toxic smoke. Nor is there room onboard for a fire resistant container.
It's hilarious how a bunch of software developers who have never spent any time at sea think they have all the answers.
That is EXACTLY part of the problem. You put people with lots of flammable stuff under their asses on a ship in the middle of nowhere, with no help readily available, and hope that some sprinklers will be good enough to do the job.
Don't you see a problem with that, that should be tackled?
https://www.dnv.com/news/what-s-new-with-solas-2024--227502
The thing is that ferries are generally a low margin business so imposing a bunch of extra firefighting requirements will make some of them at the margins no longer economically viable. And fires aren't necessarily even the biggest risk: they also have to worry about collisions, loss of power, storms, navigational errors, cargo shifting, etc.
Realistically I just don't think civilian crews can be expected to effectively fight major fires in 50KWh+ lithium battery packs. Instead they should focus on fast, safe evacuation; when there is significant loss of life due to shipboard fires it's usually because the crew waited too long to abandon ship and screwed up the lifeboat deployment. Once the people are off then just let the vessel burn, or perhaps let a skeleton crew try to put into a nearby harbor where fire boats with trained personnel can take over.
It may also be practical to do something on the prevention front such as a quick visual inspection of EVs for obvious battery pack damage and dashboard warning lights. Or require packs to be discharged below 20% or whatever before boarding (passengers will complain about this).
Not an expert firefighter by any means, even back then. Just responding to this to add some data. Still, you make a good point: if you're not regularly fighting fires, that training atrophies like anything else. If fire like this breaks out anywhere but on the main deck, my guess is that they'd just flood the space with CO2.
Chance are, electrical fires are much more self contained than gasoline fires
Having these corner case be an over-focus of an overall better technology is a bad human habit though [2]
[1] https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5391449/zo...
This is not how normal solar panels are placed on roofs. In CA, for example, there are offset requirements where they have to be a certain distance from the edge of the roof, and on top of roof tiles/shingles. The only exception is uninhabited buildings, like a detached garage.
Sounds like Norway needs to adjust its safety regulations.
Secondly, Hydrogen is dangerous indoors, because the gas gets trapped AND is odorless, and no one will notice until something goes boom.
https://www.hydrogenfuelnews.com/hydrogen-fuel-odorized/8550...
Natural gas is a bit of a heavier molecule but hydrogen is very light and I suspect that the hydrogen and the smell would very rapidly separate.
A bigger problem is that hydrogen can leak through tiny cracks, and odorant can't.
To completely stop lithium battery fire, you need to submerge it in liquid oil for several weeks, to make sure that thing is completely dead. In country of 10 million people, we only have two tanks, that can deal with electric car fire.
Electric car can self ignite randomly, even after being parked for several hours or days. We are lucky Tesla has good QA, but that will change as other brands (even Chinese) will flood market. And there will be DIY battery repairs... Ferry in Norway could have cars from Bulgaria or Serbia onboard. Even homemade electric bike is electric vehicle!
I am absolutely for banning electric cars from underground garages, ferries, long tunnels, and so on.
In a county of 160k people we have two troughs on standby for these cases. It's about being trained and prepared and things will lose its horror.
I’m very glad you don’t write laws.
so.... build more?
if there are too few fire extinguishers in a building do you scrap the building or do you commission more?
We just have to accept that we’re only at the beginning and get to commissioning.
Dunning-Kruger effect? You are explaining to a firefighter who is presumably trained in this stuff that water makes the problem worse … when a simple Google search shows you that using (a lot of) water is the standard recommended procedure for EV fires across the globe.
https://www.ctif.org/news/150-000-liters-water-needed-put-ou...
https://www.iafc.org/topics-and-tools/resources/resource/iaf...
https://www.phoenix.gov/firesite/Documents/074742.pdf
https://www.dekra-roadsafety.com/en/what-to-do-if-an-electri...
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SR2001....
Actually, the most practical solution to transporting electric cars by ferry might be to dump them into the sea in case of fire :)
Fires on boats are terrifying. Second only to submarine fires, IMO.
But not using water on electric devices, is one of first things we learn in safety training. Even fire extinguishers are not based on H2O, but specialized chemicals! I worked at UPS backup batteries.
It sounds like fire fighters are still scared today. Perhaps it is because there is not only a risk of fire, but also electrocution.
Yes, as mentioned there's not enough training happening. Every firefighter should be trained for handling fires in electrical installations.
If you can't shut it off, there are safety distances you'll have to maintain, these are even defined in industrial standards.
For "low voltage" (up to 1.500 V DC) the safety distance is 1 meter for a wide beam of water and 5 meters for a narrow beam of water. This can be well kept (don't lay down in the water, though) with appropriate tactics.
360MJ per battery / 66MJ per drum = 5.46 drums of water.
Are there better ways of discharging EV batteries?
To go from 1 L @ 100℃ to steam at 100 ℃ would take in additional 2.26 MJ.
A 200 L drum of room temperature water then could be used to tank 200 x (2.26 + 0.33) MJ = 518 MJ. They would only need one such drum, and one fully charged Tesla battery would be able to boil away 70% of the water.
That actually works out nicely. Assuming a standard sized 55 gallon drum when the battery runs out juice there would still be about 25 cm of water in the drum. You want enough water to remain so that the heating element stay immersed because it is often bad for them to run in air.
Which is more efficient, time-wise?
When the water is at 100℃ the difference between it and the heating element should be less than when the water is colder and so it should be transferring heat slower.
By switching drums you are spending more time with the heating element in colder water so can transfer more energy.
However there may be other factors.
First, dH/dt = k ΔT, but k depends on the particular two things that are exchanging heat. I don't know if the k for the heating element and liquid water is the same as the k for the heating element and water that is undergoing a phase transition to steam. Someone who remembers their college thermodynamics a lot better than I do will be needed here.
Second, the battery is going to have some limit on how fast it can transfer energy. That may be low enough that whether you use one drum or multiple may not matter.
Also, all teslas are fitted with the same batteries now, with a software limit. Don't know how charged the extra capacity is, or if it's spread out.
For a smaller fire trucks with only 1000 gallons that would raise to around 42℃ or 108℉ which might be too hot to use.
For fire trucks with only 500 gallons this approach it would definitely be too hot to use. The water would end up at around 65℃ or 150℉. That scalds people in under 2 seconds.
> The decision was made after an external risk analysis was made on behalf of the company. What the risk analysis found was that fires in electric cars are considered more difficult to extinguish than fires in cars powered by petrol and diesel.
In other words: the problem is that they can't easily extinguish these fires on their ships. Or, perhaps, doing so isn't worth whatever the corresponding insurance burden is.
They seem to spread super quickly, be hard to extinguish, and release a lot of toxic smoke.
0 - Four dead at ebike store 1 - Leveled a supermarket and laundromat. Firefighter quoted "something we've never seen before, in terms of going from small to big in a matter of a few minutes" 2 - Over three dozen injured
[0] - https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/20/us/nyc-ebike-store-fire-lithi... [1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lithium-ion-battery-bla... [2] - https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-11-06/nyc-probe...
It just goes on and on like this with a simple search for "battery fire NYC".
But lithium fires, if they start, can be nasty, so I'm not surprised the insurance doesn't like it.
I wonder how hard it would be to engulf a vehicle with something like a fire retardant expanding foam to contain it?
I guess we could practice on our dead mobile phones for a scaled mock up of the problem? At least that would also help deal with the e-waste problem and is something any individual could do in their own garden shed!
It's basically a hypergolic fuel once the cells are ruptured.
Gasoline carries much more energy than a lithium battery, but spraying it with regular water (I don't know if this is actually common) could disperse the fuel and sap the heat easily, killing two parts of the fire triangle.
You just can't do that with a lithium battery. Other fluids which can soak up massive amounts of energy have other problems, like being very toxic.
You can't disperse the fuel either, because lithium will react with water anywhere it finds it. There's not that much lithium in a battery, but it's enough to keep re-igniting the rest of the battery.
Lithium ion batteries are like semtex or rocket fuel, their weakness is they cant be dispersed easily due to their solid compact nature unlike petrol or diesel or gas vapours which can all be dispersed easily, typically with water, and to transfer heat.
A hose that produces a fine mist of water has water droplets with greater surface area with less volume of water which then enables the heat to be absorbed by the water.
So the problem seems to be dispersing or containing the reaction to limit damage.
https://news.sky.com/story/one-dead-and-several-injured-afte...
Reuters [1 or see comment above] says the fire started "near" an EV, Sky seems to know better and says an EV was the source of the fire. What's right now?
If an EV was the cause of the fire, the question would be, if the outcome would have been different if the car was a petrol car of some sort.
Also: Why did somebody die? Why did some people jump overboard while others were airlifted? What's with emergency boats and whatnot else?
More from the Reuters article: "It's a very hard fire to extinguish, possibly because of the cargo the ship was transporting". Is that because of the 25 EVs on board or because something else?
This whole story is made up like the whole ship went "Boom!" and from one second to another the whole thing was up in flames.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/one-dead-cargo-ship-fir...
likewise, the fumes released from the batteries are much more toxic than those released from gasoline. coper, cobalt, lead, and other toxic minerals are released into the air in much greater quantities. as you can imagine, this is also extremely problematic in enclosed spaces, like on a ship.
It has capacity for just a few cars, and with a maximum vehicle size that is quite limited - e.g. a Tesla Model X is too big.
What is noteworthy is that they are also restricting hybrids, so in practice it means they will only take on really old cars.
Their competitor "Hurtigruten" which travels the same distance is a lot less restrictive on car transport.
They way I read this, they are bound by the contract with the government to offer car transport, but they are putting up restrictions in the name of safety etc. that ensure less and less cars are actually transported.
Seems to me the problem currently is that while the probability of an electric car catching fire is very low, if it does so the fire itself is of the very nasty kind.
Also, as far as I understand Lithium-based battery tech you can't really have/ship a "flat battery", it has to have some charge in order not to break down on itself. If that's the case then yeah, the simplest option "ship it without fuel, like an ICE car" goes out the window.
That said, it's impossible to extinguish a lithium battery so I can't blame them. When a fire does eventually start, it'll burn for the entire duration of the trip and probably a while after as well.
Their take on hybrids (with much smaller batteries) and hydrogen cars (those are just weird, more complex ICE cars) is bad, though.
My guess is that there's more going on. Perhaps the extra weight of modern cars is causing them problems? They would have to ban ridiculous vehicles like SUVs as well if that were a concern, but it could explain why a shipping company is putting out such strict limitations.
ICE cars ignite randomly mostly when the engine is running, which is not the case on ferries. I'd bet self-ignition of ICE cars with stopped engine is more rare than self-ignition of stopped electric cars. And in most cases of ICE fires handheld fire extinguisher is enough to stop the flames...
Really?
Lithium batteries contain extremely strong oxidizers, which means starving the fire is near impossible. Cooling the reaction down is a way to make the flames go out, but damaged lithium batteries tend to let out hydrogen gas (very flammable, obviously) and the heat of one burning battery cell can damage the one(s) next to it.
You can't just extinguish them because they'll relight themselves later. In fact, several Teslas have lit on fire hours after a somewhat minor incident that the car could just drive away from.
Aside from dropping the burning wreck into the ocean, I don't know how you could possibly hope to really extinguish a burning electric car on a boat. When those things go, they go!
Electric cars are great, but electric car fires are terrible. That's not necessarily a problem; ICE cars go up in flames all the time too, but they're easier to put out. I'll gladly take the lower risk of self combustion for an EV parked in a garage over the risk of an ICE car parked in the same spot; how hard it is to put out a car fire isn't really relevant when you're lucky to get out of the house safely anyway.
They're not exactly ICE cars or hybrids because they don't ignite the hydrogen (they use fuel cells instead) but they are pumping fuel around and filled with combustible material.
I suppose in terms of fires, they're closer to hybrids because they'll charge an electric battery that can also be used with tech like regen braking for better fuel efficiency. Then again, if a hydrogen tank lights on fire, that'll probably cause a strong burst of flames (assuming explosion prevention mechanisms work) similar to bursts that escape from burning lithium cells.
They're really their own category, but there are so few hydrogen cars that I don't think it really matters to be honest.
It's common to carry heavy trucks weighing tens of tons on ro-ro ferries. So, spare us your uninformed nonsense about "ridiculous vehicles like SUVs".
If you manage to stuff ten tons trucks into that thing, I'm not so sure you'll be able to leave port at all.
They have flammable lubricants spread everywhere on the same environment as high-current electric circuits, high-powered attrition-based devices and a bare hot fuel burning engine. It's a wonder that fires are as rare as they are. (I mean, I must have seen some 5 ICE cars catching fire. Compared to how many I've seen in total, that's an incredibly low ratio; it's a scheduled aviation level of safety.)
I do expect electric cars to catch fire much less often, but that's because they are naturally not prone to it. But yes, if the decision was up to me, I would want to have some real numbers, and I don't think anybody has them yet, so expect things to be random.
According to AutoinsuranceEZ study based on US government data, rates of fires per 100k cars:
Hybrid 3474.5
ICE 1529.9
EV 25.1
That shouldn't be too difficult to find on a ferry.
The Danish Institute of Fire Safety seems to think it's OK: https://brandogsikring.dk/en/news/2022/new-knowledge-about-b... / https://brandogsikring.dk/en/research-and-development/mariti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havila_Kystruten
https://www.electrichybridmarinetechnology.com/news/rolls-ro...
With these details it seems much Ado about nothing (click bait).
Everyone is hating on BEVs, but the problem runs way deeper:
Most car ferries are old. Like, really goddamn old, many decades are the norm, not a rarity - unlike oil tankers, where the double-hull mandate has forced a lot of old ships into retirement years ago. These things are almost exclusively completely open decks from bow to stern, which means any fire has an easy time to spread through the entire deck and subsequently destabilize the ship. No doors, no intermediate walls, nothing to stand in the way of fire, heat and smoke.
At the same time, on-board firefighting equipment is designed to handle a burning car just fine... a gasoline car. Smother it in water, and the fire should at least stay contained. A lithium fire however needs the car to be submerged and even that's not a guarantee it will extinguish, but - remember the open decks - any water that gets sprayed onto it just flows away.
Given that BEVs will become the norm in the next decades, shippers absolutely need to buy new ships, designed to be able to withstand the very different load of a battery fire. But they won't do that because, surprise, ships are extremely expensive...
Many decades old ones don't meet pollution standards, and are sold off to other countries. I've travelled on several ex-European ferries around the world, often still with the signs in Italian or French or whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%26O_Ferries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stena_Line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFDS_Seaways
etc, etc.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/auto/elektroautos-autofaehren-br...
It will take additional days to extinguish the fire, and then several weeks of monitoring the lithium. You can't get to the batteries since they are specifically enclosed in a way to never get wet.
So, this battery may go nuts and burn up the entire vehicle extremely fast, but you don't know when this will happen. All this while, the entire area is unsafe and unusable.
If tossing them in the sea is not the sustainable option, the only other way is to submerge them in a specialized container to submerge them into. Which needs to be brought to the ship. In this instance, for 25 vehicles. In the future, about every vehicle.
There have been a lot of reporting on Lithium batteries catching fire on airplanes.
Also, a lot of reports on eBikes and escooters that catch on fire. (So to be consistent the company should ban those as well)
Having a huge fire breakout on a ferry is not my idea of a good time. I dont know what the chance is for the fire to spread to other vehicles in the hold but given they are packed like sardines. It would not take much.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/4-injured-after-battery-caught-fir... https://www.ctif.org/news/passenger-airplane-made-emergency-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/03/03....
No-one wants a fire on a ship, and lithium batteries in a fire aren't fun, but if you want to transport cars then I guess you'll need to figure something out to stay in business...
Electric car fires are nasty in garages too.
My best guess is that no, they don't really want to transport cars, they seem to be doing so almost begrudgingly.
I looked around their pretty touristic cruises, they can accommodate hundreds of passengers, and _9_ cars. My guess would be they could stop allowing passenger cars altogether it wouldn't make a dent in their business model.
Does it make sense? Will they revert the decision after complaints? Hard to tell if this ferry is used by locals or is it only some touristy thing (for rented cars).
Both, it's the coastal norwegian route. However they're not car ferries, they're passenger ferries which can carry a few cars on the bottom deck. The standard payload is a few dozen cars but several hundred passengers.
The entire trip from end to end takes 6 days, but there are around 30 stops.
"the vessel was carrying 2,857 cars, including 25 electric cars, making fighting the flames more difficult. "
https://apnews.com/article/cargo-ship-fire-netherlands-envir...
edit: The linked article is from February, the fire happened today.
> Ship carrying 3,000 cars ablaze off Dutch coast, crew member dead
> July 26, 2023 3:04 PM UTC Updated 5 min ago
Edit: Oops. I see what you mean now. The article linked to HN is from February. The fire on the ship is from today.