A Look Back at Recent Car Carrier Fires | Hacker News Reader

A Look Back at Recent Car Carrier Fires

gcaptain.com

28 pointstestrun17 comments

This is crazy. Not only have there been tons of ships lost to vehicle fires.... nobody has yet said "stop putting batteries/fuel in these janky-ass vehicles you're shipping". Are they trying to lose these ships?

No batteries and no fuel makes it a lot harder to unload.

Requiring batteries to be disconnected after loading / connected before unloading could help, but that adds more complexity to the process. Some vehicles have battery disconnects in inconvenient places. Adding a few minutes of labor on each end for reasonable vehicles would be fine. Adding 30 minutes for vehicles where the battery is buried underneath the trunk/trim work or where disconnecting the battery and closing the doors makes it very hard to open the doors at the end of the journey would be more problematic; maybe that would help encourage better vehicle design, but in the meantime shipping vehicles would get much more difficult.

This is a value chain issue. At one specific point in the value chain, people see the potential for difficulty, so they resist it. But what if the value you get as a result is greater than the difficulty? Afaik, the main issue of transportation isn't time, it's cost. If this lowers overall cost then it's a value-add.

Think of the consequences of removing battery/fuel:

  - Pros
    - Reduced shipping costs (you have to ship vehicles again, plus somebody has to
      cover the costs of these lost ships)
    - Lower insurance premiums (from reduced insurance payouts)
    - Reduced inventory losses (which require more inventory to be stocked and shipped 
      to resist sales losses from lost vessels)
    - Reduced vehicle price
  - Cons
    - Additional transportation time
    - Additional labor cost

There are other ways to attack the problem too. Relocating the battery/removing fuel could be performed well before the vehicles are brought to port. This could be mandatory, or made a shipping surcharge if relocation is not done before being brought to port (the surcharge could pay for the extra time/labor to do it at port).

You might be underestimating just how many ships full of cars there are?

The port city where I live has ships doing this all the time, there are literally rail shuttles moving hundreds of vehicles from outside the city to the port sometimes several times per day and some of the huge carparks in the restricted dock area are dedicated to parking vehicles ready for export until a vessel arrives to take them.

> The Morning Midas had departed Yantai, China on May 26 and was heading to Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico

What is it doing 300 miles south of Adak, Alaska? (Yes I understand the curvature of the earth vs map projections causes the shortest route to appear to be a curve rather than a straight line). This should be passing within a few hundred miles of Hawaii, not Alaska, right?

Are these things incapable of sailing in open ocean? Do they always stay within a few days sail of land?

It's hard to have a good intuition for great circle routes. The shortest path between those cities does in fact go all the way up to Alaska, crossing through the Aleutians:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=YNT-LZC

Adak is about as far south as the Aleutians get, so it makes sense that the ship would have passed (relatively) near there.

This counterintuitive bit of geography is why Anchorage has one of the busiest cargo airports in the world, despite its small population.

Nice website! Thanks!

I found that the ship went through the Tsugaru Strait, so this is the appropriate great circle:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=hkd-LZC

More information (Video) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFhhvr_afws

I wonder if this changes the calculus for shipping cars with 80% charged batteries. (Even given that many of the fires in the article were not ev related).

If this continues, will maritime insurance keep paying out for these total losses? It seem untenable.

Some thoughts: 1) drain almost all the gasoline from vehicles so that if there is a fire, the fuel is limited.

2) for battery EVs, other than disconnecting the batteries, I dont see a way to make them safer for transit.

If we wanted to limit the spread of Chinese EVs globally, one way would be for shipping companies to tax EVs heavily for sea transport so that fires would be covered by the increased transport costs.

> I dont see a way to make them safer for transit.

Discharged/low charge batteries are safer.

My understanding with LithiumIon is that batteries with low charge are more likely to catch fire.

This article lists 10 boats in 2 years. Is it more than a rounding error for insurance companies?

Yes, every one of these incidents is impressive because those are big boats, but there are thousands of them running around.

>for battery EVs, other than disconnecting the batteries, I dont see a way to make them safer for transit.

The shift towards LFP batteries should help.

I wonder if it would be possible to ship the vehicles under CO2. Assume they’re on fire instead of assuming they’re safe.

Read the article. CO2 is already installed as a fire suppression system. The problems are non-technological: system disconnected, doors left open, late activation...

The shipping industry is exploiting people to crew barely-seaworthy ships, abusing flags and international (lawless) waters.

LI batteries would burn regardless

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