Hope nobody has a new Porsche on order!

[gnat]

https://www.reuters.com/business/contai ... 022-02-18/

BERLIN/LISBON, Feb 18 (Reuters) - A ship carrying around 4,000 vehicles, including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, that caught fire near the coast of the Azores will be towed to another European country or the Bahamas, the captain of the nearest port told Reuters on Friday.

Lithium-ion batteries in the electric cars on board the vehicle carrier Felicity Ace have caught fire and the blaze requires specialist equipment to extinguish, captain Joao Mendes Cabecas of the port of Hortas said.

[32wildbilly]

Based on the highlighted below this s--t is going to the bottom of the ocean!

https://www.reuters.com/business/contai ... 022-02-18/

BERLIN/LISBON, Feb 18 (Reuters) - A ship carrying around 4,000 vehicles, including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, that caught fire near the coast of the Azores will be towed to another European country or the Bahamas, the captain of the nearest port told Reuters on Friday.

Lithium-ion batteries in the electric cars on board the vehicle carrier Felicity Ace have caught fire and the blaze requires specialist equipment to extinguish, captain Joao Mendes Cabecas of the port of Hortas said.

[5chn3ll]

It seems insane to me that the fire suppression equipment hasn't been updated for the now-pretty-obvious reality that dumping water onto a lithium fire only makes it worse (hydrogen gas is a byproduct of lithium reacting with water...). When you combine thermal runaway (an overheated or shorted lithium ion battery) with water, you get a hypergolic reaction.

Even if they only updated one deck/hold for use specifically for vehicles with lithium-ion batteries...you'd think...

Maybe it's cheaper to just chance it and if it burns...let insurance pay for it all. At some point, you'd imagine that insurers are going to get wise.

[gnat]

It seems insane to me that the fire suppression equipment hasn't been updated for the now-pretty-obvious reality that dumping water onto a lithium fire only makes it worse (hydrogen gas is a byproduct of lithium reacting with water...). When you combine thermal runaway (an overheated or shorted lithium ion battery) with water, you get a hypergolic reaction.

Even if they only updated one deck/hold for use specifically for vehicles with lithium-ion batteries...you'd think...

Maybe it's cheaper to just chance it and if it burns...let insurance pay for it all. At some point, you'd imagine that insurers are going to get wise.

Have you ever looked at how packed those boats are? It's not like there is space for crew to get to the car(s) on fire and deal with them directly, thus they use the old school "dump a suppressant from the ceiling on everything" approach and hope for the best. Something like Halon would be better for this type of situation, but the cost would be nuts (and I have no idea how effective it would be in such an environment).

In addition to water being a bad thing to use one the LiOns go up, the "cover everything" approach isn't as effective against such fires. So because they can't get to the car to fight it directly, even a better suppressant isn't likely to do anything but give the crew some extra time to get off the boat.

I think what we'll see is demand (very possibly from insurers) for them to start building these big packs to be self extinguishing similar to how cars are moving to add explosives or other mechanisms to cut power from the battery in the event of an accident. Even outside of a mess like this, I imagine the insurers are getting tired of Hybrids and EVs going up in even fairly minor accidents.

[5chn3ll]

Burning the thing down to the waterline seems like it would be expensive, too...especially when you're hauling Bentleys and Porsches.

Maybe you're right and ro/ro isn't the right way to ship electric cars...but the standard disclaimer (I'm an idiot...never listen to me) applies here.

[gnat]

Burning the thing down to the waterline seems like it would be expensive, too...especially when you're hauling Bentleys and Porsches.

Maybe you're right and ro/ro isn't the right way to ship electric cars...but the standard disclaimer (I'm an idiot...never listen to me) applies here.

Maybe they go back to a container model where each car is in a separate fire proof container. That way if one goes up, the whole shipment (and ship) isn't lost. The expense could probably be offset some by being about to use vertical space to pack more in (assuming the ship has the displacement capacity).

[32wildbilly]

All this "flame on" just confirms my original stance of "never one in my garage". We will never know what started it but my guess is, well you know.

[theprf]

These vehicle carrier ships are subdivided into fairly small pieces by internal fire barriers and the decks are supposed to be fire resistant for some period of time. They are required to have a CO2 flooding system that can fill the largest space twice over with enough CO2 to put out a fire.
This is great in theory, and it works on gas or diesel power cars as long as the CO2 is released early enough and the vents and opening in the decks are sealed tight enough. Problem is that some batteries can burn without O2 and the only way to put the fire out is to cool the battery, CO2 doesn't do much for cooling unless it's applied directly to the fire.
The ships also have water mist systems that do a really good job at putting out fires. These use really high pressure, like 60 bar, to finely atomize water which results in a large number of microdroplets. The latent heat of vaporization pulls a ton of heat out of the fire without loading the ship with too much water (this is Not A Good Thing from many avenues). These also don't do much against a lithium fire.
It seems that ship and fire protection technology has lagged behind the EV tech.

[gnat]

has lagged behind the EV tech.

Are you suggesting that we have rushed onto a bandwagon without properly thinking things through?

[5chn3ll]

It's remarkable how unimportant a ship full of luxury cars has become in the past few days...