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.
Discharged/low charge batteries are safer.
The shift towards LFP batteries should help.
Yes, every one of these incidents is impressive because those are big boats, but there are thousands of them running around.
The shipping industry is exploiting people to crew barely-seaworthy ships, abusing flags and international (lawless) waters.
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?
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.
I found that the ship went through the Tsugaru Strait, so this is the appropriate great circle:
0xbadcafebee•8mo ago
tialaramex•8mo ago
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.
toast0•8mo ago
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.
0xbadcafebee•8mo ago
Think of the consequences of removing battery/fuel:
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).