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If this is true, there will be big delays waiting for Taycans as I doubt the shipping companies will be willing to carry them without guarantees from VW that this will not occur again.
Effing EVs, my distaste for them keeps increasing, and that's even despite owning one for over 3 years. Convenient but an appliance. It is an i3, which is not known for having propensity for self-combusting, but maybe I should kick it out of the garage anyway...
Effing EVs, my distaste for them keeps increasing, and that's even despite owning one for over 3 years. Convenient but an appliance. It is an i3, which is not known for having propensity for self-combusting, but maybe I should kick it out of the garage anyway...
I don't think any of the VW/Audi/Porsche EVs have a propensity for self combustion, the bigger issue is that once these things catch on fire it is damn near impossible to put the fire out on a RORO ship. Anything can cause a fire on a ship, but having cargo on board that can combust uncontrollably like LiON batteries is a huge risk, especially the quantity of the material on a ship carrying hundreds or thousands of EVs. I think eventually the cars will have to be shipped without batteries and the batteries will have to be installed after the car is off the ship. The battery packs will have to be built locally, or shipped over in connex containers that can be flooded with fire suppressant should a fire break out in the batteries.
I have read the formal Porsche communication letter posted above several times. What exactly does “prioritize production capacity” mean? Are they saying they will add a third shift? Will they focus corporate leadership efforts on production? What else could it mean?
Seems to me like a well written letter by in-house counsel. I guess it means any and all points. They go on to say that they expect the vast majority of vehicles will be replaced in model year 2022. Well, that ends in August.
I truly feel bad for those who have waited so long for their cars. What about customers at VC200 with current lock and build dates. Will they pull back dealer inventory slots and give all new allocations to these poor customers?
I have read the formal Porsche communication letter posted above several times. What exactly does “prioritize production capacity” mean? Are they saying they will add a third shift? Will they focus corporate leadership efforts on production? What else could it mean?
Seems to me like a well written letter by in-house counsel. I guess it means any and all points. They go on to say that they expect the vast majority of vehicles will be replaced in model year 2022. Well, that ends in August.
I truly feel bad for those who have waited so long for their cars. What about customers at VC200 with current lock and build dates. Will they pull back dealer inventory slots and give all new allocations to these poor customers?
So hard to predict what might happen now.
i took that as meaning they will prioritize these rebuilds to fit into their current production capacity.
I don't think any of the VW/Audi/Porsche EVs have a propensity for self combustion, the bigger issue is that once these things catch on fire it is damn near impossible to put the fire out on a RORO ship. Anything can cause a fire on a ship, but having cargo on board that can combust uncontrollably like LiON batteries is a huge risk, especially the quantity of the material on a ship carrying hundreds or thousands of EVs. I think eventually the cars will have to be shipped without batteries and the batteries will have to be installed after the car is off the ship. The battery packs will have to be built locally, or shipped over in connex containers that can be flooded with fire suppressant should a fire break out in the batteries.
These probably are not as bad as Bolts or such, but yeah, once one goes, it's game over, can't extinguish it. Locally produced batteries would make heck lot of sense.
I suppose insurance for shipping EVs will soon become prohibitively expensive without measures like you describe.
It's kind of surprising that the ships aren't built to isolate fires at least from deck to deck. It seems to me that that wouldn't be so hard to engineer into their design and construction. Design them in such a way that a fire on one deck has no pathway to another deck. But I'm no maritime engineer.
There are quite a few differences between fire on a boat and a house fire due to the layout, construction, and materials; that's without the added complication of whatever the cargo may have been. The key things here are that steel can store a lot of heat, radiate a lot of heat, conduct a lot of heat, and that this occurs inside a steel shell. I don't know how hot it may get in a boat fire but it's quite hot. I once walked over to look at a boat I was familiar with that had burned and on the back deck in the place where there had been two aluminum skiffs on racks there was only a few small pools of aluminum, some streaks of aluminum leading over to the side where the hull of the skiffs presumably went over the side as a liquid, and a few engine parts and assorted tidbits of other detritus that wasn't consumed. Not much of that either. The fire itself never reached there, the radiant heat off the deck coming from the fire below was what destroyed those skiffs. In any event these secondaries are common in a boat fire where other fires are started by radiant heat coming off of plate, conducted by steel pipes, etc. These fires may join forces or burn separately, either way this is how various mechanisms designed to stop the spread of fire are defeated: The heat won. That boat BTW was carrying frozen fish, not a dangerously combustible material. It isn't as easy an engineering task as you might think making something fire proof against that amount of heat energy but many people have been working on improving fire safety and reducing losses for decades. Boats have become huge capital expenditures with years in the construction and owners and other interested parties have more than just their investments to protect, there can also be massive liability costs in a major casualty.
It's been coming up so while I'm here...
In a house fire most of the heat is transferred to the atmosphere and not long after it's extinguished or consumed there is little heat remaining compared to a boat fire because there is no substantial storage available for the heat. On a boat you can have literally tons of steel that is storing heat, that steel can in turn be inside tons (again literally) more steel storing heat and also now acting as an insulator for the hot steel inside it. Even that steel may be surrounded by more hot steel. This makes for a lot of problems initially for those attempting to extinguish it and also plays out when making a decision about when to attempt boarding an abandoned boat for a survey of the casualty. I did not make a guess when I said at least 48 hours before boarding, that is considered a bare minimum and would be on a smaller boat without dangerous cargo. In order to have fire you need 3 things, enough heat, fuel, and oxygen, the fire triangle it's called. Remove any one of those and you kill the fire but one or more of the other three may still be present. When a house burns to the ground the fuel is usually largely consumed and most of the heat transferred to the atmoshpere. On a boat the fire will often go out while there is still fuel because the fire consumed the available oxygen due to the enclosed spaces. In this case however there may still be substantial heat stored in the steel for a time unlike a house fire. Go in too early and you might find fuel and heat waiting for a sip of oxygen to get the party started again. The other reason they don't go in too early or re-board too quickly is that the boat is assumed to be flooding. Sea-***** are inlets where seawater is brought into the boat for ballasting, engine cooling, refrigeration, wash down, fire suppression systems, etc. The plumbing for this is steel but assembled with various gaskets and seals which can be destroyed by the fire allowing seawater entry into the boat. Tail shafts, rudder shafts, may suffer similarly depending on the packing. This flooding doesn't always happen but can happen. Whether it does happen or not you've got the possibility of uncontrolled flooding affecting vessel stability and potential reflash weighing against whether you want to get on what you see in the pictures and wander around.
As for what's next: If you're in the business, no matter the side, at this point no one is thinking about the value of the cargo; all are looking ahead toward the findings of fact which will assign blame.
Seems like the various insurance companies are going to all start pointing fingers at each other.
If an EV battery is to blame, I would imagine that car manufacturer would be at a lot of liability risk. Not entirely sure how that would get proven unless there was video. And even then….
That's not what the article says. It says tugs have been dispatched to go get the FA. But to my understanding, it is still adrift and still burning (or at least smoldering).
02-18-2022, 06:21 PM
