Aug 21, 2023

Marine Industry News from the UK reported that 3,784 new cars and sport utility vehicles, including Porsche, Rolls Royce, Volkswagen and Mercedes models were damaged or destroyed when the car transporter ship Fremantle Highway experienced an onboard fire on July 25th. Speculation is that one of the new electric vehicles onboard caught fire. What would cause that?

These vehicles are securely lashed down for transoceanic shipping from Europe to markets around the world. They are not running. Was it hot on board the ship? Was there a short or a spark that somehow ignited a vehicle? I don’t know, but this is not the first time it’s happened.

A few months before the Fremantle Highway fire, the Felicity Ace sank off the coast of the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean with some 2,500 vehicles on board. Again, the Felicity Ace carried many high-end luxury vehicles including electric models and that fire burned so long that the transporter sank in water almost 10,000 feet deep causing an environmental catastrophe as well as a huge insurance loss.

The Fremantle Highway remained afloat as of last week, but it has wound up in an environmentally sensitive marine habitat near Holland.

Two things occur to me; these are major insurance losses that will be spread across the globe through the reinsurance programs and global insurance losses are already having an impact on everyone’s insurance rates. The second thought is that I wonder if there would be a risk of fire if a battery powered boat were stored at a marina.

Certainly, we’ve all heard or read stories of electric cars catching fire. It’s not a common occurrence but it does happen. For larger boats, I think we can expect to see boat batteries even bigger than some car batteries. Also, cars tend to accelerate to a cruising speed and then continue at a more moderate load, going a steady speed. How many boats are run at, or near wide open throttle all the time?

Will a marine Lithium-ion battery be more likely to suffer a failure?

I suspect that little boats with little motors are likely to be pretty safe but then again, even small battery packs like the ones in a laptop computer have been known to burst into flames.

In this edition of Boating Industry Canada News Week Digest, we have a New Product story on the LiCELL SK Series Fire Safety Kits. These are designed for smaller items like cell phones and laptop computers. If you have a boat with a system for charging electronic devices, you might look into these Fire Safety Kits because conventional fire extinguishers will not put out a Lithium-ion fire, but the kits are a significant investment.

We already see that these great new technologies are being embraced by consumers but how many of them consider the risks and how will our industry manage the new electric boats that are surely coming soon?

Andy Adams – Editor