Three weeks after the Morning Midas caught fire and its crew of 22 abandoned ship, it has finally been reported to have sunk in the 16,400 foot deep waters of the northern Pacific Ocean, about 415 miles south of Alaska.
The sinking wasn’t a surprise; once a car carrier catches fire nowadays, it’s often a total loss. Unlike most types of cargo fires, these fires often cannot be extinguished; they just have to burn themselves out.
And oh yes, this was a car carrier. The Morning Midas was a cargo vessel, sailing from China to Mexico, with a load of over three thousand doomed automobiles on it.
The electric car lobby will disagree; they will point out that such a conclusion is premature, and perhaps it is. It has not yet been conclusively determined, after all, that it was an EV that started this fire. And now that the evidence is 16,400 feet below the surface, such “conclusive” proof is now buried for good on the ocean floor.
But here’s what we do know: crew members reported that the fire started on the level that contained electric vehicles… and it spread very, very quickly, so quickly that they had to abandon ship when they realized there was no hope of putting it out. What kinds of fires spread that fast, and are that resistant to fire-fighting techniques?
The official report from the U.S. Coast Guard listed the cargo as follows: 3048 vehicles in all, of which 70 were fully electric vehicles and 681 were hybrid electric. The rest were presumably normal internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Presumably all Chinese made, bearing such Chinese brands as Great Wall and Chery Automobile. They are not sold in the USA; these were made for the Mexican market.
One might conclude that Mexico lucked out.
There’s an interesting thing about vehicles in transit, especially gasoline powered vehicles. The global Hazardous Materials regulations managed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), known as the International Maritime Dangerous Goods code (IMDG) have clear requirements stipulating that vehicles be empty of fuel – or almost empty – before transport, so that we don’t have thousands of cars, each with ten or twenty gallons of flammable liquids in them, with the attendant fire and explosion risks.
Remember how the Al Qaeda terrorists counted on the fuel tanks of the airplanes being a major part of their destruction plan on September 11, 2001? Large quantities of petroleum can be a severe fire hazard.
The reason that car carrier fires were rarely severe, and rarely total losses, during the first century of vehicle transport was that all those gasoline-powered cars were always transported empty, only to be fueled up upon arrival.
And while the electric vehicle lobby doesn’t want to say the quiet part out loud yet, the truth of the matter is clearer every year: these non-ICE vehicles that the environmentalist lobby loves so much have a very different risk profile.
You can transport an ICE car without fuel in it.
You can’t transport an EV or hybrid without its battery.
These batteries are not filled or emptied in use; they are self-contained bricks of thousands of individual lithium cells. The HazMat regulations require that they be shipped at a lower charge than usual – generally under 30% of full electric charge – but how much real safety that adds to the process is unclear.
These batteries don’t do well when they get wet, but they’re being shipped across an ocean, with rain sloshing around the deck as the ship rocks in the sea for weeks.
These batteries don’t do well when they’re scratched or nicked; there’s so much movement aboard a ship as it rocks in the waves, it’s easy for debris to brush past the undercarriage of these vehicles.
And once one EV catches fire, these plastic and electric firetraps frequently catch the fire and spread it quickly, if there are other EVs nearby to pick up the spark.
Just to put a rough approximation on the value of this loss – not completely necessary for the news story, but helpful as a frame of reference – be aware that this ship was worth approximately $16 million or so, the last time I could find its value estimated, and if we assume a relatively low price for these cars, since they are not made to USA standards and the sale was from one socialist economy (China) to another (Mexico), a very rough guess might be a range between $20 and $25 thousand each. This puts the total value of the sunken cars at about $68 million.
We are therefore looking at a loss of approximately $84 million, give or take (formal filings listing the exact numbers will of course be made public in the coming weeks or months, but there’s no telling whether or not they’ll be made public).
Again, we don’t know everything about this story yet, and we may never know much more about it than this.
But if we make the reasonably safe assumption that the EVs were the source of the fire, and the equally safe assumption that it was the EVs that caused the fire to be unquenchable, we can imagine what the owners of the ship are thinking today, and what the owners of other non-Chinese car companies (and perhaps even the Chinese car companies) are thinking today as well:
We probably wouldn’t have lost this $16 million ship, and we probably wouldn’t have lost these $50 million or so worth of cars, if we had just refused to carry those 70 EVs.
Do the owners of the EVs pay more to ship their EVs than do the owners of the hybrids or the ICE vehicles? Do the EVs contribute at all to balance out the considerable added risk that their very presence contributes to the vessel in transport?
(In case you’re wondering, we don’t actually know for sure whether the risk caused by hybrids is closer to the risk of the EVs or to the risk of normal ICE vehicles. There isn’t enough data yet; they haven’t all been around long enough. We can only assume the hybrid risk is somewhere in between.)
But this wasn’t the first ship to sink because of an EV fire. Ships, parking garages, parking lots, streetside parking, roadway intersections, and manufacturing plants have all suffered from these fast-spreading and unquenchable fires in recent years, often enough to develop a pattern that would take mile-high blinders to miss.
If you were a car company, shipping ICE vehicles, wouldn’t you be inclined to stipulate to your carrier that you only want them shipped on car carriers that have zero EVs on board?
And if you were a ship owner, wouldn’t you be inclined to set such an oppressively high transportation price on EVs as to keep the business out of your portfolio entirely?
And if you were a vessel insurer, facing this $84 million claim (remember, this estimate is just a guess by your humble internet reporter; it is probably a lowball estimate in order to avoid accusations of hyperbole), wouldn’t you be inclined to refuse to sell policies to carriers who accept EVs as cargo?
Maybe not enough data is in to support such a conclusion; that’s the argument of those who dismiss this increasingly-voiced concern. The EV market is still a niche in the automotive world, and some brands have better safety records than others.
But one of the odd things about the special risk of EVs is that their fire risk increases with age and use. When a car is new and pristine, it’s unlikely to have the exposure that causes sparks and therefore fires. But after it’s been driven around a while – a year, or two, or three – then it’s more likely to have hit a curb, or had its undercarriage grazed by a rock, or been in a minor accident, all the sorts of things that expose that tiny area of the battery, just enough to almost imperceptibly create this risk of almost spontaneous combustion.
And that’s why it’s time to talk about a bit of insurance jargon:
In the insurance business, there’s a certain buzzword that’s critical to this discussion:
“Inherent Vice.”
“Inherent vice” refers to certain types of cargo that are so risky as to be unacceptably likely to suffer losses in transportation, due to fragility, instability, poor packaging, or other risks of either suffering or causing damage to itself or to other nearby cargo. The inherent vice of some cargo may mean that even if you have an insurance plan, this particular item in your cargo may be uninsurable, and may even render your insurance null and void.
More and more of us believe that it’s only a matter of time before the insurance industry accepts the unpleasant reality that the Electric Vehicle itself, at least as long as it remains dependent on the lithium ion battery currently in use, is itself an inherent vice, endangering any and every ship that carriers it, and for that matter, any parking structure, homeowner’s driveway, apartment garage, underpass, or tunnel that it passes through.
It’s only a matter of time before the insurance industry has to put an end to this danger, because the insurance industry is the only party in our modern society that can.
Too many people love these products – it’s easy to enjoy their positives and shut one’s eyes to their flaws – so government doesn’t dare ban them.
But the insurance industry can refuse coverage. And if every insurer refuses coverage – until they come up with more fire-resistant battery technology – that will finally force the industry to slow down, and wait to relaunch these impressive products until they’ve worked out the bugs.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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