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When the 600-foot car carrier Morning Midas burst into flames 260 miles southwest of Adak, Alaska on 3 June 2025, the headlines practically wrote themselves: “ghost ship,” “electric-car inferno,” “ocean-going barbeque.” The reality is less click-bait and more cautionary tale. The vessel, managed by Zodiac Maritime and chartered by China’s SAIC Anji Logistics, was hauling 3,048 vehicles—including roughly 70 fully electric and 681 hybrid models—on a run from Changzhou to Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico when smoke started curling out of the EV deck. Twenty-two crew members abandoned ship; days later, salvage teams were still tip-toeing around smoldering steel plates hot enough to fry baozi (Maritime Executive, WorkBoat).
EV batteries don’t combust more often than gasoline tanks, but when they do, they throw a chemistry party you really don’t want an invite to. A damaged cell heats past ~200 °C, the separator melts, electrolyte boils, and voilà—thermal runaway. Each cell then becomes its own Roman candle, cascading heat to its neighbors and belching flammable gases like hydrogen fluoride (HF) and phosphoryl fluoride (POF₃). Even a five-cell pack can spit out 13 g of HF—500-plus × the workplace exposure limit (Ossila). Add the oxygen buffet of an open cargo deck and the fire can burn hotter than a summer TikTok trend, reigniting hours after it looks “out.”
Unfortunately, maritime fire codes still treat a battery-packed sedan a bit like a spatula: Class 9 “miscellaneous dangerous goods.” The International Maritime Dangerous Goods (IMDG) Code offers broad strokes, but it was drafted when “new energy vehicles” meant Prius, not 100 kWh skateboards on wheels. BIMCO’s 2025 white paper flat-out states “there are no regulations for safe carriage of EVs at the moment” (Bimco).
The IMO knows it has homework. After the Felicity Ace (2022) and Fremantle Highway (2023) infernos, its Maritime Safety Committee (MSC 105) kicked off a multi-year review of shipboard fire protection for “new-energy vehicles,” and the SSE-10 sub-committee drafted a roadmap that’s still winding its way through red tape (IMO). Yet none of this is ratified; shipowners remain free to pack fully-charged SUVs bumper-to-bumper without extra suppression systems—something airlines can’t do. (IATA already limits lithium-ion SoC to ≤30 % for UN 3556 vehicles starting 2026 — mandatory in the sky, optional at sea (Lion)).
If the Morning Midas feels like a rerun, that’s because it is. The Felicity Ace sank with 3,965 luxury cars and a $236 million insurance bill (News.com). The Fremantle Highway lost one life and 500 EVs in the North Sea (GCaptain). All within three years. Each time, investigators mutter “possible battery involvement,” regulators promise “lessons learned,” and then another deck lights up like a Fourth-of-July sparkler.
SmarterX’s AI already ingests SDSs, UN codes, and battery metadata to spit out an instant “transport-fire-risk” score. Shippers using our Connected UPC database can flag EVs with >100 Wh packs, auto-check SoC, and generate IMDG-ready documentation in seconds. Because regulators love data they didn’t have to wrangle, we feed anonymized incident trends back to standards bodies—and yes, to the IMO working groups—so tomorrow’s rules are shaped by live supply-chain telemetry, not rear-view-mirror autopsies. Think of it as predictive compliance: catching the spark before the smoke goes viral.
The Morning Midas may end up a footnote—another charred hull on a salvage report—but its message should burn bright: our appetite for electrification has outrun the rulebook. Until EVs get their own chapter in maritime law, we’re one thermal runaway away from the next floating bonfire. Let’s upgrade the regs before the hashtag #GhostShip trends again.
Because, frankly, the only thing that should be on fire about the EV revolution is its sales curve—not an entire car deck somewhere in the Pacific.