There’s been a lot of news and notice recently about fires aboard ships. EVs and their batteries have been frequently blamed. What are the actual facts?
This podcast features a risk management specialist who works for a P&I firm – one that rates risks for insurance and may actually provide the insurance to cover risks such as fires.
I was fascinated to learn that the evidence is scarce for lithium batteries causing shipboard fires. And it seems that vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICE), which don’t have lithium batteries, are just as likely to cause fires as EVs. It’s a complex subject, and you would expect insurers to be more concerned if lithium batteries were a big problem. But that’s not so, from the evidence collected so far. And there are quite a few techniques that ship operators and shippers could take to reduce the risk of fires even more.
We have to condition the conclusion; often shipboard fires consume all the evidence of how the fire started. But this concern about EVs seems to be a red herring.
In Focus Podcast, 10/30/2025
Supply Chain and Logistics 