Friday, November 9, 2012

Hybrid car fire mystery at Port Newark; the sea did it

The Monday after the Hurricane Sandy blew through the Eastern Seaboard, 17 Fisker Karma luxury sedans caught fire at Port Newark.

It was not immediately apparent what caused the plug-in hybrid vehicles, worth more than a million dollars, to burst into flames. Fisker reportedly has had past difficulties with vehicle fires, including an incident that triggered a recall of 2,000 Karmas due to defective cooling fans. But the port incident seemed to have something to do with the unusual storm conditions.

Three Toyota Prius hybrids at Port Newark, parked amidst a group of 4,000 hybrid and regular Toyotas, were also damaged by fire.

"We can't be certain exactly what happened at the port," Fisker representative Russell Datz told the New York Times in a telephone interview. "But we think being submerged in 13 feet of saltwater had something to do with it." There were no injuries associated with the fire.

Fisker's green cars, made from aluminum, have a lower melting point than steel cars. And all modern cars loaded with electronic components are susceptible to problems when exposed to saltwater, which is highly corrosive and conductive.

"Picture a charged AA battery," suggested Daniel Abraham, a lithium-ion battery expert and chemical scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. "If you connect the positive and negative terminals with a wire, it will short the battery and generate tremendous heat in the process."

Salts dissolved in water break into positively and negatively charged ions, which then act as conductors. So if seawater connects both the positive and negative electrical terminals of a battery, it will tend to short.

"These were definitely extraordinary circumstances," Toyota spokesperson Cindy Knight said in a telephone interview with the New York Times. "Once the salt gets in there, it's ready to do damage." Corrosion from the salt can damage wiring, for example, and the harness that holds the wiring, elevating the risk for fire, she said.

In total more than 300 Karma cars, a value of approximately $30 million, were destroyed at Port of New Jersey during the storm, Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher told Reuters on Tuesday. Toyota Motor Corp lost 4,500 cars, said Jim Appleton, head of the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers, to Reuters.

For more of the New York Times story: wheels.blogs.nytimes.com

More Newswire stories

Southeast Freight Conference: Memphis on track to become trade powerhouse

National Wildlife Federation sues New York over ballast regulations

Green cargo ships: Sails that harness the wind and sun

New mining haul truck transforms into haul train

Click to browse past stories on these topics:

Logistics

Ports & Infrastructure

Economic Outlook

Environmental Impact

Technology