There are few things in this world more disappointing than a cup of lukewarm tea, a silent V8, or a cargo ship going up in flames like Guy Fawkes night, and not for the right reasons. But that’s exactly what happened aboard the Morning Midas, a cargo ship that recently decided to impersonate a flaming Viking funeral. The culprit? Electric vehicles. Again.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, EVs, those battery-powered virtue signals on wheels, have done it once more. Except this time they weren’t virtue-signalling quietly through a Supermarket car park; they were torching an entire ship. Because apparently, it’s not enough to set fire to themselves in a lonely Dutch garage or a poorly ventilated underground car park, now they want to take down entire fleets of innocent, tax-paying internal combustion engines along with them.
The Morning Midas was carrying a few thousand vehicles enroute from China to Mexico, some of them EVs, when surprise! one of those lithium-ion bombs on wheels decided it had had enough of this world. Cue spontaneous combustion, heat that makes a volcano look like a lukewarm bath, and fire crews who suddenly realised that water, foam, and goodwill have the same effect on a burning EV as clapping does on a migraine.
See, here’s the problem. When a petrol car catches fire, it’s dramatic, yes, but it tends to burn out. A few minutes of flames, a puff of smoke, and it’s over. Like a celebrity marriage. But an EV? That thing burns hotter and longer than a Jeremy Clarkson rant on tofu. Lithium-ion batteries go into what’s called “thermal runaway.” Which is a polite way of saying: You’re not stopping this thing unless you push it into the ocean and pray to Neptune himself.
And while firefighters scrambled to figure out how to douse the inferno, probably Googling “how to extinguish Tesla in open sea,” the ship just kept on burning. It’s like trying to put out the sun with a water pistol.
Now, I can already hear the EV evangelists queueing up like Tesla’s at a broken charging station. “But, EVs are safer statistically!” they’ll say. Yes, maybe. But they also don’t come with the one thing that makes a fire slightly manageable: the ability to be put out. It’s like driving around with a box of fireworks and pretending it’s fine because you’re not lighting them, yet.
Let’s face it, this whole situation proves one thing: putting hundreds of electric cars with volatile batteries on the same ship and then sending it out into the open sea is about as clever as giving a flamethrower to a toddler.
The Morning Midas fire wasn’t just a tragic accident. It was a flaming monument to our blind sprint into the battery-powered future, where the only thing more explosive than the technology is the smugness of the people defending it. And as for the ship, well, she lived up to her name. Everything she touched turned to fire.
