Want to travel by ferry? you can’t enter with a charged electric car. Fire hazard

In Greece, a new rule by the Ministry of Navigation and Insular Policy requires the country’s ferries not to accept BEV (battery-powered) and PHEV (plug-in hybrid) electric cars with more than 40 percent charge on board.

So when you disembark, you will have to look for a charging point for your car rather quickly, and this can be a problem for tourists.

The rationale? The ministry in question brought up safety to justify the rule; on the surface, however, it seems that the current Greek government is ill-prepared on the subject of electric cars. If it is taken for granted that BEVs and PHEVs exist, why not HEVs? They, too, possess a lithium-ion battery and are terribly dangerous (more on this topic: do electric cars ignite more easily than thermals?). The Ministry should ban them from ferries altogether. Requiring the charge to be less than 40 percent has no effect in practice, not even in terms of weight; in Greece, however, they must have compared electrons to LPG and CNG.

LPG and CNG cars, in fact, will only be allowed to board ferries with the tank at most 50 percent full. If it is fairly easy for a PHEV to discharge the traction battery below 40 percent, it is much more likely that the driver of a BEV arriving at the dock at 60 percent (if not more) will have to start swirling around the port to get the charge below the fateful 40 percent, and discharging an electric vehicle is not as easy as one might think, unless one is going on the highway.

One would have to think that whoever came up with this rule has never seen a battery electric car, even in a photograph: a car that is 80% charged is no more likely to catch fire than one that is 20% or 35% charged—or at least there is no scientific evidence to claim anything like that. If a BEV catches fire, it is difficult to put it out anyway, regardless of its state of charge. Hopefully, someone will eventually point this out to the ministry.