This is crazy. Not only have there been tons of ships lost to vehicle fires.... nobody has yet said "stop putting batteries/fuel in these janky-ass vehicles you're shipping". Are they trying to lose these ships?
No batteries and no fuel makes it a lot harder to unload.
Requiring batteries to be disconnected after loading / connected before unloading could help, but that adds more complexity to the process. Some vehicles have battery disconnects in inconvenient places. Adding a few minutes of labor on each end for reasonable vehicles would be fine. Adding 30 minutes for vehicles where the battery is buried underneath the trunk/trim work or where disconnecting the battery and closing the doors makes it very hard to open the doors at the end of the journey would be more problematic; maybe that would help encourage better vehicle design, but in the meantime shipping vehicles would get much more difficult.
This is a value chain issue. At one specific point in the value chain, people see the potential for difficulty, so they resist it. But what if the value you get as a result is greater than the difficulty? Afaik, the main issue of transportation isn't time, it's cost. If this lowers overall cost then it's a value-add.
Think of the consequences of removing battery/fuel:
There are other ways to attack the problem too. Relocating the battery/removing fuel could be performed well before the vehicles are brought to port. This could be mandatory, or made a shipping surcharge if relocation is not done before being brought to port (the surcharge could pay for the extra time/labor to do it at port).- Pros - Reduced shipping costs (you have to ship vehicles again, plus somebody has to cover the costs of these lost ships) - Lower insurance premiums (from reduced insurance payouts) - Reduced inventory losses (which require more inventory to be stocked and shipped to resist sales losses from lost vessels) - Reduced vehicle price - Cons - Additional transportation time - Additional labor cost
You might be underestimating just how many ships full of cars there are?
The port city where I live has ships doing this all the time, there are literally rail shuttles moving hundreds of vehicles from outside the city to the port sometimes several times per day and some of the huge carparks in the restricted dock area are dedicated to parking vehicles ready for export until a vessel arrives to take them.