Cargo Ship Carrying Thousands of Luxury Cars Sinks in the Atlantic

The Panama-flagged 60,000-ton service supplier ship carrying round 4,000 luxurious vehicles—together with merchandise from

Porsche,

Bentley, Audi, Lamborghini and different

Volkswagen AG

manufacturers—caught hearth in February and burned intensely for days.

SMIT Salvage, the Dutch enterprise charged with salvaging the ship, despatched a bunch of considerable oceangoing tugboats to the scene and was towing the vessel to safety when it sank.

Salvage crews and the Portuguese navy skilled talked about that the depth of the fireplace could also be said by an enormous quantity {of electrical} motor automobiles on board. Some batteries are acknowledged to be flammable and burn at important temperature after they combust, making this type of a blaze difficult to extinguish.

The Felicity Ace fireside is a single of the initially on board a significant car service loaded with a major cargo {of electrical} autos. The incident has sparked dialogue between insurers and regulators about methods to correctly transport these autos, a problem that may acquire urgency as EVs grow to be much more frequent.

Regardless that the induce of the fireside on the Felicity Ace may probably by no means ever be regarded as a result of reality the ship is mendacity on the base of the ocean, trade specialists say there’s a danger that batteries in electrical powered automobiles can temporary circuit and catch fireside. That might signify that security measures not relevant for typical vehicles may probably must be taken into consideration by way of transport, regulators defined.

Proper after the blaze stopped,

Volkswagen

skilled defined it anticipated “that substantial items of the nearly 4,000 autos from many group model names have been so damaged within the ship fireside that they will no prolonged be shipped.”

Volkswagen

declined to comment on the advantage of the cargo.

Incident insurance coverage protection specialists Russell Group Ltd. estimated that the cargo on board the Felicity Ace was really price about $438 million, of which the autos on board accounted for about $401 million. Russell believed that VW may facial space losses of at minimal $155 million.

Publish to William Boston at [email protected]