Supercars are TOAST - cargo ship full of deluxe EVs catches fire

JEEP

The Living Force
FOTCM Member

Race to salvage fire-ravaged US-bound cargo ship drifting in the Atlantic with thousands of supercars on board including Porsches, Bentleys and Lamborghinis with blaze fueled by batteries in electric vehicles

54365625-10527899-image-a-15_1645199181035.jpg

Rescuers are racing to salvage a US-bound cargo ship in the Atlantic engulfed in flames with 4,000 cars on board including Bentleys, Audis and Lamborghinis

Lithium-ion batteries in the electric cars on board have caught fire and the blaze requires specialist equipment to extinguish. Investigators are probing whether the batteries started the onboard inferno.

The ship is still ablaze and plumes of white smoke are billowing from the vessel as a Portuguese navy ship works to stop it sinking with the 3,965 Volkswagen AG vehicles on board, including 1,100 Porches and 189 Bentleys, thought to be worth a combined £120 million.

One man said his custom-ordered Porsche Boxster Spyder, whose base models sell for at least $100,000 was on board the ship.

The Felicity Ace sounded the alarm after a fire broke out in the hold, the Portuguese Navy said in a statement. The cause of the fire is not known.

The ship was sailing from Emden in Germany and had left on February 10 and was heading to the port of Davisville in the U.S. state of Rhode Island, according to online vessel trackers.

Captain Joao Mendes Cabecas of the port of Hortas said: 'The ship is burning from one end to the other... everything is on fire about five meters above the water line.'

Eager Porsche buyers logging into the Track Your Dream service, which details the progress of the car's delivery, stated how the company was 'aware of an incident on the Felicity Ace carrying certain Porsche vehicles.'

Matt Farah, the man behind The Smoking Tire YouTube channel, posted Wednesday regarding his own Porsche that was apparently onboard the ship.

'I ordered a Boxster Spyder in August, and I was very excited to get it at the end of this month, and now it seems like it might become an artificial reef,' said Matt Farah who runs the Smoking Tire YouTube channel, which has more than 1 million subscribers.

Full story - pics and vid
 
Symbolic?

Cargo Ship Carrying Thousands of Luxury Cars Sinks in the Atlantic

The Felicity Ace had caught fire last month, destroying thousands of Porsche, Bentley, VW cars
BERLIN—The Felicity Ace, a 60,000-ton merchant ship that caught fire on Feb. 17 carrying around 4,000 Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Audi, and Volkswagen vehicles, sank on Tuesday morning in the Atlantic Ocean about 220 nautical miles (253 miles) off the Azores islands, the ship’s management company said.

MOL Ship Management Singapore Pte Ltd, which owns the company that operates the ship, said the Felicity Ace sank around 9 a.m. local time after it began to take on water and tilt to one side.

The Panama-flagged ship carrying some of the world’s most expensive cars burned intensely for days. SMIT Salvage, the Dutch company charged with salvaging the ship, sent a team of large oceangoing tugboats to the scene and was towing the vessel to safety when it sank.

Salvage crews and the Portuguese navy had said that the intensity of the fire might be explained by a large number of electric vehicles on board. Some batteries are known to be flammable and burn at high temperature when they combust, making such a blaze hard to extinguish.

The Felicity Ace fire is one of the first on board a major vehicle carrier loaded with a substantial cargo of electric vehicles. The incident has sparked debate among insurers and regulators about how to safely transport such vehicles, a question that will gain urgency as EVs become more widespread.

While the cause of the fire on the Felicity Ace might never be known because the ship is lying at the bottom of the ocean, experts say there is a danger that batteries in electric cars can short circuit and catch fire. That could mean that precautions not relevant for conventional vehicles might have to be taken into account during transport, regulators said.

After the blaze stopped, Volkswagen AG—the German car maker that owns the Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, VW and Audi brands—had said it expected “that large parts of the nearly 4,000 vehicles from several group brands were so damaged in the ship fire that they can no longer be delivered.”

Volkswagen declined to comment on the value of the cargo.

Incident insurance experts Russell Group Ltd. estimated that the cargo on board the Felicity Ace was worth about $438 million, of which the cars on board accounted for about $401 million. Russell estimated that VW could face losses of at least $155 million.
 
Back
Top Bottom