Abandoned burning ship ‘had $400m cargo of luxury cars’
An abandoned ship that caught fire in the mid-Atlantic last week was carrying $401m (£295m) worth of cars, including Porsche, Audi, Bentley and Lamborghini models, an insurance estimate has revealed.
Felicity Ace, a specialist cargo ship carrying more than 4,000 cars, caught alight near the Azores on Wednesday evening. The vessel’s 22 crew members were evacuated but the fire continued to burn for several days, fuelled by lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles on board.
Insurance experts at Russell Group said on Monday they estimated that $438m of goods were onboard the ship, including an estimated $401m of cars and goods vehicles.
Suki Basi, the group’s managing director, said the incident would result in losses of at least $155m for Volkswagen, which owns Porsche, Audi, Bentley and Lamborghini.
“These figures showed once again the precariousness of global supply chains,” Basi said. “The incident comes at a bad time for global carmakers, who are in the middle of a supply chain crisis sourcing semiconductors, resulting in new delays for new cars. An event like this will not do a great deal in instilling trust with consumers.”
The ship’s operator, MOL Ship Management (Singapore), said on Monday that the vessel was “still assumed to remain on fire south of the Azores drifting further away from the islands”.
It said two firefighting tug boats were due to arrive at the site of the ship on Monday and would “start spraying water to Felicity Ace together with the patrol boat with the initial salvage team onboard already on site to cool down the heat from the vessel”.
The company said the ship remained stable and was not leaking oil. Another salvage craft with firefighting equipment is set to arrive from Rotterdam on 26 February.
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