A few things in life won’t hurt as much as what you’re about to read. A burnt-out cargo ship carrying 4,000 luxury sports cars including Audis, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Porsches worth an estimated total of $400 million sank off the coast of Europe on Tuesday.
The Felicity Ace, a 60,000-ton ship that caught fire on February 16, was traveling from Germany to the USA. It carried nearly 4,000 electric- and non-electric vehicles from the Volkswagen Group. While it’s unclear exactly what started the fire, captain Joao Mendes Cabecas of the port of Hortas said lithium-ion batteries in EVs aboard the ship caught fire.
“We are already working to replace every car affected by this incident and the first new cars will be built soon,” Angus Fitton, vice president of PR at Porsche Cars North America, Inc., told The Associated Press in an email.
How much goods did the burnt-out cargo ship carry?
While Volkswagen declined to estimate the value of the perished luxury cars, an incident insurance company informed The Wall Street Journal that the vehicles were worth roughly $401 million.
Customers in Michigan and Rhode Island called car shops worried about the ship after hearing the news.
One man tweeted that the burnt-out cargo ship was carrying his custom-built Porsche Boxster Spyder. The vehicle’s base models cost $100,000.
The Felicity Ace ran aground about 253 miles off the coast of the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. MOL Ship Management Singapore, the burnt-out ship’s owner, said the Panama-flagged vessel sank around 9 a.m. local time.
Authorities were concerned that the burnt-out ship might pollute the sea. 2,000 metric tons (2,200 tons) of fuel and 2,000 metric tons (2,200 tons) of oil were carried by the ship. It has a cargo capacity of almost 17,000 metric tons (18,700 tons).
Only a few bits of wreckage and a small area of oil were visible where the burnt-out ship went down, according to the Portuguese navy. According to the report, tugboats were using hoses to rip up the patch.
On the lookout for evidence of pollution, a Portuguese Air Force jet and a Portuguese naval vessel will remain at the area.
