OT: Multi-vehicle car smash in the Solent

Despite what you see in movies, it's pretty hard to create a fireball by crashing cars into each other. Car designers have had 130 years or so to work on this and they've gotten fairly good at it. :)

One piece of this is that since maybe the 1990s, just about every circuit on most cars is fused. About the only thing that usually isn't fused is the cable from the battery positive to the starter motor; sometimes there is no fuse on the main alternator/generator output wire.

I know that a lot of new cars are shipped with the engine computer backup/radio backup/clock fuse removed, but that's just to keep the battery from going dead. I've seen a dealer pre-delivery checklist that mentions reinstalling this fuse, but doesn't say anything about reconnecting the main cables to the battery. On the other hand, maybe someone at the port hooks up the battery when the cars come off the boat. *

I don't think any car gets a full tank of gas at the factory, unless the new owner is picking it up there. I suspect that cars destined for a boat ride may get even less fuel than ones that are going to go by truck or rail.

I read a magazine article a few years ago about a ship, bringing new Mazdas from Japan to the US, that rolled on its side in the ocean. This is it:

The article focused on the efforts to right the ship; it mentioned that when the recovery workers went through the hold, it was slippery, due to leaks of transmission fluid, etc. I think it said most of the cars were still tied down in their places, but a few had broken loose and shifted around.

The job was basically to get accurate blueprints of the ship, and then use modeling software that the recovery company had developed to figure out where to add ballast or flood compartments, where to pump compartments out, and so on, to bring the ship upright in a controlled way. Then the divers and welders got busy setting it up, they switched on the pumps, and watched to see if they did it right. It turned out that they did; they righted the ship and either sailed it or towed it into port in the US.

The cars went to a storage lot while lawyers and insurance companies did their thing. The lawyers were worried about liability if the cars were rebuilt, or if parts from them were sold as spares, so about 4,700 brand new cars went into a shredder.

Matt Roberds

• Foreign car companies that sell into the US are good at doing things at the port. Since the 1960s, there has been a 25% import tax on light trucks. At least one of the Japanese companies got around this by sending over two boats at a time of "truck parts", which were taxed less. One boat was full of cab+chassis and the other boat was full of truck beds. There was a shack at the port with a couple of guys, a crane, an air ratchet, and a big bucket of bolts. More recently, Ford builds the Transit Connect in Europe, installs windows and rear seats in it, and imports it to the US as a passenger car. In the US, the windows get replaced by steel panels, the seats get shredded, and it becomes a panel van.

That Cougar case was referred to in a local news report today, as an example of the same sort of design that is right on the edge of stability, shallow draft, high sided. Little latitude available for when things go wrong even assuming correct computer assisted ballasting before sailing. Perhaps a bit like fly-by-wire aircraft that are inherently unstable and need computer control of control surfaces to make them stay in the air.

There is a pic on that Cougar piece showing a number of the cars with active tamper alarms so at least enough battery power for sidelights. But it also referes to inert-gas fire suppression , a danger in its own right for salvors etc

One of my employees is also a dock worker and drives cars off ships often here in Vancouver, BC. He just told me that they simply hop in the car and drive them off the ship, no prep, no connecting batteries. About

1 in 200 cars needs a battery boost...of course they remove shipping tie downs first.

John :-#)#

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