cars firegeezer on 02 May 2008 12:42 pm
Mazda Destroys 4,700 Brand New Cars
NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO ON JULY 23 OF 2006, an ocean freighter, the Cougar Ace, listed more than 60 degrees after a problematic ballast exchange.
The Singapore-based container ship was near the Aleutian Islands carrying 4,703 new Mazda automobiles of various models and was enroute to Vancouver, British Columbia. The ship was performing a mandatory sea-water ballast exchange that is required before entering U. S. waters as a measure to prevent the introduction of invasive species that are not native to the country. During this exchange, something went wrong and the ship started listing, ending up at the severe angle in about 10 minutes.
The ship was adrift for eight days before salvage tugs were able to tow it to an Alaskan seafood processing plant that had docking space where it was righted. Later it was towed with its cargo intact to Portland, Oregon.
Alaska Dept. of Environment and Conservation photo
All of the cars were securely strapped down and only about 40 of them broke loose and were damaged. But Mazda decided to not sell them because of the unknown effects from being on their side in the sea air for so long. They had offers to buy them as scrap for uses such as school auto shop classes and Hollywood movie makers to be used for stunts and crashes.
Mazda was reluctant to let them go because of liability potential and the fear that they would slip into the black market where they would be smuggled to Latin America and sold as new cars. So they decided to completely demolish $100 million worth of automobiles, a decision that would cause them to set up a “disassembly line” in Portland.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
It took more than a year to devise a plan that satisfied everyone. The city of Portland wanted assurance that nearly 5,000 cars’ worth of antifreeze, brake fluid and other hazardous goop wasn’t mishandled. Insurers covering Mazda’s losses wanted to be sure the company wouldn’t resell any cars or parts — thereby profiting on the side. So every steel-alloy wheel has to be sliced, every battery rendered inoperable, and every tire damaged beyond repair. All CD players must get smashed.
Little things make a big difference. For instance, most of the cars have six airbags, and discharging them individually (forcing them to inflate so they can’t be resold) takes about five minutes apiece — or a total of a half-hour per car. So engineers back at Mazda’s headquarters, in Hiroshima, fashioned a device that can discharge all six at once. Multiplied by 4,703 cars, that trick alone saved months of work.
60% of the cars were the 2007 Model 3s
By the time they are finished, the entire car has been stripped of all fluids and adversarial metals, crushed and chopped into pieces and then shipped back to Japan where it will be recycled into new cars.
The Wall Street Journal has the complete description of this fascinating process HERE.
Alaskan blogger Ben Muse has the story of the Cougar Ace HERE.
WIRED Magazine produced a short video that
explains the salvage effort. Click to play:
