AUTONEWS

BMW cars from a cargo ship destroyed in a fire for sale?

Two years ago, the Fremantle Highway, a cargo ship carrying around four thousand vehicles from Germany to Egypt, caught fire off the Dutch coast. In addition to one crew member who died, many others jumped into the sea to escape.

The batteries of the electric vehicles were a major problem at the time, making it difficult for firefighters to do their job, and it took several days to bring the flames under control. The ship then ended up in port, and around 1,000 cars were pulled from it, which appeared to be in fairly good condition.

The Taiwanese insurance company then sold the ‘surviving’ cars to a consortium in Rotterdam, from where they found their way to used car dealerships. However, a legal battle then began, and the court in The Hague was not sympathetic to the lawsuit filed by Womy and 3B Exclusief against BMW, which was filed after the German manufacturer banned them from selling the cars in question.

The court concluded that BMW was ‘right to stop the sale because the quality of the vehicles was questionable due to their prolonged exposure to high temperatures in the ship’s fire’.

However, two years after the fire, the story has taken on a new dimension, according to Jutarnji.hr.

Dagblad van het Noorden writes that the surviving BMW models from the ship are being sold in a showroom in Japan. And in an official showroom. They are BMW Alpina models.

Dagblad van het Noorden asked Andrew Mason from BMW’s Dutch representative office for a response, and he said: “Those nine BMW Alpinas have been marked for destruction, maybe it has already happened. Because those cars are not allowed to be sold. And if the chassis number in Japan matches the number of the models on the ship, then those copies should be destroyed.”

However, the dealers claim that they have received permission to sell, and the continuation of the story is apparently yet to come, because the dealers in Japan have announced that they will take legal action.

The accident...The ship had left Bremerhaven, Germany, en route to Egypt when a fire broke out on July 25. One crew member died in the blaze. The other 22 survived, and seven of them jumped into the sea to escape. All but two of the crew were from India.

For almost a week, the fire burned on the 200-metre-long Fremantle Highway, registered in Panama.

There were fears that the ship could sink, raising fears of an environmental disaster in the waters of the Wadden Sea, a World Heritage site on the North Sea coast.

The Dutch coastguard stressed that the cause of the fire on the 11-deck ship was unknown and that authorities were careful not to speculate. But an audio recording of a rescuer has emerged suggesting that the fire had started in the battery of an electric vehicle and "it appears that an electric vehicle also exploded".

Of the 3,783 cars on board the ship, 498 were electric vehicles.

The fire started on the upper deck and salvage experts said that while four of the ship's decks were relatively intact on the hull, the eighth deck had partially collapsed due to the intensity of the fire.

Autonews