Mazda Destroyed 4,703 Brand New Cars After Cargo Ship Accident

Posted by Alex in Car & Vehicle on May 7, 2008 at 1:24 pm


Automobile makers usually try to find the best way to build a car, but Mazda had the unenviable task of finding the best way to destroy over 4,700 brand new cars:

It all started about two years ago, when a ship carrying 4,703 shiny new Mazdas nearly sank in the Pacific. The freighter, the Cougar Ace, spent weeks bobbing on the high seas, listing at a severe 60-degree angle, before finally being righted.

The mishap created a dilemma: What to do with the cars? They had remained safely strapped down throughout the ordeal — but no one knew for sure what damage, if any, might be caused by dangling cars at such a steep angle for so long. Might corrosive fluids seep into chambers where they don’t belong? Was the Cougar Ace now full of lemons?

The Japanese car maker, controlled by Ford Motor Corp., easily could have found takers for the vehicles. Hundreds of people called about buying cheap Mazdas. Schools wanted them for auto-shop courses. Hollywood asked about using them for stunts.

Mazda turned everyone away. It worried about getting sued someday if, say, an air-bag failed to fire properly due to overexposure to salty sea air.

It also worried that scammers might find a way to spirit the cars abroad to sell as new. That happened to thousands of so-called "Katrina cars" salvaged from New Orleans’ flooding three years ago. Those cars — their electronics gone haywire and sand in the engines — were given a paint job and unloaded in Latin America on unsuspecting buyers, damaging auto makers’ reputations.

Joel Millman of The Wall Street Journal has the story (and video): Link – via Look At This


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14 comments to "Mazda Destroyed 4,703 Brand New Cars After Cargo Ship Accident"

  1. luvpumpkns
    May 7th, 2008 at 2:25 pm

    i understand the concern about scammers, but it seems that anyone wanting to purchase the car rightfully should be able to sign some kind of waiver accepting that the car may have unknown problems. just seems like a sad waste to destroy all those cars when apparently, schools could be using them.

  2. Rich
    May 7th, 2008 at 2:45 pm

    but that's the litigious, get-even society we live in... where fear of lawsuit outweighs 'good faith' actions.

  3. bean
    May 7th, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    Mazda has a very long tradition of honor and workmanship in Japan, and in the US to a slightly lesser extent, so I wouldn't have been surprised by this ten years ago. But since they got bought by Ford, I assumed all of the quality and ethics would've been thrown out the window. Nice.

  4. Sofar
    May 7th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    There have been bigger wastes. It kind of bothers me though, that there are so many things I want to do that I can't because no one can take my word as a sane human being that I'm not going to sue anyone.

  5. Erik
    May 7th, 2008 at 3:34 pm

    I originally read about this in wired (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys  ?currentPage=all) . The Washington Times failed to mention that one of the salvage guys died during the recovery of the cargo ship. That makes it all the more tragic and sad.

  6. Jess
    May 7th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

    Better safe than sorry I suppose. Those engines are probably rusted out anyway. Even if they sold the cars cheap the they'd probably be high maintenence and need replacement parts pretty quickly.

  7. sikantis
    May 7th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

    Yes, I think the unknown damages were the problem. At the end it's the safety for the persons which counts.

  8. L
    May 7th, 2008 at 9:02 pm

    I hope they at least did a little recycling...

  9. rizwan
    May 7th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    i think they could have salvaged some parts of the cars for instance the body. the doors, trunk lid, etc etc are all worth money.

  10. BikerRay
    May 8th, 2008 at 4:32 am

    I can't think of any damage a car could suffer from being tilted over. Even if inverted, the only thing you'd have to do is get the oil out of the cylinder heads. And rusted? The cars were in containers, not on the deck. Certainly less salt damage than a car suffers from sitting in a car lot for a couple of months in a coastal town.
    I would have taken one for, say, 25% off the price.
    I think they saw it as a PR exercise, and, besides, their insurance paid for it.

  11. definitelyme
    May 8th, 2008 at 6:00 am

    yeah, i'm sure they didn't simply destroy them, they would have been able to re-use the majority of the parts.

  12. Josh S
    May 8th, 2008 at 12:21 pm

    Anyone and everyone should read the article from wired about the recovery effort of this ship(mentioned in Erik's post). One of the edge-of-your-seat stories I have ever read. I couldn't help thinking "when are they going to make a movie out of this?"

  13. Sid Morrison
    May 8th, 2008 at 4:01 pm

    It's a huge liability risk. You can get a buyer to sign something, but then they sell the car to someone who sells it to someone else, &c.

    I was an automotive engineer for a US manufacturer for 12 years and we crushed a lot of test cars that were only lightly used. They could have been sold as low-mileage used (not new of course) cars, but it just wasn't worth the risk. Recovering $20K isn't worth a future lawsuit that could pay out tens of millions and generate a lot of bad press.

  14. Sam Pharoah
    October 8th, 2008 at 4:58 pm

    Back in the day, when glutamine came out as the latest sweetener, think it was right after saccharin was the hot deal, food manufacturers converted an entire year's food supply to glutamine, until some FDA got a hair up their keister that glutamines were cancer causing, then we had to help our grandfather to empty out his entire food warehouse and bury it in the nearby landfill, back before there was inventory loss for FDA declaration, and ours was 1 of 100,000s similar food product destructions which continue today with 1000s TONS of food destroyed. All the shrimp fed on Chinese melamine for example, but now FDA says well, a "little bit" is OK for humans, like a little bit of mercury, or dioxins, or perchlorates. The really sad part is that now codes are requiring storm water remediation at the cost of billions because it contains pet poop bacteria, but those same billions aren't being spent to keep the poop out of our food!


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