Largest electric autonomous container ship begins commercial service

ktpsns

Title is misleading. The vessel has "autonomous navigation", I guess this is some autopilot function which is probably widespread these days. I thought of "autonomous" as in "no crew onboard". That would be good for piracy (there is nobody to kidnap and no hostage which could die). For everything else I think the few humans and their facilities onboard don't make a big difference in payload or so. Having a human onboard is still an asset in many situations.

puelocesar

That’s a nice development. But the article fails to mention which kind of battery the vessel will use, which I thought was the main reason we didn’t have these kinds of ships yet.

Teever

It's very important for people to understand that China has something like 260x the ship building capacity of the US and about 60% of the global total[0] while Japan and South Korea make bulk of the rest with the rest of the world working out to be a rounding error.[1] Domestic ship production capacity in America has gotten so bad that the US Navy is looking at outsourcing naval ship production to SK and Japan.[2] With the United States having just expended a significant portion of their missile stockpiles[3] in the recent conflict against Iran and China apparently resupplying Iran with air defenses[4] it isn't certain how America will be able to ensure the safety of this outsourced naval ship production. New developments like this electric ship show that China is just so far ahead of the game from anyone else in ship building and that it won't be possible for them to catch up. [0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-china-became-the-... [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s... [2] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/could-us-navy-build-n... [3] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio... [4] https://thehill.com/policy/international/5827443-china-prepa...

moralestapia

This is really nice, and it’s good to be pushing the boundary of what’s possible with electric-only propulsion. However, whether people like it or not, the most ecological alternative, all things considered, is still heavy fuel oil. Other fuel sources might look cleaner at first, but after you do the whole analysis (how much cargo is moved, how long the engine lasts, how much energy it takes to create the components, how much is involved in their disposal, ...) it might end up being the opposite.