Empty or full??? UPDATE: It WAS full....of luxury cars.

     This car transporter is listing at 45 degrees after running aground near Southhampton, England.
     We don't know if it is full of new cars, or empty and on the way to Germany to be loaded.
     The 590 foot long Hoegh Osaka was built in 2000, and sails under a Singapore flag. 

[UPDATE: Still no word about cargo this morning, but the ship is said to be capable of transporting thousands of vehicles. It was hoped that high tide might right the huge vessel, but that did not happen. The owners have appointed a salvage company.]

[UPDATE: CBS reports it was full...some 1,400 luxury cars....Bentleys worth about $237,000 each, reports The Daily Mirror, which also has a drone video of the ship.][UPDATE 3: The BBC reports they are not Bentleys, but:

There were 1,400 cars on board, including 1,200 Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles and 65 Minis, as well as 105 JCB machines and 500 tonnes of fuel.] NOTE: According to the CITY AM website: a similer 2006 incident involved the MV Cougar Ace, carrying 4,700 Mazda cars, partially capsized in the North Pacific.

On the surface, most were perfectly fine: only 68 had been jogged free of their bindings, or damaged by those that had. And although some had been damaged by water, most looked as brand new as the day they were loaded on to the ship. They even had that new-car smell.

But by the time the vessel was righted, the cars had languished for more than three weeks at an angle of 60 degrees, which could, it was decided, make the company liable in the event of any accidents in the future. In particular, the electrolyte in the batteries concerned the company. 

 

“On their sides, it’s not bad. But the saltshaker motion [of the ship at sea] added a lot of damage,” Robert Davis, Mazda North America's then-senior vice-president of product development and quality (now its senior vice president of US operations), told US-based magazine Car and Driver.

 

So instead of being sold, the Cougar Ace Mazdas - including 2,804 Mazda 3s, which now retail for £16,995 and 295 MX-5s, which start at £18,995 - were painstakingly dismantled, fetching an estimated $250 (£164) apiece at scrap. ]