Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
First crewless, zero emissions cargo ship will set sail in Norway (edition.cnn.com)
23 points by lnguyen 1754 days ago
3 comments

Wow, so cool! Basically a giant 80 meter long RC ship with an autopilot! :-)

It also has a way smaller battery capacity than I would have expected to be necessary for a (small) cargo ship, even for the short range of 64 nautical miles (~120km). Ships are pretty efficient, apparently. :-D

In the images is looks like the main deck is 4 x 11 containers, I guess any kind of 'canopy' of solar panels above them would need to be easy to remove when it came time to load or unload, but that's a pretty large amount of area (depending on the weather it was sailing in - though I suppose like being becalmed, if your robot ship needed sunshine to sail, it'd just have to wait until the clouds parted...)
Assuming it's more than a publicity stunt, this is the kind of thing we really need to combat climate change. Cargo ships are enormous polluters (and not even just of greenhouse gases)
Hasn't Tesla done this already?
I don’t remember Tesla ever attempting it, care to provide a link?