Lost cars aboard sunken Felicity Ace will be replaced, say brand CEOs

The U.S. customers whose high-end vehicles are now on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean in the burned hulk of Felicity Ace will all get their orders filled — including 15 out-of-production Lamborghini Aventador Ultimae editions, the CEOs of Volkswagen Group's premium brands told Automotive News.

In an online roundtable with journalists from the U.K. and U.S. a day before Audi's annual press conference Thursday, Automobili Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann said executives at the supercar brand had to scramble to be able to replace the $500,000 handcrafted Aventador Ultimae editions on board.

"This was the edition which was closing the production of the Aventador, and there were 15 on board of the ship," Winkelmann said. Brand officials had previously disclosed that there were 85 Lamborghinis aboard, primarily Urus SUVs, but hadn't said how many were end-of-run Aventador Ultimaes.

"We put our heads together, and luckily, we are able to replace those cars, so there will be no loss for our customers in the U.S. due to the sunken ship. This is good news," Winkelmann said. "And all the rest we are able to replace. The Aventador was tricky, but we made it."

The Felicity Ace caught fire at sea on Feb. 16 in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal en route to the U.S. with nearly 4,000 vehicles aboard, primarily from Volkswagen Group brands. The vessel sank March 1 in rough seas as it was being towed back to port. An Audi spokesman said that the cause of the blaze remains under investigation.

Bentley Motors CEO Adrian Hallmark said his luxury brand has already "found a solution" to replace more than half of the 189 pre-sold Bentleys that were aboard the ship and should be able to replace the remainder within six months.

"We've already found a solution for 100 that we can rapidly redirect, and we will catch the others up within six months," he said. "We've promised those customers, and we're doing some clever things with dealers to keep [those customers] mobile, which I won't talk about."

Audi CEO Markus Duesmann said the German premium brand's approximately 1,800 cars aboard the Felicity Ace will also be replaced. "We are able to replace them," he said. "It will take some time, but we will do our best."

The heads of Volkswagen Group's premium brands spoke at length about the impacts of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as well as the ongoing microchip shortage, and how it has affected their operations.

Duesmann said the group had lost a substantial amount of wire harness production in Ukraine that was needed to keep assembly plants running — but amazingly, not all of it.

"Many of our suppliers, especially for wiring harnesses, were in Ukraine, or are in Ukraine. They are desperately — even with the people staying there, which is incredible — trying to produce, and doing so always close to a bomb shelter," Duesmann said stoically. "They try to produce, which is an enormous achievement [for] a really proud and brave people there."

He said the group has tried to adjust by boosting production of wire harnesses in Romania, Hungary, Tunisia and Morocco, as well as in Mexico and China "to compensate for the volume losses we do have in Ukraine. We think within the next few weeks, we will be up to full volume, and then the situation might ease, I think, in the second half of this year, depending on how the war develops."

The roundtable Wednesday took place without any theatrics or fanfare out of respect for the serious situation in Ukraine, which Duesmann said should make every company in Europe and elsewhere consider the source of the energy supplying their factories and powering their products.

"The war in Ukraine leaves little room to think about anything else at the moment. We really hope for a stop of hostilities and a return to diplomacy. We need to come to a sustainable solution, based on international law," he said. "This war forces us to look into, where does the energy come from? And certainly this will force us and accelerate the processes to discuss also where we get our energy from, because we need to save production, and certainly we will review that as well."