Heroic Leader Car Carrier

Yes its dark! -
AN ocean voyage of thousands of miles may separate the factory where an import car is assembled from the garage of its new owner, but the weeks spent at sea are hardly an endless buffet punctuated by evenings of Las Vegas-caliber entertainment.

The trip is no Disney cruise either: the vehicle makes its crossing lashed snugly to the steel floor of a cargo deck, just inches from its neighbor, inside a vessel that looks both impossibly clunky and imposingly grand. When loaded, these decks look like a traffic nightmare on the Long Island Expressway; cleared in the hours after docking, they are as spotless and cavernous as a newly opened warehouse.

Car carrier ships are nautical workhorses of the industrialized world. Hauling up to 8,500 vehicles in a layer cake of 13 decks packed as tight as the Tokyo subway at rush hour, these ships do one basic task very well — delivering vehicles, from tiny compacts to enormous excavators, unscathed to destinations like the port here.