I guess I want to know "oceanic" means in this instance. Is that just going out into the ocean a short distance? They mention the "Yangtze River Three Gorges 1" river cruise ship as an example. This thing has a range of like 100km. It seems we are far away from making true oceanic crossings of any long distance and I doubt that is coming by 2028.

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Animats 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

East Asia has extensive coastal medium-distance trade. There are so many islands and island nations. That's oceanic trade, but not transatlantic or trans-pacific long hauls.

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antonkochubey 5 days ago | parent [-]

Those small islands also don’t have any infrastructure to recharge such ships. The small ones often struggle even to serve their own needs.

	▲	Animats 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Islands. As in Japan, Taiwan, Okinawa, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Guinea, and for practical purposes, Australia. All of which rely on medium-haul sea traffic.
	▲	matthewdgreen 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I would expect that building out electric fueling points throughout Asia will be a big infrastructure investment over the next few years.

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ta9000 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If it were Elon Musk saying it, I’d agree, but this is CATL. They actually do the work.

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lostlogin 5 days ago | parent [-]

Fully autonomous cargo shipping is coming with the next update.

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manacit 3 days ago | parent [-]

Cargo ships have very few crew as-is, I'd imagine there isn't a huge need to lower that from where it is now.

If something breaks in the middle of the ocean, it's probably better to have a few people on board who can fix it.

	▲	sudosysgen 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		If it's rare enough it may well be cost efficient to just fly people into the ship if and when that happens.