NCL Wins Lawsuit Against ABB for their "AZIPODS" - Now What?

[v3cruiser]

At least the settlement will recover some of the costs and lost revenue. It appears ABB was pushing design and engineering limits with the azipods in question. best they can do is offer support for free and or discount. makes me wonder how much help ABB provided to the cruiselines with premature failing units. Punishing one of the only companies that makes these propulsion systems doesnt make a whole lot of sense if these lawsuits continue one way or the other. Paying the 159 million court decision Im sure will just get priced in to future product builds. 

[EvanBedar]

1 hour ago, v3cruiser said:

 Punishing one of the only companies that makes these propulsion systems doesnt make a whole lot of sense if these lawsuits continue one way or the other.

You call it punishment.   I call it legitimate corporate regulation.  And yes, they probably will just pass the cost of their own negligence off on to consumers, which is just further proof that you can’t trust billion dollar companies to just do the right thing out of the goodness of their “hearts”.  
 

Perhaps if there was more competition and less monopoly it would be less necessary.  
 

The rules of capitalism dictates that next to a profit margin, 3000 souls on every ship is irrelevant.    But you can bet they’ll hire a CEO that will pay a little better attention to safety and reliability in the future. 
 

And yes, cruisers will pay the price for that too.  But at least they’ll be alive to pay it. 

Edited November 12, 2022 by EvanBedar

[chengkp75]

31 minutes ago, EvanBedar said:

Perhaps if there was more competition and less monopoly it would be less necessary.

If there was more competition, each company's market share would be less, R&D and general overhead would be more, and the overall cost of each unit would go up.  A lot.  This is a very small market.

 

32 minutes ago, EvanBedar said:

The rules of capitalism dictates that next to a profit margin, 3000 souls on every ship is irrelevant.

This is mere hyperbole.  There is nothing that made the ships unsafe for those 3000 souls, except the cruise lines' decisions to continue to operate when a unit was showing signs of deterioration (and there are plenty of warning signs).

 

34 minutes ago, EvanBedar said:

And yes, they probably will just pass the cost of their own negligence off on to consumers, which is just further proof that you can’t trust billion dollar companies to just do the right thing out of the goodness of their “hearts”.  

There was no negligence proven in this court case.  And, I don't care whether it is a billion dollar company or the mom and pop store on the corner, they will always pass cost on to the customer.

[Pbone666]

FYI this was not a thrust or slew bearing issue. The failures in question were of the exciter in the azipod.  the failures occurred years and in some cases decades after the warranty expired.