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Comment by 56J8XhH7voFRwPR | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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

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.

I would expect that building out electric fueling points throughout Asia will be a big infrastructure investment over the next few years.

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

Fully autonomous cargo shipping is coming with the next update.

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.

If it's rare enough it may well be cost efficient to just fly people into the ship if and when that happens.

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