Yeah, that's what Piotr told me (I'm the author). Boats are already very much a luxury good and the first question is not of reaching a large market but proving that the product is superior. Once that's established you can differentiate up and downmarket. In the article I note a cheaper (still $175K) version is already in the works, and of course costs only go down with scale.
I'm not one to get excited about toys for millionaires either but this one is potentially the beginning of a major change to a pretty gross industry.
> I'm not one to get excited about toys for millionaires either but this one is potentially the beginning of a major change to a pretty gross industry.
I agree on all counts. I should have known the price tag was going to be up there when in the first couple paragraphs it mentions the boat is all carbon fiber.
While boats are luxury goods, there are some great options in the $75k range which are similar at least on the surface to this one. That's what got me about this thing, it's not just double the cost of a comparable, it's more more than 3 times the cost.
I have no use for a boat. But my parents have one from the early 90s and would love to get an electric replacement. I think $100k is probably the upper limit though...
And I've often thought about how easy (compared to cars) it would be to make a good one. I thought it would make for a good between-jobs hobby project.
Cars are extremely complicated; boats are much simpler because the production volumes simply do not support such complexity. That said, an electric boat is subject to a great deal of corrosion and other problems; I personally know of two electric boats which have caught fire and sustained significant damage.
Interesting there aren’t any solar panels. I guess the weight would undo the charging benefit for most customers? I wonder if folks will add them after market or if it’s just not useful for a watercraft like this.
I did a high-level study a while ago. It makes no sense for cars, or boats, to consider solar panels. They just don't produce enough energy to justify their presence there.
It might make sense if you incorporate solar panels into large sails, but the engineering required to make it work (main problem: too much weight; not enough elasticity) is essentially unsolved for now.
10kW of panels, 2x30kW motors (or 2x150kw for more $), 75kWh battery (150kWh for more $).
I forget where I saw it but iirc cruising at 5kts was less than 10kW out the screws. Meaning you can do 5kts for as long as the sun is up, and then for 7.5 hours more off the battery. If you want to do 9kts (on that short a hull) you're looking at like 50kW and therefore it would drain the bigger battery in 3 hours.
A rough rule of thumb for solar panels is they're worth four hours of full output a day, so that panel setup is good for about 40kWh/day. You can either use that to travel 200 miles, or use it to charge up the battery. It very neatly fits the 100 mile/day + 2 - 5 days at anchor travel lifestyle of most "cruising" catamarans (sailboats).
Whats most interesting to me is all the indian/thai/phillipine solar ferry's that are getting built. Those are not eco projects, those are people finding niches where this really is the more economical choice.
Couldn't it make sense if you only use the boat every day or two, and it's docked in the sun when not in use? I can see that it wouldn't make sense for cars since cars are typically parked (1) out of the sun, in covered/enclosed structures, and (2) near power outlets, which provide an alternate source of energy.
Some people might want to use a boat infrequently, and not near charging stations. But perhaps a speed boat isn't the type of boat someone would choose for this due to lack of sleeping quarters, fridge, etc.?
It definitely makes sense for some applications. For example, I believe Uma was running their electric motor purely using solar for charging for a few years: https://www.sailinguma.com/electro-beke Not a huge amount of solar either - 480W of panels on a 36-foot ocean-going sailing yacht, shared with all their other electrical needs. It worked for them because they were primarily sailing, with the motor used briefly for maneuvering in tight areas like harbours, so they had plenty of time on passage and at anchor to recharge the batteries between each use. (Their current setup has regen, so they can charge the batteries by sailing - basically a very indirect form of wind power. Some small sailing boats have actual wind generators but those are loud and take up space.)
For speed boats? Probably not. Those things are small and incredibly power hungry - going fast on the water is expensive in terms of power used.
If that's the use case, then it would probably be cheaper and easier to put solar panels on your boathouse, and still keep it plugged in. Then you wouldn't lose range to the weight of the panels, either.
Yeah but generally if your sails are up you don't need panels that big!! My boat has 3 100w panels and that runs all the equipment plus a fridge and a freezer. I have to turn the engine on during long trips here and there but it isn't a big deal.
I guess it depends on how you use it. Like on cars, solar panels don't do much of anything to improve range because the power the car consumes while driving dwarfs the power you get from solar panels. On the other hand, if you don't drive very far most of the time, then having solar panels means charging your car less often, which could be a great thing. It's like a gas tank that fills itself automatically at a rate of a gallon a week. You'd still need to buy gas if you drive much, but still who wouldn't want that?
I figure that's especially true for boats, which aren't usually daily drivers. If you use your boat, say, twice a month, it could be a nice feature to have the battery partially or completely refilled when you want to use it without having to bother to plug it in.
Rule of thumb for a boat motor is 1hp for each 40-50lbs of weight. Say conservatively that you're 160-200lbs like myself, that's 4hp minimum.
Solar panels are ~15w/ft^2.
4hp = 2983w, which is ~200ft^2, or approximately a 14'x14' panel.
There's some fudging around that can be done around letting it charge for part of the day, but even with those extremely generous numbers you end up with an enormous "sail" of solar cells.
Another way to look at it: I don't remember the article saying anything about how big the batteries are, but let's take a guess they're about 80kwh, similar to a Tesla.
Let's say the boat can easily add solar panels to collect an average of 200 watts for 10 hours a day. That's 2kwh per day, or enough to fully recharge the boat in 40 days. If you go boating once every two weeks, then that's a third of a full charge for free.
Is that worth it? It depends. It seems like a nice feature to have, and it adds some additional weight and complexity to the boat, and increases the manufacturing cost somewhat. The hardest part might be explaining to customers that solar panels don't increase the range and they'll have to plug in to charge if they want to use the boat every day.
> Rule of thumb for a boat motor is 1hp for each 40-50lbs of weight.
For a planing hull, maybe?
Displacement hulls (sailboats, trawlers, etc) don't need (and can't make use of) much hp. It doesn't take much to get to hull speed, and basically no amount of power will make it go significantly faster.
For example my 8000lb sailboat has an 18hp engine (~440lb/hp) and it could easily reach hull speed with a smaller engine in most conditions.
If you're spending that kind of money on a boat, you're almost certainly keeping it in a covered dock or lift. The panels won't get much direct sun except when out tooling around. Better to put the panels on the roof of the boat house.
Personally I avoid any corporation claiming to be the <famous company> of the <different field>, since that implies they are unable to succeed on their own merits.
Speak to the merits of the product or find an alternative attention grabber that people don't instinctively tune out. There are some openers that people flag as preceding a BS spiel.
This is too expensive and short range to sell in any significant numbers. That said, batteries are steadily becoming more energy-dense and less expensive. That means the proportion of cases where an electric boat makes sense will be steadily increasing.
There's a popular sailing channel called Sailing Uma.
When they were first getting started, on low budget, they DIY a used a cheap fork lift motor. They recently got rid of it, but it lasted them many years.
It's tough. It takes a lot of energy to move a boat. And boats go slow. Sailboats go 6mph or so under motor. And they use about half a gallon of diesel an hour (for a boat ~40ft) to do that. That's a ton of fuel!
Electric motors are probably 2x as efficient (probably more like 1.5x? I guess?) But even then you have to fill your boat with expensive batteries to even get 1/20th of the range of your normal boat with 50gallons of diesel.
And not just that, now you have to have a way to put all that energy back into the batteries each day. This is hard to do from solar or wind alone if you need any sort of real-world range (20-30nm/day for instance). It may be Ok for a day sailor that just uses an engine to get in and out of the harbor but if you use your boat to do real travel you can't always rely on wind for sailing or a dock to plug into at night.
For instance, in a typical Pacific Northwest summer even a sailboat ends up motoring a lot in the Inside Passage with few places to recharge from plug-in electricity.
Some hybrid systems that use a diesel generator and lithium batteries almost get there but it's tough to make it all fit in a sailboat in the 35ft range, which is a popular size.
Diesel is a pretty compact energy storage system for boats and it's hard to beat. We recently had to repower our sailboat and we just couldn't make it work without severely limiting our range.
In short, doubling the weight on a ship does not double the energy needs required for moving it. The same can't be said for wheeled transportation, let alone air. Batteries are very heavy, but on boats this doesn't have to be a big negative.
However, we're not talking large amounts of freight here, this is more or less a personal watercraft. Also, for personal watercraft most of the energy is spent on accelerating and decelerating, something that boats are not as efficient at.
> In short, doubling the weight on a ship does not double the energy needs required for moving it. The same can't be said for wheeled transportation...
I wonder how the physics of freight on a ship vs a train works.
Yes, the static coefficient of friction of train wheels would make it harder to run a longer train, but I see some awfully long freight trains with only one or two diesels at the front!
Yeah, I'm surprised by these numbers. I think trains might end up being more efficient in an "ideal" sense. The rails really help remove friction from the equation. TIL.
I suppose you'd have to factor in other issues in the "real" world, like managing inclines, curves, and starts/stops for traffic. Boats generally have fewer constraints on those fronts. Also, boats can increase their size in more than one dimension, which lets them increase size more geometrically and efficiently (trains can only get longer, and hits practical length limitations faster).
Train wheels are pretty interesting. To keep good performance, wheelsets (axle and 2 wheels) are regularly removed and the wheels are machined on a lathe. This can also be done while the wheels are on the train. Then every couple of years the wheels are popped off the axle and new wheels are pressed on. The axles last like 70 years.
With such care, the rolling resistance is very low, but it takes a bit more power to start moving. Despite that, one strong person can push one rail car, usually starting with use of a pry bar.
A locomotive cannot actually move many rail cars from rest. That’s why there is slack between each car, and to start, the locomotive is first reversed to push the rail cars together, then moves forward, pulling a single car until the slack is taken up, which pulls the next one, and so on. That’s also why you see one locomotive pulling so many cars. If a train stops on an incline for some reason, it generally needs to reverse all the way down the incline and start again.
The static coefficient comes into play during braking and if the locomotive wheels slip under power. For that, sand is applied to increase friction.
I didn't know some of this, thanks! I used to live near an active train yard, and one of the warnings people gave me when I moved there was the sound caused by the trains "stacking" (which is the noise caused by each of the car couplings pulling out of their slack).
I thought it was a drawback at first, but now that I've moved away I kind of miss it.
Why would vehicle weight have any bearing on a vehicles efficiency traveling at a constant speed on level terrain?
If we’re going to compare boats to vehicles I would think that it’s at least fair to say that the vehicles terrain must be equally flat as that of the boat.
If I’m the engine pushing a large truck at 55 miles an hour across the highway, I have no sense of the vehicles weight.
OK, I was a bit cynical but this actually does seem like a well-designed boat for what it is (a superyacht tender.) Stable, accelerates fast, appears well made, 10/10 toy for the rich. I imagine it'll be popular in that market if they manage to make them in large enough numbers and don't have any serious problems they'll do very well.
That said, it is still a quarter million dollar toy for the rich... so the environmental impact of one dinghy (electric or not), amongst all the megayachts and private jets, is really nothing.
In case anyone's curious about specs, they're 20'/6m long, draft 18"/0.45m, 1850 lb/840 kg, seat 5-10.
Candela has an electric boat with foils, using the advantage of electric motors to provide high instantaneous torque to pull the boat out of the water. Once on the foils, the power required is a fraction of a displacement hull at equal speed.
Was going to post the same. If I were going to get an electric boat, right now it'd be a Candela. They also make microadjustments to the foils while cruising, which is a cool innovation.
Their styling, engineering, and quality of build are all exceptional. This Zin boat looks like a shoddy toy. Another commenters mentioned it would make a great tender for a yacht, its size to seating capacity is too small for most yachts. This company looks like another SV VC pump and dump that is to be hyped up so the naive an uninitiated waste time and money on an inferior product...sigh....
As an aside Frauscher's 1414 Demon is one of the sexiest power boats you will ever see. I highly recommend the youtube review!
What new boat can you get for $60k that is not an entry level model? A 23’ Chris Craft starts over $100k these days. That is something that I would put as roughly on par with what they are marketing this electric boat to in terms of buyer profile.
$250k is still pricey, possibly double what a similar gas boat can be had for, but you’re not going to find something in that class under $100k from most makers today.
There’s more than one comment here about competition and I’m curious how they compare because the article seems to write them off:
> Like electric cars, they enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 20th century. And likewise they were never considered viable for “real” boating until quite recently.
…
> And in fact there are a few competitors, but they tend to be even more niche or piecemeal jobs, mating an electric engine to an existing hull and saying it’s an electric boat that goes 50 knots. And it does — for five or 10 minutes. Or there are custom boat builders who will create something quite nice for a Zin-type customer — head on over to Monte Carlo and buy one at auction for a couple million bucks.
> Zin sees his boat as the first one to check every box and a few that weren’t there before.
Doesn't look very seaworthy to me. A bit of chop and i bet that thing will struggle and be a very rough ride. Might work ok on a lake or something though.
That photo showing the LCD screens in the center console that are not angled to face the seat position... I really doubt those will be viewable at all in direct sunlight. In the photo they're already barely legible. This is what happens when you directly implement a concept rendering into real life without taking into account other environmental factors, and real-world human UI requirements.
How is that in any way a good design? It's like they wanted to slavishly copy a Tesla, but without actually making it usable for the person piloting the boat.
A speedboat is pretty simple to operate. A steering wheel and throttle lever really are enough. Since the screen is mostly for entertainment, the driver shouldn't be especially accommodated. The design might be improved by better shading from the sun, but it shouldn't be made less egalitarian.
yes, and no, I don't see any gauges for battery percentage remaining, throttle level, anything like that. The equivalent to an instrument cluster on a power boat.
I've built a few ~10-20 hp equivalent electric boat motors and some smaller brushless pod motors like the ones that efoils use -- It's really satisfying engineering work and you have to master so many disciplines along the way: machining/fabrication, CAD, electronics, software, etc... And as with any project of that complexity, you could spend a lifetime just getting interested in a single part of the project.
looks like our chinese friends already have the motors, ESC's and so on ready to buy, and there is open source software - so the project thankfully becomes more an assembly exercise, similar to building drones
This is a really good idea! Most recreational boaters do far less than 100 miles per day. I wonder how quickly the price will drop if they make it out of less exotic materials.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadQuarter million is a bit of a reach for a toy. Call me back when they make one for... $50k?
Gotta start somewhere.
I'm not one to get excited about toys for millionaires either but this one is potentially the beginning of a major change to a pretty gross industry.
I agree on all counts. I should have known the price tag was going to be up there when in the first couple paragraphs it mentions the boat is all carbon fiber.
While boats are luxury goods, there are some great options in the $75k range which are similar at least on the surface to this one. That's what got me about this thing, it's not just double the cost of a comparable, it's more more than 3 times the cost.
And I've often thought about how easy (compared to cars) it would be to make a good one. I thought it would make for a good between-jobs hobby project.
It might make sense if you incorporate solar panels into large sails, but the engineering required to make it work (main problem: too much weight; not enough elasticity) is essentially unsolved for now.
10kW of panels, 2x30kW motors (or 2x150kw for more $), 75kWh battery (150kWh for more $).
I forget where I saw it but iirc cruising at 5kts was less than 10kW out the screws. Meaning you can do 5kts for as long as the sun is up, and then for 7.5 hours more off the battery. If you want to do 9kts (on that short a hull) you're looking at like 50kW and therefore it would drain the bigger battery in 3 hours.
A rough rule of thumb for solar panels is they're worth four hours of full output a day, so that panel setup is good for about 40kWh/day. You can either use that to travel 200 miles, or use it to charge up the battery. It very neatly fits the 100 mile/day + 2 - 5 days at anchor travel lifestyle of most "cruising" catamarans (sailboats).
This guys youtube channel is cataloguing all the electric and solar boats he can find: https://www.youtube.com/c/JimWaltz/videos
Whats most interesting to me is all the indian/thai/phillipine solar ferry's that are getting built. Those are not eco projects, those are people finding niches where this really is the more economical choice.
https://www.saildrone.com/
Some people might want to use a boat infrequently, and not near charging stations. But perhaps a speed boat isn't the type of boat someone would choose for this due to lack of sleeping quarters, fridge, etc.?
For speed boats? Probably not. Those things are small and incredibly power hungry - going fast on the water is expensive in terms of power used.
I figure that's especially true for boats, which aren't usually daily drivers. If you use your boat, say, twice a month, it could be a nice feature to have the battery partially or completely refilled when you want to use it without having to bother to plug it in.
Rule of thumb for a boat motor is 1hp for each 40-50lbs of weight. Say conservatively that you're 160-200lbs like myself, that's 4hp minimum.
Solar panels are ~15w/ft^2.
4hp = 2983w, which is ~200ft^2, or approximately a 14'x14' panel.
There's some fudging around that can be done around letting it charge for part of the day, but even with those extremely generous numbers you end up with an enormous "sail" of solar cells.
Let's say the boat can easily add solar panels to collect an average of 200 watts for 10 hours a day. That's 2kwh per day, or enough to fully recharge the boat in 40 days. If you go boating once every two weeks, then that's a third of a full charge for free.
Is that worth it? It depends. It seems like a nice feature to have, and it adds some additional weight and complexity to the boat, and increases the manufacturing cost somewhat. The hardest part might be explaining to customers that solar panels don't increase the range and they'll have to plug in to charge if they want to use the boat every day.
For a planing hull, maybe?
Displacement hulls (sailboats, trawlers, etc) don't need (and can't make use of) much hp. It doesn't take much to get to hull speed, and basically no amount of power will make it go significantly faster.
For example my 8000lb sailboat has an 18hp engine (~440lb/hp) and it could easily reach hull speed with a smaller engine in most conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoD-j9Dy6xQ
Electric motors are probably 2x as efficient (probably more like 1.5x? I guess?) But even then you have to fill your boat with expensive batteries to even get 1/20th of the range of your normal boat with 50gallons of diesel.
For instance, in a typical Pacific Northwest summer even a sailboat ends up motoring a lot in the Inside Passage with few places to recharge from plug-in electricity.
Some hybrid systems that use a diesel generator and lithium batteries almost get there but it's tough to make it all fit in a sailboat in the 35ft range, which is a popular size.
Diesel is a pretty compact energy storage system for boats and it's hard to beat. We recently had to repower our sailboat and we just couldn't make it work without severely limiting our range.
In short, doubling the weight on a ship does not double the energy needs required for moving it. The same can't be said for wheeled transportation, let alone air. Batteries are very heavy, but on boats this doesn't have to be a big negative.
However, we're not talking large amounts of freight here, this is more or less a personal watercraft. Also, for personal watercraft most of the energy is spent on accelerating and decelerating, something that boats are not as efficient at.
So, good idea in theory, bad idea in application.
I wonder how the physics of freight on a ship vs a train works.
Yes, the static coefficient of friction of train wheels would make it harder to run a longer train, but I see some awfully long freight trains with only one or two diesels at the front!
I suppose you'd have to factor in other issues in the "real" world, like managing inclines, curves, and starts/stops for traffic. Boats generally have fewer constraints on those fronts. Also, boats can increase their size in more than one dimension, which lets them increase size more geometrically and efficiently (trains can only get longer, and hits practical length limitations faster).
With such care, the rolling resistance is very low, but it takes a bit more power to start moving. Despite that, one strong person can push one rail car, usually starting with use of a pry bar.
A locomotive cannot actually move many rail cars from rest. That’s why there is slack between each car, and to start, the locomotive is first reversed to push the rail cars together, then moves forward, pulling a single car until the slack is taken up, which pulls the next one, and so on. That’s also why you see one locomotive pulling so many cars. If a train stops on an incline for some reason, it generally needs to reverse all the way down the incline and start again.
The static coefficient comes into play during braking and if the locomotive wheels slip under power. For that, sand is applied to increase friction.
I thought it was a drawback at first, but now that I've moved away I kind of miss it.
If we’re going to compare boats to vehicles I would think that it’s at least fair to say that the vehicles terrain must be equally flat as that of the boat.
If I’m the engine pushing a large truck at 55 miles an hour across the highway, I have no sense of the vehicles weight.
That said, it is still a quarter million dollar toy for the rich... so the environmental impact of one dinghy (electric or not), amongst all the megayachts and private jets, is really nothing.
In case anyone's curious about specs, they're 20'/6m long, draft 18"/0.45m, 1850 lb/840 kg, seat 5-10.
Candela has an electric boat with foils, using the advantage of electric motors to provide high instantaneous torque to pull the boat out of the water. Once on the foils, the power required is a fraction of a displacement hull at equal speed.
The surfboard sized version is very cool.
https://youtu.be/ieigm2t9apk
[0] - like https://www.silent-yachts.com/
https://www.frauscheramerica.com/electric-yachts
Their styling, engineering, and quality of build are all exceptional. This Zin boat looks like a shoddy toy. Another commenters mentioned it would make a great tender for a yacht, its size to seating capacity is too small for most yachts. This company looks like another SV VC pump and dump that is to be hyped up so the naive an uninitiated waste time and money on an inferior product...sigh....
As an aside Frauscher's 1414 Demon is one of the sexiest power boats you will ever see. I highly recommend the youtube review!
https://www.frauscheramerica.com/1414-demon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW_siGAYTa0
$250k is still pricey, possibly double what a similar gas boat can be had for, but you’re not going to find something in that class under $100k from most makers today.
> Like electric cars, they enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 20th century. And likewise they were never considered viable for “real” boating until quite recently.
…
> And in fact there are a few competitors, but they tend to be even more niche or piecemeal jobs, mating an electric engine to an existing hull and saying it’s an electric boat that goes 50 knots. And it does — for five or 10 minutes. Or there are custom boat builders who will create something quite nice for a Zin-type customer — head on over to Monte Carlo and buy one at auction for a couple million bucks.
> Zin sees his boat as the first one to check every box and a few that weren’t there before.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ZinBoats_I...
How is that in any way a good design? It's like they wanted to slavishly copy a Tesla, but without actually making it usable for the person piloting the boat.
https://efoil.builders/
They have been making electric propulsion for boats for ~15 years - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanvolt