Maritime News
Is there an electric future for every mode of transportation? You would be hard pressed to come up with a corner of the vehicle market that’s not pushing the merits of battery power. Companies are working on electric cars and trucks, of course, but also buses, planes, tractors, golf carts, snowmobiles and boats. These projects are at varying stages of development and also varying stages of realism about near-term appeal and utility. Some of these nascent technologies will upend entire categories of transportation; others will be far more niche, at least for now. Electric boats, for example, currently work best for those willing to pay top dollar for a smaller model that doesn’t go very far and doesn’t need a lot of power to get there. That’s a mere sliver of the overall market.
“It’s really important that we don’t lose sight of the fact that there’s a certain level of utility expected with electrification,” David Foulkes, chief executive officer of Brunswick Corp., the largest maker of recreational boats and engines, said in an interview. “If we lose the consumer, we’re not going to sell it. Just being electric isn’t enough.”
Powering Up
Brunswick shares took off during Covid as lockdowns inspired people to buy boats and rediscover the outdoors. The company is sold out of 2022 models. That’s not to say Brunswick isn’t investing in electric boats; it is. The maker of Boston Whaler boats and Mercury Marine engines is aiming to launch five electric propulsion products by 2023 and offer electric models in four different boat categories over the same timeline. But if you’re looking for a hype man on boat electrification, Foulkes isn’t the guy. He has a degree in aerospace engineering and spent nearly two decades at Ford Motor Co., but he also has an appreciation for old-fashioned common sense.
Boats, after all, operate in water. To state the obvious, this isn’t the most ideal environment for electric power. Brunswick and other boatmakers have to worry much more than manufacturers of electric cars about sealants, electrical groundings and how to prevent uncontrolled deluges of wetness from frying the whole system. Battery technology’s compatibility with open bodies of water is decently understood for lower-power applications in the 50 to 60 volts range; much less so at the energy levels of an electric car, Foulkes said. Indeed, it’s not recommended that someone drive a Tesla Inc. car — or any car for that matter — into the ocean. Boats generally need more power to cut through water than cars need to cut through air. That’s particularly true in the ocean-based environments of Florida and the Northeast, which are the among the biggest boat markets in the U.S. But boats also have to float, which means you can’t just slap an automotive battery designed for higher speeds and longer ranges in them and call it good. Certain Tesla battery packs weigh about 1,000 pounds, for example.
The result is that even with the latest and greatest in automotive-derived battery technology, “you can’t really provide the same utility in terms of range and speed as you can with a contemporary combustion setup,” Foulkes said. The primary market for electric boats today is smaller lakes and waterways where the distance requirements are limited and speeds are lower. Most of the interest comes from Europe where certain municipalities that are highly dependent on boat traffic — including Amsterdam and Venice — have moved to ban or limit the use of gas- or diesel-powered models. The market is even more niche in the U.S.; one of the more popular applications is electric dinghies that ferry the well-heeled from the dock to their parked yachts, Foulkes said. He estimates about 90% of electric models being sold today operate below 10 horsepower. Arc, an electric boat startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz and staffed with former SpaceX employees, plans to offer a 475-horsepower model by the end of this year, but the vessel runs less than 25 feet and costs a cool $300,000.
“The common characteristic is they cost a lot of money and don’t have great utility,” Foulkes said, speaking generally about the electric boats currently available. By comparison, 90% of the boats that Brunswick sells cost less than $100,000. Its average customer makes about $140,000 a year. Consumers typically don’t spend as much on fuel for their boats as they do for their cars, which complicates the cost-benefit analysis of going electric, Foulkes said. “I don’t want to paint the picture that it’s not possible,” he said. But the industry needs to be practical about where battery technology can be a good fit while continuing to invest in improving the environmental footprint of combustion engines and exploring other alternatives such as e-fuels and hydrogen, he said.
In the immediate term, Foulkes is more optimistic about the prospect of electrifying on-board generators that power everything from the sound system to the refrigerators on larger boats and recreational vehicles. These generators are used for longer periods than the propulsion systems but operate at lower power, which makes it easier to replace them with battery-operated versions, Foulkes said. Brunswick unveiled its Fathom e-power system designed for this purpose at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show. The company is aiming to replace 15,000 combustion engine generators on boats and RVs with electric-powered versions by 2023. For context, retailers sold almost 320,000 new powerboats in the U.S. in 2020, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Association. So even this seems to be more of an evolution than a revolution.
Source : Bloomberg
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