Our lakes and rivers might become a whole lot quieter — thanks to a handful of companies cranking out electric boats.
If you own a house, cottage, or cabin beside a popular lake, the drone of an outboard motor is probably as familiar as the proverbial haunting cry of the loon. But that droning sound might become a relic of the past; a number of new and established boat manufacturers are doing their best to make the nation’s waterways a lot quieter and cleaner.
These companies are striving to build quiet-running electric boats that don’t spew smelly exhaust and leave the surfaces of lakes and oceans rainbowed with a shiny residue of oil and gas. Most of these new vessels are made of wood, fiberglass, or aluminum. Some of them — launches, pontoon boats, fishing boats — have modest electric out- or inboard motors meant for recreational cruising on placid waters. Others are the sorts of craft that compete in The Wye Island Challenge, a twenty-four-mile open-water race run annually since 2001 by the Electric Boat Association of America. The highest-end versions of these racing boats are, compared to their more consumer-friendly cousins, blazingly fast, high-tech machines affordable only to those with extremely deep pockets. What unites the two boat types is the desire of their builders to create watercraft that are easier on both the ears and the environment.
But building the perfect electric boat isn’t simply a matter of affixing a battery bank to a hull, especially when that boat is a speedboat. Batteries are heavy, and a boat can’t sit too close to the waterline if it's meant to go fast. Striking the right weight balance is the design challenge successfully tackled by boatbuilders like Voltari Marine Electric Inc., which has bases in the Canadian province of Ontario and in Florida. The company’s flagship vessel, the Voltari 260, has a sleek carbon-fiber hull driven by a 142K watt-hour lithium-ion battery that cranks out 740 horsepower. Like an electric car, its engine has serious torque and can accelerate to full speed in a head-snapping few seconds.
But Voltari is far from the only player in the electric boat market. California-based Duffy has been building electric cruisers since 1970. The Swedish firm Candela produces a range of electric hydrofoils that zoom across — or rather above — the water; its boats are the bestselling electric boats in Europe. Another Canadian company, Vision Marine Technologies, manufactures a range of electric boats for both recreational users and racers. It built what it claims is the world’s first all-electric marine powertrain for day-boaters — in other words, a complete electric outboard system for ordinary consumers. At the opposite end of the product line is Vision Marine’s custom-built V32 Vision catamaran, which, at the 2023 Lake of the Ozarks Shootout, blazed across the water at 116 mph — a world record for electric boats.
These are only a few of the electric boat companies that want to bring the clean energy transition to the world’s lakes, rivers, and oceans. The loons surely won’t mind the quiet.
