(Bloomberg) — “This is one of those pretty obvious ideas,” says cofounder and CEO Mitch Lee of his year-old startup’s work on electrifying pleasure boats. Arc Boat Co.’s first design, a pre-production model named the Arc One, recently hit the water for a day of testing.
Lee travelled with the team building the vessel to Lake Arrowhead, about an hour-and-a-half east of Los Angeles, Arc’s home base. The lake run along with other testing last fall and this winter have informed a handful of specification changes — “in a good way,” according to Arc — from those we reported on in November.
The 200 kWh battery size, for example, has increased by 10%, nearly three times the capacity of a Tesla Model Y.
- $300k The price for the Arc One, roughly 50% more than a comparable gas-powered vessel
- Most marinas are wired to provide electricity to yachts and other marine machines.
- Keeping Arc One’s 220kWh power pack from overheating isn’t hard, since the vehicle is perpetually surrounded by cooling fluid.
- “A lot of people just naturally assume that boats are similar to cars and planes, and that they take a ton of time to bring to market,” says Lee.
But the regulatory hurdles for new vessels are few, relative to the ones highway-bound vehicles have to negotiate.
$30m Arc’s latest investment round, led by Eclipse Ventures, which has also invested in electric aircraft
3 to 5 hours Time the Arc One can run on a single charge—roughly a day of pleasure boating
What’s Next
The limited edition e-boat will start shipping to customers this summer.
It comes at a time when other electric boats are also hitting the market, from Swedish startup X Shore and Nautique Boat Co. The bigger challenge, says Lee, will be to figure out how to produce thousands.
“We deeply understand that that is the most challenging aspect; this industry right now is supply constrained. So how quickly can we produce a lot of these electric boats?”
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