Navier’s 30-foot electric hydrofoil hits the water and prepares for production

Electric pleasure craft startup Navier has managed to bring its hydrofoil concept to life and is open for pre-orders if you have a few hundred thousand lying around. It may not be affordable, but it’s also not like the other 30 foot boats you can order are a bargain. At least it doesn’t burn 10 liters of gas per hour.

Navier just started a launch lap earlier this year, when the 27-foot vessel was a nod to founders, Sampriti Bhattacharyya (whom I met at Accelerator at Sea) and Reo Baird. Now it is a real boat of 9 meters long, sailing over the waves at 25 knots.

The boat is fully electric and uses an airboat to get around the fact that the batteries, while fine for wheelers, drain quickly if you’re pushing water out of the way all the time. The hydrofoil essentially uses the physics of how water resists forward motion to ensure that most of the boat rises above the surface, while the propulsion part remains low, held down by thin fins.

The basic approach isn’t unique: Candela also makes some electric hydrofoils and is trying to reach some of the same markets. But Navier offers a longer range, about 75 nautical miles compared to Candela’s 50, and a more leisure-oriented experience. That means a more comfortable cabin that focuses more on the user experience and a sport mode that allows the operator to steer the boat more directly.

The leaves are also fully retractable, allowing the N30 to navigate shallow water without damaging the bottom. Clogging also minimizes “biofouling”, ie algae and barnacles.

However, Bhattacharyya was quick to add that he sees Candela as a colleague rather than a competitor: the real competition is petrol boats. “I believe we all need to do more and faster to rid our lakes and oceans of polluting fossil fuels and rebuild the marine industry. We need to replace our gas competitors – there are plenty of them, and the more people in the industry that can switch to electricity quickly, the better we can accelerate the planet’s economy,” he wrote in an email.

Of course, at $300,000 each, they won’t replace the boats with 5 horsepower outboards. This caters to both the upmarket crowd and institutional clients such as water taxi services. Fuel is expensive, eroding already thin margins in transportation operations. A ten-passenger non-fuel boat can be perfect for transporting passengers across a bay or lake, or for three-hour trips. The amount of marine fuel used in this type of travel is huge and gasoline powered boats are not particularly clean.

Bhattacharyya described the recently unveiled N30 as “software-driven”, which at first seems like an odd claim for a ship. But while most boats simply float, hydrofoiling is a process that must be actively controlled to maintain stability.

“It’s a combination of boat and plane; There are a lot of very complex parts, but it’s what it takes to build something that works more efficiently,” he explained, comparing the boat to a fighter jet, which compensates for the natural instability with constant software-defined adjustments. “The control system software stabilizes it and, using sensor information, lets it fly and power the actuators. The user operates in a higher level (or outer loop) and steers it like a normal ship.

It might sound a little scary, but pretty much every car now does it with traction control and all-wheel drive: hit the accelerator and the car calculates how much power to send to which wheels and adjusts if necessary. You hit water or ice. Some cars give you a little more control if you want it, and that’s the N30’s sport mode.

The plan is to integrate more advanced software features, culminating (as all vehicles seem to do these days) in an autonomous driving mode. At the moment, the ship has an auto-docking feature, which probably sounds good to anyone who doesn’t like this potentially tricky maneuver.

“The N30 can autonomously steer the vessel safely to a dock selected by the user without the intervention of the captain. The automatic mooring system uses advanced image processing and additional sensors to estimate the vessel’s position relative to the selected berth, while compensating for external disturbances such as wind and avoiding obstacles,” said Bhattacharyya.

There are three variants: convertible, hardtop and cab, which start at $375,000 and go up from there. It’s a lot of money to be sure, but cabin cruisers of this size don’t come cheap to begin with, and this is a cutting-edge electric craft that essentially flies. Sure, it will be toys for the very rich for the foreseeable future, but once production methods and technologies become somewhat established, you’ll see these kinds of crafts seep into institutional uses (such as water taxis). and maybe even rent. Anyway, it’s nice to see some innovation in the water and I look forward to the days when the lakes are calmer and cleaner as a result.