Zin Boats reinvents the electric boat in a bid to become the Tesla of the sea
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
[0] - like https://www.silent-yachts.com/
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.
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
Quarter 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They have been making electric propulsion for boats for ~15 years - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanvolt
$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.