Among the companies that are trying to bring the electric motor in the world of boats, there is the Seattle start-up Zin Boats, which aims at producing electric boats and at ranking on the market to propose “the Tesla of the sea”, so demonstrating that electric boats can be a valid alternative to those powered by fuel. For this reason, the product conceived by the company is called Z2R, a 20-foot speedboat powered by BMW batteries, with 160-kilometre autonomy.
Z2R weighs around half of a standard boat of the same size. Weight is a fundamental matter: to move a boat, more power is necessary than the one needed for a car, a limit that hindered the previous electric experiments, carried out on boats in the Sixties.
The current lower cost of lithium-ion batteries is giving the opportunity of experimenting in this issue. Those used by Z2R, with a cost of about 250,000 dollars, are BMW-branded, able to power a Torqeedo motor that reaches speeds of 30 nodes. The autonomy is 160 kilometres, not exceeding 15 nodes.
