The future of boating is electric

many of us will be spending this holiday weekend out on the water in a lake river or Bay sales of recreational power boats boomed during the pandemic while they leveled off a bit last year an estimated 250 000 new boats were sold in 2022. of course the vast majority of those were gas-powered boats but just like with cars the future of boating may be electric Joy Benedict found one company that's trying to power a sea change good it's the season of sunshine and sea but sometimes the sound that takes you there cuts through the silence and peace that comes with being on the water but now the wave of the future sounds different what's your favorite thing the silence everything's on right now you can hear nothing no noise pollution Francis pickworth has been driving boats professionally for more than a decade but now he's testing them for Tech startup Arc offering the first of its kind in electric watercraft the technology and electric device is just that's the way forward it's the future it's called The Arc one an all-electric 24-foot cruiser with power to hit speeds of more than 40 miles an hour you have instant torque [Music] instant fun that's torque right that is torque this is my favorite way to spend time I like fishing I like water skiing wakeboarding I like just cruising Mitch Lee is the CEO of the Los angeles-based company and sometimes captain of his experimental ship we went from absolutely nothing just two people and an idea to delivering customer boats to people in under two years with the with the background in engineering he teamed up with a friend from college Ryan Cook to Electrify the industry which is why a large portion of his team came from SpaceX this is the very first build station for our boats built by hand The Arc one is constructed less like a boat and more like something headed out of this world The Arc one is a fully aluminum boat which when you squint starts to look pretty close to a rocket in the sense that it needs to be light it needs to be strong and so so that talent and that experience from the group from SpaceX directly translated over to what we were doing but Lee said he says the power illegian electric vehicles specifically the Tesla as their team of Engineers built the batteries first and then the whole of the vessel was crafted around them these battery packs are huge how much space does it actually take up of the boat so what's very cool about this boat is the battery packs essentially make up the floor of the boat and they run from approximately here on the boat all the way to the back of it the weight of the battery is half of the seven thousand pound boat anchoring the ship while the aluminum help keeps it light for Speed and serves another purpose being an aluminum boat we can also directly benefit from that cooling using the hole itself so it's basically like a big giant aluminum cooler exactly so we limit the speed right now to 41. on the outside the arc one has all the luxuries you'd expect a backup camera temperature and Battery gauges similar to an EV but with no gas tank or giant engine there's more room for seating and hidden champagne coolers [Music] but that performance doesn't come cheap The Arc one retails for three hundred thousand dollars and still sold out in months we know that it is not necessarily at a mass Market affordable price so future boats will have lower costs associated with them but when you as they go out on the water and they and that's right electric boats make a tremendous amount of sense because they solve some of the most acute ownership problems that people have hundreds of dollars a day to take a boat out on a lake with gas with gas that is compared to just tens of dollars to refuel an electric boat not having to fill up would be kind of nice at the end of the day Andrew hard owned several boat rental clubs in Southern California he says his only electric boat right now tops out at just five miles an hour but remains one of his most popular reservations the other thing is the maintenance on these is really easy so an engine and a gas engine is going to have a lot of moving parts we do a lot of Maintenance to those boats these are the easiest boats we have to maintenance at this speed you can go for well over a day on a single charge Lee says the next generation of Arc boats will be lower in cost and Target the power hungry Market of water sports all right ready the force behind the helm is addictive and it's calm a contradiction as the newest technology on the waves may be the one thing that brings us all closer to nature for CBS Saturday morning I'm Joy Benedict off the coast of Southern California I love Choice reaction ah oh you should be on a boat it'll be interesting to see because the design I know for so many people that are boaters is is something that they love and that may be a different thing and so will that develop to me as costs come down the cost though three hundred thousand dollars no this is why it's good to have friends with boats yes regardless because a regular boat is expensive also we were a used boat around that size would be about half the cost right now a little bit more than half the cost but that's a used boat not a new one yeah only because we don't know what the cost of a real boat that size would be because we don't have boats just have a friend that has a friend friends with both

Channel: CBS Mornings

Views: 6,679

Keywords: CBS Saturday Morning, CBS News, video, boats, technology, pandemic, electric

Id: CUDrHiqT4Yw

Length: 6min 36sec (396 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023