(It’s a similar technique to building a wooden ship or an airplane wing.) While manually laborious, this method allows the company to iterate on the slightest curves within its own hull design, and then test them on the water quickly.Ĭook tells me he’s been on the water testing designs nearly every day for the past two weeks, and the L.A.-based company has been fitting the boats with GoPros to measure wake, and assessing dozens of sensors on things like the battery. Instead, designers bend a metal skeleton and weld sheet metal on top of that. “But it’s all in the details.”Īluminum hulls aren’t molded, which is a big advantage to developing a new design-a design that Arc may produce in fiberglass when it’s finalized. “Pretty much all the equations you use are from the ’60s and early ’70s, similar to rockets as well,” Cook says with a laugh. And while we know a lot of best practices in hull design, optimizing every curve of a boat for a particular ride is an art and a science.
Hulls like that on the Arc One tend to be shallower for balance and maneuvering (better for lakes), while ocean-faring hulls feature a deep-V to slice into waves. “We’re starting from scratch.”Īs Cook explains, the precise shape of a hull is critical to not just the efficiency with which a boat cuts through the water, but the smoothness of its ride and the shape of its wake (and, yes, water skiers and tubers need some wake for fun). “Gas boats have decades of refinement to their hull shapes,” says Cook. But Cook lists several reasons that his company is starting with aluminum-the biggest of which is that it’s still figuring out the perfect shape for its hull. Fiberglass hulls make sense for much of the boating industry since they form in molds and can be mass produced inexpensively. The Arc One is 24 feet of aluminum, promising 3 to 5 hours of fun on the water per charge, with speeds of up to 40 miles per hour-largely thanks to its giant battery that’s about four times the size of what you’ll find in a base Model 3.įor the Arc One, the company opted for an aluminum hull (just like SpaceX rockets), as opposed to a fiberglass hull, which is more popular in water sports. It’s a high-cost proof of concept that Arc Boats is using to show that electric boats can compete with gas boats in just about every way, and all without the maintenance or exhaust. Priced at $300,000, the Arc One is being built to be something like a Tesla Roadster for water. Those foils also mean it isn’t the most flexible option for casual cruising and water sports. One exception is burgeoning performance products like the Candela C-7, which uses hydrofoils to lift the boat out of the water to reach its impressive speeds. Most of the electric-boat market is for low-speed, 5 mph recreational vehicles. While boating is a $42 billion industry in the U.S., electric boats are a minor player. With $35 million in funding, the 17-month-old startup will start selling its very first electric boat, the Arc One, on June 15, to be delivered this summer.
Now, he’s the cofounder and CTO of the hyped electric boating company Arc Boats. Cook spent nearly a decade as the lead engineer at SpaceX, developing autonomous rockets.
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