Every form of transportation may one day be an EV. Cars, trucks, planes, etc. Boats would also make a lot of sense as an EV, and, as Bloomberg reports, a startup called Arc Boat agrees.
Arc Boat Co. is an L.A.-based startup made up of former SpaceX engineers. Its goal: to bring to market a $300,000 EV speedboat with 450 horsepower. The startup just completed another round of fundraising, getting $4.2 million from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz.
Founders Mitch Lee and Ryan Cook are both mechanical engineers who not only went to college together but also worked together at Boeing before Cook went to SpaceX:
Chief Executive Officer Mitch Lee founded the Arc Boat Co. with his college friend Ryan Cook, who shares a passion for sustainability and nature. Cook and Lee both majored in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University and have been working together since Lee helped recruit Cook to Boeing Co. After Boeing, Cook spent seven years at Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. where, according to his LinkedIn profile, Cook worked on the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. All of Arc’s employees except Lee have a background at SpaceX.
While the overall electric boat market is small, they think there’s a market for an upmarket EV boat, especially with the market’s forecasted growth. Arc thinks its key advantage is batteries, with a boat, called the Arc One, that has 200 kWh batteries that are made in-house. Arc also claims that the boat will be “the highest performance boat in its class by far.”
The construction of the boat uses a combination of marine and aircraft manufacturing techniques for its aluminum body. While some may balk at the price, the company is taking a page from Tesla’s playbook (that they haven’t really been following):
Lee has partly modeled Arc’s approach on the Tesla Inc. blueprint: enter the market with upscale models, produce them at sufficient volumes to cover research and development costs and then gradually move down market.
The Arc One is set to go on sale at the end of the year; you can join the waitlist if you’re interested.