Skip to main content

Electric Boat Startup Arc to make a big splash

Electricity and water don't mix well - well, actually, they mix really well. Though, a thought of electric boat may seem risky but a new California start-up called Arc is going to try to shred that perception, starting with a limited edition 24-foot water sports boat that will cost around $300,000. It is company's first project, which expects to bring to a commercial stage by the end of this year. 

Structure of Electric Boat

Arc already has a prototype. The vessel is made of aluminum, which allowed to reduce the weight of the structure, and the battery is planned to be made a structural element of the electric vehicle. It will be 7 meters long and it is claimed that the boat will be able to move through the water at speeds up to 70 km/h.

The boat will have a 200kWh, 800-volt battery pack - roughly double the capacity and voltage of Tesla's current top-tier pack - and an electric motor with at least 475 horsepower. It will have a top speed of around 40 miles per hour and run for a total of around four hours. 

Features of Arc

Like Tesla, Lee says Arc is going for a high degree of vertical integration. One more key portion of Arc's style and design is that it is developing aluminum hulls. Most boat hulls are made of carbon fiber or some other composite material. It is said that aluminum will be less labor intensive and cheaper while still being light enough.

In addition to the hull, the start-up is designing its own enclosures for the battery packs, as well as the cooling system. It's developing the software too, which it plans to tweak and improve via over-the-air updates.

Advantages

Since, electricity can be a lot cheaper than marina fuel prices, and it makes a lot more sense to charge a boat at home than to do it with a car. While Arc's first boat may not achieve full par with a gas powered boat, that is the goal, and Arc CEO Mitch Lee thinks it is achievable.

Also, the boat will throw a wake behind it, meaning it will be fun to use for water sports like waterskiing. This is rare in the nascent electric boat market because it takes a lot of energy to move through water. Some companies use hydrofoil to reduce drag, basically eliminating the wake altogether.

Arc Boat first announced itself and received $ 4.25 million in support of the project from Andreessen Horowitz, a well-known Silicon Valley financial foundation. Most of the top executives at Arc Boat are from SpaceX.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Unhackable Internet

  W hy it matters?   The internet is increasingly vulnerable to hacking; a quantum one would be unhackable. Quantum Computing    A quantum internet could be used to send unhackable messages, improve the accuracy of GPS, and enable cloud-based quantum computing. For more than twenty years, dreams of creating such a the quantum network have remained out of reach in large part because of the difficulty to send quantum signals across large distances without loss.   Now, Harvard and MIT researchers have found a way to correct for signal loss with a prototype quantum node that can catch, store and entangle bits of quantum information. The research is the missing link towards a practical quantum internet and a major step forward in the development of long-distance quantum networks.   The U.S Department of Energy (DoE) explains how a quantum link will make it happen through two quantum phenomenon: the first is quantum entanglement, where two-particle ...

Impact of Social Media on Business

Watch out for that bird! Imagine you are skydiving, you are visiting one of the most beautiful countries in the world and you want to share that experience with your loved ones and friends. Why not send a postcard? Oh wait, you’re already back from the trip by the time that postcard has reached, or it got lost in the mail. If only there was an alternative. This isn’t 1990. You have a platter of platforms to share your adventure. Webster’s dictionary defines social media as-“ forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).”In simple words, social media, are various public platforms where people can share their views, stories, etc. with the help of various mediums. Starting with websites such as MySpace, Orkut, and Facebook, etc. it is now estimated that there are about 200 social media websites in ...

Pegasus Spyware: Flying Through The Air

 Hundreds of millions of people can't imagine life without their smartphones. Almost every aspect of their daily lives, from the most mundane to the most intimate, is within easy reach and hearing distance of their smartphones. Only few people realize that their phones may be used as surveillance devices, with someone hundreds of miles away secretly extracting their messages, photographs, and location while also activating their microphone and recording them in real time. Such capabilities are present in Pegasus, a spyware produced by NSO Group, an Israeli maker of mass surveillance weapons. What is Pegasus? Pegasus is a hacking software – or spyware – that is developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group. It has the capability to infect billions of phones using either iOS or Android operating systems. The spyware is named after Pegasus, the white winged horse from Greek mythology. It is named so because it "flies through the...