40 Miles an Hour in an Electric Speedboat: Test-Driving the Arc One
Electric Vehicles
Speaker 1: Alright. I pitch my, oh God. Sorry guys. You're good. Rookie mistake.
Speaker 2: I visited Long Beach, California to take this 100% electric speedboat for a spin. The Arc one has 500 horsepower room for 12 and two enormous battery packs that dwarf almost every other consumer EV battery on the road. I started off my day by meeting up with Mitch Lee, co-founder of arc to learn the ins and outs of this 24 foot long luxury vessel. The challenges and advantages of designing an electric boat and what's next for this [00:00:30] company that aims to electrify boating.
Speaker 3: One of the things you might notice or not notice is a sound coming from this boat right now. It is currently on,
Speaker 2: Even once we were moving along at lower speeds, it was still quiet enough to have a conversation.
Speaker 3: The motor is inboard, so it's kind of in the center of the boat and it connects to a propeller shaft. That shaft goes through the hole, and then on the backside you have a propeller.
Speaker 2: The Arc one has two battery packs, totaling 220 kilowatt hours of power, which their website [00:01:00] says will last for about three to five hours, depending on how you drive it.
Speaker 3: If you just wanted to go five miles an hour, you could almost go an entire boating season without having to recharge. So when we think about that three to five hours of usage time, it's a blended average of time that you're spending ripping across the lake at 40 miles an hour, or sitting still having lunch and jumping into the water with friends and family.
Speaker 2: For comparison, the 2023 Tesla Model S has a battery capacity of 100 kilowatt hours.
Speaker 3: This is the charge port on the boat. This uses a standard [00:01:30] form of charging that all of the electric cars do today called CCCs one. Most of these docks are already wired for power that this boat can tap into. We also take advantage of the aluminum hole by making the boat itself a cooling system for the motor and the battery packs that are on
Speaker 2: Board. There's even charging pads to wirelessly charge your phone.
Speaker 3: The battery packs are fully watertight. They're also airtight. We are streaming tens of thousands of data points a second off of these boats to monitor the [00:02:00] safety of them in real time. It has a touchscreen display complete with a camera navigation system, music, everything that you would expect of a boat like this. A very spacious seating area. It also has a pop-up ski pylon that allows anyone that wants to wakeboard or enter tube behind the boat to do so, and a swim platform for getting into and out of the water.
Speaker 2: The arc one's top speed is 40 miles an hour, and I had the opportunity to bring it up to that limit. Just going
Speaker 1: To take it nice and easy at first, so we get around [00:02:30] this buoy.
Speaker 3: You're welcome to open it up.
Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. Wow. Alright. It's about 20 miles an hour right there. Now let's see what it really can do here. Wow. Oh boy. Alright. Oh God. Sorry guys. You're good. It hit my wing from the other side. [00:03:00] Rookie mistake.
Speaker 4: There we go.
Speaker 5: Alright, that's 40 right there. The software stops it right there, but this feels nice and fast.
Speaker 2: Mitch tells me that ARC's long-term mission is to electrify the world of boating. The ARC one is an important next step toward that goal.
Speaker 3: So the ARC one is fully sold out retailed for $300,000. That was an all in cost [00:03:30] that included the trailer and delivery and all the service. We are working on our next model of boat that we have not yet announced, but we'll have more to share next year.
Speaker 2: As always, thanks so much for watching. I'm your host, Jesse Orl. See you next time with the.
