Vision Marine Technologies is a Canadian company that specializes in electric boats and it recently unveiled its 180 horsepower electric outboard motor called the E-Motion 180E, branding it the world’s most powerful of its kind currently available. It is designed with many applications in mind, the same ones that would require an equivalent gas engine, but to demonstrate its capability, the company strapped two of them to the back of a 32-foot (9.75-meter) catamaran powerboat hull and went hunting for speed records.
The rig managed to reach 109 mph (175 km/h) during its run at last week’s Lake of Ozarks Shootout. This annual event is the largest unsanctioned boat race in the United States and people come here with ridiculously powerful boats in order to compete one at a time against the clock to see which rig is fastest - it’s a bit like the Goodwood Festival of Speed hillclimb, only it’s held on water.
According to Xavier Montagne, Vision Marine’s CTO and COO,
The results we observed from this weekend’s race are only the tip of the iceberg. This accomplishment is the fruit of many years of close technical collaboration with our European and American partners. We worked hard on optimizing the electric motors, the 700V batteries, the cooling circuitry, and the hardware and software integration, all of which are quintessential to our success as a leader in the electric marine propulsion industry.
You can see the video of the Vision Marine-powered boat as it passes by the camera making quite an unusual noise for a powerboat. And this is one style of vehicle where replacing engines with electric motors won’t really make it quiet...
Based on what we saw on the official website, each outboard motor will be sold with a 70 kWh battery pack, although no price has been announced yet. You can already pre-order one, but it’s unclear when deliveries will actually begin.
