When Bob Dylan went electric, jamming Maggie’s Farm on his sunburst Fender Stratocaster at Rhode Island’s 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he changed the world and gave a jolt to a field (and a town) known mostly for being staid and traditional. Now Newport is the scene of another electrification, one that may have a similarly seismic effect.
On Thursday at the 47th Newport International Boat Show, Hinckley Co., the almost 90-year-old yacht builder, based in Portsmouth, R.I., introduced the Dasher, a 28.5-foot fully electric vessel, taking its moniker from the company’s first “picnic-style” boat.
“This isn’t just an existing design, where we dropped a couple of electric motors in,” says Scott Bryant, Hinckley’s director of new product development. “The boat has been designed, ground up, for electric propulsion.”
At 6,500 pounds, the Dasher is the lightest boat Hinckley has ever built; the similarly dimensioned Center Console 29 runabout tips the scales at roughly 8,000 lbs. This weight savings was achieved through liberal use of carbon fiber, both in the carbon-epoxy hull, conceived by noted boat designer Michael Peters, and in the carbon-fiber stringers, which lend it structure and rigidity.
Varnished teak, a dense hardwood that’s integral to Hinckley’s luxury aesthetic, has been replaced with Artisanal Teak, the company’s trademarked name for a molded composite structure hand-painted with wood grain to look “literally indistinguishable from real teak,” Bryant says. Pioneering use of lightweight materials is actually baked deep into the Hinckley heritage. It was among the first commercial boat builders to integrate fiberglass in its production in the 1950s.
Meet the Dasher, Hinckley's new all-electric runabout.https://t.co/cdA4f0xw0F pic.twitter.com/58x5X4Ye5t
— Yachting Magazine (@YachtingMag) September 15, 2017
While much about the Dasher is new, electric boats have been around for quite a while. Before the 1930s you were more likely to see an electric-powered boat than one driven by an internal combustion motor. Today, the electric boats you’re most likely to see are designed for casual, calm-water cruising, such as the Duffy 18 Snug Harbor, which has a top speed of 6 miles per hour. High-speed electric boats tend toward the experimental and promotional: The Swedish Candela Speedboat concept features hydrofoils to reduce drag and, thus, energy consumption, while the one-off 38-foot Cigarette AMG Electric Drive was powered by a dozen Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Electric Drive motors.
Whether they’re fast or slow, you’re still more likely to see them in Europe—where, says Bryant, “there are several lakes where you’re not allowed to have a petrol-based platform. You can row your boat, or sail your boat, or you have electric propulsion. In the U.S. it’s a little bit less prominent, but we believe that’s going to be coming sooner than later.”
The Dasher will be propelled by twin 80-horsepower Deep Blue 80i 1800 motors from German company Torqeedo, each powered by a 40-kilowatt-hour BMW i3 lithium ion battery. That combination will produce a range of about 40 miles (35 nautical miles) at a cruising speed of 10 mph, or 8.6 knots, and up to 25 miles (22 NM) at speeds of 18 to 27 mph (15.6 to 23.5 knots). As a rough comparison, a similar-size boat, such as a Boston Whaler 285 Conquest Pilothouse with twin Mercury 225 Verado engines on the back, will burn 9.5 gallons of fuel per hour while traveling at roughly 10 mph.
To assuage any so-called range anxiety, the single touchscreen console of the Dasher will include a GPS display of the boat’s location, surrounded by a circle that grows or shrinks in size, indicating your remaining range at any given time, depending on how fast you’re going and how far you’ve gone. Also on the console will be a retractable windshield and Jet Stick joystick, which makes delicate docking maneuvers Pac-Man simple, by allowing fine control of motors and a subaquatic thruster.