The Latest EVs Are Taking to the Water

The electric boat market, until now confined to specialty builders, is going mainstream. Just as some central cities in Europe and the U.S. are being closed to internal-combustion cars, so are some lakes and rivers requiring electric power—both for the quiet and the absence of pollution.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Brunswick Corp.’s Mercury Marine division introduced the Avator 7.5e electric outboard motor (US$3,250) for small boats, with 750 watts of power—the equivalent of a conventional 3.5-horsepower unit. Brunswick’s 13-foot Veer X13 boat (US$11,995) will pair with the 7.5e.

The 7.5e electric motor provides quiet and non-polluting cruising.
Mercury Marine photo

And at a New York boat show event Sept. 19 at Chelsea Piers, on Manhattan’s far West Side, the company showed off two larger variations, the 20e (US$8,792) and 35e (US$9,192), with 2,200 and 3,700 watts of power, respectively. The larger of the two offers the power equivalent of a 10-horsepower Mercury outboard.

“Electrification is going to be an important part of the future for marine,” says Dave Foulkes, CEO of Brunswick. “But I think we’ll need a portfolio of solutions, including alternative fuels. E-fuel (gasoline made from sustainably produced hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide) is certainly fascinating.”

Mercury Marine has so far sold 2,000 of its 7.5e electric outboards internationally, Foulkes says. “The 7.5e has only been on the market since April, so we think that volume is high in the marine space. We’re seeing lots of interest at regulated lakes in Europe and other locations.”

The motors are connected to the company’s lithium-ion batteries, made by the Mastervolt division. The 7.5e comes with a basic one-kilowatt-hour battery pack. On the 20e, which has a larger 2.3-kilowatt-hour pack, up to four units can be put together for a half-day of cruising. The 35e comes with a 5.4-kilowatt-hour battery.

Perissa Bailey, vice president and general manager at Mercury Marine, says that Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands are three countries with major buy-in for the electric outboards. The interest in the U.S. is growing a bit more slowly. “But a segment of the population is looking for more sustainable solutions, and they’re going electric in other parts of their lives,” Bailey says. “Rather than have those early adopters leave our brand we’re coming up with alternatives for them.” Bailey says that two new Avator products will be announced shortly, and that there’s interest in higher-horsepower electric marine motors.

Brunswick is also offering a Navico Fathom e-power battery pack that can replace the polluting generators on larger boats and, through a recent acquisition, the Fliteboard electrically powered eFoil surfboard. The US$13,195 Ultra L model, with a 14-pound lithium battery, can fly above the water at speeds of up to 28 miles per hour. There is 45 minutes of cruising and a one-hour recharge time.

The Avator 7.5e will power small boats, like these Quicksilver inflatables and 13-foot Veer X13 at Chelsea Piers.
Brunswick Corporation photo

The development of electric boats paralleled that of cars, and both had initial heydays around the turn of the 20th century. Wealthy people bought electric launches that were elaborately furnished with velvet cushions and stained-glass windows. The boats were for slow cruising on relatively still bodies of water, such as lakes.

At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, 55 electric launches built by a company called Elco gave a million rides. Elco launched the Wenona in 1899; it was a 32-foot launch with five-horsepower power that quietly glided at seven miles per hour and could last eight hours on a charge. Wenona is still running on Lake George, and Elco is still in business making electric boat motors. The largest of its units produces the equivalent of 14 horsepower.

Battery advances have made larger electric boats practical. Norway’s MV Ampere ferry, with a one-megawatt battery, can carry 120 cars. Launched in 2022, the MS Medstraum is a zero-emission fast ferry that plies Norwegian waters. It reduces emissions by the equivalent of 30 operating diesel buses in a year.

With their large surface area, passenger boats can also host solar panels that increase electric cruising range. PlanetSolar, a catamaran yacht, circumnavigated the planet in 2012.

All this makes it seem that electric power for boats is imminent, but Tom Hesselink, executive director of the Electric Boat Association of America and a 30-year builder of EV craft in North Carolina, says that the industry is “very transitional right now. How fast it will transition is questionable. I don’t expect to see big changes in the U.S. industry anytime soon, though it’s moving much more rapidly in Europe—where there’s more environmental awareness.”

Hesselink adds that “there’s still a big power-to-weight advantage for gasoline. The motors are fine, but it’s the batteries that are the issue.” Foulkes echoes that sentiment. “Electric power is still not a solution for larger mainstream recreational boats,” he says.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

The Latest EVs Are Taking to the Water

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.