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.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.