Updated on October 19th, 2024
It seems the trend for eco-friendly boats is becoming almost aggressive and as obsessive as religion once was. But we must understand that in reality, few boat manufacturers care about the environment more than their own profit. This is quite natural. And we don’t even need to touch on the topic of superyachts.
Riding the trend wave in time means getting more profit. However, if you stay on this wave for too long, you risk dramatically reducing the attractiveness of your products among potential buyers. Thanks to the work of company marketers and magazine writers who still randomly mention buzzwords like sustainability and nature-friendliness in headlines, the appeal of the offer is turning into an obsession.
In addition, yacht buyers are not fools and are well aware that electric boats are not at all environmentally and the term “eco-friendly” is misleading. If we consider electric boats not in the moment, but take into account their entire life cycle, then many of them may even lose to modern internal combustion engines in terms of negative impact on nature.
In fact, at the moment, only continuously operating commercial electric ships can have significant environmental benefits over a long period of time. But electric boats for the private sector, making occasional weekend cruises, are unlikely to be considered when the phrase “nature-friendly” is mentioned. The production of their hulls, batteries, electric motors and in general all equipment has a huge impact on the environment, even before we begin to consider the issue of recycling them at the end of their service life.
However, we love electricity
It is quite obvious that electric yachts are no longer a fashionable trend, but have become as commonplace as electric cars and smartphones. Battery efficiency continues to improve, and hydrogen fuel cells are a great combination.
Without any doubt, we will always choose an electric motorboat due to such significant advantages as ease of maintenance, absence of vibration and odor, and also because of the low noise level, both for us and for underwater inhabitants.
Ultimately, all the problems of safe production and processing will be solved, then our yachts will truly become environmentally friendly, but for now we can only talk about reducing the harmful effects as much as possible. But we are not ready to completely abandon our motorboats or switch to wooden sailboats, no matter how amazingly beautiful they are.