I Tested Navier's Flying Electric Boat

Manav: This is a flying electric boat, and it's solving two major problems — seasickness and traffic. The biggest problem with boat travel is people get sick while riding, but with this boat, you get a smooth, even ride, because it uses hydrofoils to lift itself about four feet into the air — you don't feel the waves. Second, it's tackling traffic — our highways are jam-packed, and this boat wants to move people around at the same cost, convenience, and speed as cars, and they're already doing it. Eleven months into production, the boat is already out in the world — they just closed a partnership with Stripe, and they're going to be commuting Stripe employees in literally half the time.

The price tag on this boat is around $550,000 — but I see a lot of value in that. It's fully electric, and you're getting the longest range of any electric boat ever made, plus a genuinely beautiful-looking boat. We're going to take this boat on a test drive — I'm going to drive it too — and we'll get a great drone shot showing you exactly how it takes off and lands.

All right guys, we've got Sam Cedar, head of operations at Navier, the flying electric boat company, and I'm going to ask Sam a bunch of questions about how this boat works. Why is this boat electric — let's start from first principles — was it environmental, was it emissions, what was the reasoning behind going electric?

Sam: It's really a combination of everything. The world's moving toward electric — it's happening on the road, it's happening in the air, and it's going to happen on the water too. The problem is you can't really build an electric boat in the traditional sense. A normal boat this size, around 30 feet, gets maybe 1 or 2 miles per gallon on gas, and switching that same hull from gas to electric doesn't change much, because you're still dragging a huge, heavy "bathtub" through the water. The only real way to get an electric boat meaningful range at meaningful speed is to lift it onto hydrofoils — those fins you see attached to the bottom of the boat actually lift the hull out of the water entirely, up about three or four feet. They work somewhat like an airplane wing, which is how the boat "takes off" — though hydrofoils on boats can be much smaller than an aircraft wing, because water is so much denser than air that you need far less surface area to generate the same lift.

It's really the combination of cheaper computing, improved battery technology, and improved materials that let us bring all of that together and build the world's most advanced electric flying boat.

Manav: How does it compare to a regular boat — is it faster, more energy efficient? Can you talk more about that?

Sam: It's about 90% more efficient than a traditional gas boat of this size. The best way to think about it: a traditional boat of this size gets maybe 1 or 2 miles per gallon. We have no gas on board at all, but we get the energy equivalent of about 30 miles per gallon. This boat carries the energy equivalent of about two gallons of gas, and with that we can travel roughly 75 nautical miles, about 86 regular miles.

Welcome to the most advanced electric hydrofoil boat — the boat of the future. This here is our flight control screen — it looks like an airplane's, because this is, functionally, a flying boat. You've got your horizon line here, and you can see it shifting slightly as we bounce in the water. This shows our speed, our height above the water, engine RPMs, what each rudder is doing, what each flap is doing, and so on. I'm a pilot myself, and we deliberately built this screen to resemble an aircraft's.

Manav: [testing controls]

Sam: We have an entirely different wing design here — we call it a canard configuration, which resembles an airplane more than a typical hull. We have three wings, and each has an aileron that adjusts up to 50 times per second. We use what's called a coordinated turn, matching our bank angle — the ailerons — with the rudders, the same way a pilot coordinates a turn in an aircraft. That means the boat stays perfectly coordinated through the entire turn — today, when we do some steep 20 to 30 degree banking turns, you'll feel an incredible amount of control throughout.

Worth noting, given the aviation background behind this: there's no single point of failure anywhere on this boat. Any individual system can fail, and in most cases the boat keeps flying — and if not, it can still get you safely back to shore. I'm a pilot myself, as well as a commercial captain, and that matters a lot to me — in a car, if something goes wrong, you can just stop and walk away. On a boat, you don't always have that luxury. That's why we have two motors, two batteries, two controllers, two screens, three separate foils — even a single aileron could be fully disconnected, and the boat can still foil.

Manav: There's a big problem with range anxiety with cars, and similarly with boats — I read that Navier has the highest range among electric boats. Can you talk about how you achieved that?

Sam: Absolutely — we're the longest-range electric hydrofoil boat in the world right now. We'll be announcing our next version soon, which will break the 100-mile mark, a real milestone in the electric boat and hydrofoil world. A big part of that comes from our partnership with our naval architect, Paul Bieker — he designed the foils used in America's Cup racing, and was part of Larry Ellison's team that won the America's Cup. He and his team designed the naval architecture of this boat.

On our technical team, our founder was previously an actual rocket scientist and has a PhD from MIT. We also have Kenny Jensen, our CTO, who previously designed drone systems — drones share a lot of flight-control DNA with how this boat operates, so he's been able to bring decades of learning from that space directly into the boat. Bring all of that together, a strong aeronautical engineering team plus a strong marine and naval architecture team, and you get the most advanced flying boat in the world.

For as complicated and intricate as this boat is under the hood, it's actually one of the easiest boats in the world to drive — you have a joystick throttle system on the right side, we'll show you that at the dock later.

Manav: [at the controls] All right, let's see.

Sam: All you're doing is clicking both throttles forward, together — slowly, slowly, easy, you've got a bit too much power there, slowly does it. There you go, advance it slowly, all the way down but in a controlled way. Straighten out your steering wheel there. Keep advancing it forward, a little more, you'll go all the way down, keep going, keep going, all the way down — perfect, a little more, perfect. Now watch your airspeed right here — 12 knots, it'll lift around 16 — there you go, you're up, you're flying.

Manav: Does it come up automatically?

Sam: Yeah, everything's automatic. One second — all right, go for it, give it a little more throttle. Perfect, right there is good.

Manav: So I'm flying now?

Sam: Yep, you're flying. You can give it a little turn left — my speed limiter isn't limiting you, so just adjust your throttle. There you go, you're good.

Manav: Damn, that's so easy, so smooth.

Sam: It's like a Rolls-Royce, you barely feel it. Little more power — there you go. We'll loop back here — you can stay on throttle, give a nice big bank into a left turn.

Manav: Which direction back?

Sam: You're headed that way — follow that line right there. You've got it, see it — right now you're pointing up, a little more right, perfect. You're a real captain now.

Manav: Hell yeah — this was hands-down the smoothest, quietest boat ride I've ever had. It feels like a Rolls-Royce on water, because it completely eliminates the motion sickness you'd normally get, since you don't feel the chop.

What's the business model behind Navier — who's the ideal customer? You could go direct-to-consumer selling to boat owners, but you just announced a collaboration with Stripe, running commutes like a shuttle for their employees — how do you guys see the business model shaping up?

Sam: We really have three parts to our business. First is Navier Mobility, which, like you mentioned, includes the Stripe partnership — corporate partnerships, and we'll be announcing more soon — running taxi service, both public and private. Second, we have defense contracts — I can't say too much there, but we work with the Department of Defense on certain projects. Third is recreation — we sell boats directly to individuals who want to use them for personal use, taking out family and friends.

Manav: Can people pre-order right now?

Sam: Yes — we're actually fully in production. Our first deliveries start early this summer, just a couple months out. We're sold out for the rest of this year, with deliveries continuing into next year, but people can purchase today.

Manav: I just tested the autonomous car from Waymo, and there's this whole broader movement toward autonomy everywhere — can you talk about how autonomous you guys are today, and where that's headed?

Sam: Autonomy is absolutely the direction the world is moving, and honestly needs to move. Look around us right now — this waterway is completely empty, I don't see a single other boat moving, while that bridge right over there is packed with traffic. To actually make waterways a meaningful, efficient form of transportation, you need more captains on the water, and you also need fleets of autonomous boats.

Right now, we have autonomous docking — the boat can fully dock itself — and we're working toward full point-to-point autonomy, with active collision avoidance, only needing an onboard captain as backup. Actually, the coolest thing right now — Sam, who's parking the boat, can literally park it sideways, fully autonomously.

Manav: [watching] That's freaking crazy. Is there a weight capacity — how many people can this boat actually carry?

Sam: This is an 8-to-10 passenger boat, up to 12 depending on how it's outfitted. There's no hard technical limitation — just a practical one on how big you'd want to build a given vessel, similar to standard ferries that already exist today.

Manav: One thing you said on the website is you want to turn waterways into freeways, at the same cost, speed, and convenience as land travel — how close are you to that?

Sam: We're actually there — arguably better than that already. As I mentioned, this boat gets around 30 miles per gallon equivalent while moving six people, so for the same cost and convenience as a land-based option, or better, you can now travel on the water instead.

This all connects back to a bigger idea — coastal cities were originally built around water. Half the world's population lives in coastal cities, and historically, civilization grew up around water because people used it as their primary form of transportation. Fast-forward to gas-powered cars becoming dominant, and it suddenly became roughly ten times more expensive to operate a boat than a gas vehicle, so everyone left the water. That's why you still see all this waterfront infrastructure in these cities, but almost nobody actually using the boats or the waterway itself — look around today, it's completely empty, while every bridge and tunnel near these coastal cities is jammed with traffic.

What we're able to do with our boats, as you said, is offer that same cost, speed, and convenience as a land-based option, but on the water — and I genuinely enjoy this, it's a real passion of mine, so I'll keep doing it.

Manav: Thank you for watching, I'll see you in the next video.