The Tesla of boats: Silent Yachts ramps up production of its electric catamarans

Silent Yachts, which has been described as the “Tesla of the seas”, is ramping up production of its electric catamarans.

The company now has 10 boats under construction and they are increasing production capacity to be able to produce dozens of electric boats a year.

That may not sound like a lot, but boat production can be a slow process and is difficult to deploy at scale for larger vessels like the Silent Yachts electric catamarans.

They have been delivering electric catamarans for years and now have a full line up of three boats: 55-ft, 60-ft, and 80-ft.

These boats are all powered by solar power and batteries.

Depending on the size, they can produce between 10 and 26 kW of solar power and be equipped with 150 to 532 kWh of battery capacity.

The latter is the equivalent in energy capacity of more than 5 Tesla Model S sedans.

Silent Yachts can be solely powered by clean energy with the solar panels and batteries feeding electric motors or use a generator depending on your type of use.

Here the company produced a video showing a typical use case of a Silent Yacht:

Silent Yachts has now delivered 11 electric yachts that are currently on the water, but they are seeing strong demand and ramping up production.

Plugboats reports:

“To meet demand, Silent-Yachts has new shipyards in Thailand and Italy. The Asian yard, about 220 km from Bangkok, is led by Swiss entrepreneur Philippe Guénat and is the largest privately-owned shipyard in South East Asia. In Fano, Italy, a series of Silent 60s are now under construction and a second line is being set up to provide capacity for building 15 Silent 60s a year.”

On top of those 15 Silent 60s, the company is currently building one Silent 55, its entry-level boat, and 4 Silent 80s, its biggest vessel.

Starting at roughly $2 million, we are not talking about cheap boats, but the price is actually competitive with non-solar/battery vessels of that level of capability and luxury.

Here are a few picture of the Silent Yacht 55:

Silent Silent Yacht 55 Exterior

Silent Yacht 55 Interior and Deck:

Electrek’s Take

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of living on a boat, but I could never live with the idea that I’d be burning fossil fuels in our beautiful oceans.

Enters electric and solar-powered catamarans. A game changer that enables you to match the romantic boat lifestyle with a clean, zero-emission experience.

Something is captivating to the core about the idea of traveling the world by sea purely on solar power. It just feels right to me. After all, this entire planet is naturally solar-powered. Why shouldn’t our lifestyle be the same?