Electric Foiling Boats: Everything You Need to Know
Vessev CEO Eric Laackmann — engineer, liveaboard sailor, and former Apple Watch developer — sat down with Green Boater TV to answer the most pressing questions about electric hydrofoiling boats, marine EV infrastructure, and why foiling is the most important efficiency unlock in sustainable boating.
Electric Foiling Boats:
Everything You Need to Know
Vessev CEO Eric Laackmann — engineer, liveaboard sailor, and former Apple Watch developer — sat down with Green Boater TV to answer the most pressing questions about electric hydrofoiling boats, marine EV infrastructure, and why foiling is the most important efficiency unlock in sustainable boating.
Full Interview — Q&A
What inspired Eric Laackmann to found Vessev?
Eric's path to founding Vessev is rooted in a childhood spent on the water. Growing up in Seattle, his father introduced him to ocean sailing early — the family sailed to Mexico, French Polynesia, and spent two weeks in the Galápagos Islands. Those formative experiences, including catching fish off the side of the boat at age eight in the Sea of Cortez, gave him a deep, personal connection to the marine environment that still drives his work today.
After studying electrical engineering and joining Apple — where he worked on the iPod, iPhone, and original Apple Watch — Eric spent seven years living aboard boats in San Francisco Bay. In 2018 he left Apple entirely to sail the world, transiting Alaska's Inside Passage, the Mexican coast, and across the South Pacific to New Zealand.
That combination of deep engineering experience and lived marine knowledge gave rise to Vessev's mission: to build electric foiling vessels that are simply better than their fossil-fuelled alternatives.
What is the biggest barrier to electric boat adoption today?
According to Eric, the single largest barrier is marina charging infrastructure. For decades, marinas were wired only to provide the modest power needed for onboard lighting and basic equipment. That infrastructure was never designed for the demands of charging large battery-powered vessels.
Upgrading marina electrical infrastructure is the most critical bottleneck for marine electrification — more so than battery technology or vessel cost.
The second major challenge is upfront capital cost. Like early Tesla vehicles, electric boats carry a higher purchase price than equivalent petrol or diesel vessels. However, Eric points out that commercial operators who buy a diesel vessel in 2025 are, in effect, committing to 20 years of fuel expenditure — with the vessel still operating in 2045 under increasing regulatory and social pressure to decarbonise.
Emerging financial products that balance high CapEx against low OpEx are beginning to address this gap, making the total cost of ownership case for electric vessels increasingly compelling.
Why is hydrofoiling critical for electric marine vessels?
Water is roughly 800 times denser than air, making it enormously draggy compared to any land or air medium. A conventional planing hull must constantly fight that drag at speed. Eric uses a vivid analogy: imagine strapping a parachute to every car on the road. Petrol and diesel engines would manage, but electric vehicles — whose range is constrained by battery energy — would suffer dramatically.
Hydrofoiling lifts the hull entirely out of the water, replacing the large wetted surface area of a hull with the slim profile of foil struts. This delivers more than a 2× efficiency improvement for high-speed vessels — and sometimes significantly more depending on size.
Eric draws a direct parallel to the automotive world: regenerative braking — recovering 20–70% of kinetic energy on deceleration — was the efficiency breakthrough that made the Toyota Prius viable and launched the modern electric vehicle era. Hydrofoiling is that equivalent breakthrough for electric boats.
Crucially, there is no alternative approach that achieves anything close to the same gain. Because battery energy density improves only gradually (roughly 7% per year since the 1990s), chasing efficiency through foiling is the most powerful lever available to electric marine designers.
Where is demand for electric foiling boats coming from?
Eric identifies the commercial sector as the primary near-term demand driver, for a straightforward reason: commercial operators think in whole-of-life economics. A ferry operator purchasing a vessel in 2025 must consider that vessel's operating environment in 2045 — by which point regulatory requirements, passenger expectations, and fuel costs will have shifted dramatically.
Key commercial segments include:
- Ferry operators — with net-zero fleet commitments and government pressure to decarbonise port operations
- Luxury hospitality — seven-star resorts where an electric foiling vessel provides a competitive experience advantage over diesel-powered competitors
- Port and harbour operators — particularly in jurisdictions like Singapore, which has proposed banning new fossil fuel vessels from 2030
Recreational demand is real but secondary in the near term, partly because recreational boaters accumulate fewer annual miles, making the total cost case less urgent. Eric also notes that genuinely sustainable liquid fuels — if they become widely available — could serve many low-mileage recreational applications effectively.
What is the Vessev VS9, and what makes it innovative?
The VS9 is Vessev's first commercial product — a 9-metre electric hydrofoiling passenger vessel built for commercial operators. Several design decisions set it apart:
Standard charging compatibility is a deliberate strategic choice. Rather than requiring expensive marina infrastructure upgrades, the VS9 charges from widely available Type 2 car chargers, lowering the barrier for operators to deploy the vessel almost anywhere in the world today.
Fully retracting foils address one of the most practical challenges of operating in real marine environments: biofouling. Even a single barnacle on a foil surface introduces disproportionate drag. Retracting the foils out of the water when at rest prevents marine growth from accumulating on the precision foil surfaces.
America's Cup-derived simulation software — the same tools used by Team New Zealand — enables Vessev to minimise foil surface area and maximise efficiency, keeping the vessel on what Eric calls the "virtuous design spiral": lighter → smaller foils → less drag → fewer batteries → lighter still.
Vessev's launch partner, New Zealand ferry operator Fullers360, has now operated the first VS9 for over 4,000 nautical miles and 140 consecutive on-time scheduled services.
When is hydrofoiling NOT the right solution?
Eric is candid about the limits of the technology. Hydrofoiling delivers its efficiency gains at higher speeds — it is not appropriate for slow vessels, which are already highly efficient at displacement speeds. He highlights two scenarios where foiling makes little sense:
- Slow boats — displacement-speed vessels already operate efficiently; adding foiling complexity provides no meaningful benefit
- Very large vessels — cargo ships, for example, are already twice as efficient as trains at moving freight per tonne-mile; foiling at that scale is neither practical nor necessary
Eric's view is that the sweet spot for electric hydrofoiling is high-speed vessels under approximately 40 metres. Below that threshold, the drag reduction from foiling is transformative. Above it, alternative approaches (including sustainable liquid fuels for large slow vessels) become more relevant.
For low-mileage recreational boating, Eric notes that genuinely sustainable liquid fuels — if they become broadly available — are a perfectly appropriate solution. His caveat is that not all biodiesel is responsibly produced; palm-oil-derived biodiesel, for instance, carries its own sustainability problems.
How do electric foiling boats handle underwater debris?
Debris strike is one of the most frequently raised concerns about high-speed marine vessels — and Eric speaks to it from direct personal experience. In 2018, sailing at nine knots 200 nautical miles offshore of Vancouver Island, his catamaran struck a large submerged log at 3 a.m. The strike was severe enough to open the forward bow compartment — yet the vessel continued sailing without taking on water through the main hull.
Vessev addresses debris risk through two complementary approaches:
1. Breakaway fusing: The bow foil is designed to break away cleanly on impact rather than transmitting the strike force into the hull structure. The T-foil propulsion unit remains recoverable, preserving the ability to return to port under power.
2. Detection systems: Modern infrared forward-looking sensors are effective at identifying objects with even minimal surface exposure. Eric's view is that truly submerged objects — those with no portion breaking the surface — are extraordinarily rare due to basic buoyancy physics.
Eric acknowledges that debris risk cannot be reduced to zero, which is precisely why vessel tolerance and foil replaceability are engineered into the design from the outset — not treated as afterthoughts.
What markets and geographies is Vessev targeting?
Vessels have already been sold into North America and Europe, in addition to Vessev's home base in New Zealand — giving the company a presence on three continents. Eric notes that demand is unusually diffuse: unlike some early-market technologies that have one obvious geographic hotspot, interest in electric foiling vessels is genuinely worldwide.
Eric envisions the hydrofoiling vessel market evolving similarly to the outboard and inboard engine markets — where vessels become defined primarily by their powertrain specification, and the hull becomes a configurable platform built around a standard technology package. This contrasts with today's marine market, which features an estimated 20,000 boat builders worldwide, many producing bespoke hulls with off-the-shelf propulsion.
What technology breakthroughs are driving marine electrification?
Eric identifies several converging technological trends:
- Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries — increasingly the chemistry of choice for marine applications, offering improved safety, cycle life, and cost relative to earlier lithium formulations
- Consistent energy density improvement — battery energy density has improved roughly 7% per year since the 1990s, a reliable compounding gain that steadily improves the range and performance of electric vessels
- Advanced simulation software — tools originally developed for America's Cup racing now accessible to vessel designers, enabling optimisation of foil geometry that was previously impractical
- Infrared detection systems — forward-looking sensors that improve debris detection and make high-speed electric foiling safer in real-world conditions
He also points to the broader arc of the 2013 America's Cup as an analogy for where electric foiling currently sits. When photos leaked of Team New Zealand testing a hydrofoiling 72-foot catamaran before that event, competitors reportedly dismissed the images as photoshopped — the performance implications were too radical to accept. Within months, sailing catamarans were travelling at three times wind speed. Eric believes electric hydrofoiling boats are at a similarly early, similarly underestimated inflection point.
What is next for Vessev?
The most significant near-term development is a new integrated motor pod system for Vessev's next vessel. The current VS9 uses a motor mounted above the T-foil that drives a shaft down through a gearbox. The next-generation design moves the motor directly into the hub of the foil itself — eliminating the shaft and gearbox entirely.
Moving propulsion into the foil hub delivers simultaneous gains in efficiency, performance, mechanical simplicity, and acoustic signature — making the vessel significantly quieter in operation.
Eric frames Vessev's broader mission in terms of creating products that are simply better — not products that require buyers to make environmental compromises. The model for success, in his view, is identical to what made electric vehicles succeed on roads: when charging at home costs less than fuel, when performance is equal or better, and when solar can power the vehicle for free, the choice becomes obvious. Vessev's goal is to reach that same inflection point on the water.
About Vessev
Vessev is a New Zealand-based manufacturer of commercial electric hydrofoiling vessels. Their flagship VS9 is a 9-metre, 10-passenger vessel currently in commercial service with Fullers360 in New Zealand. Learn more at vessev.com or contact the team at contact@vessev.com.
About This Interview
This article is based on an interview conducted as part of the Marine EV Leadership Series on Green Boater TV, hosted by Bruno. The series profiles leaders driving the transition to sustainable boating and marine electrification worldwide.
