generally more relaxed and precise with an electric outboard—prop
speeds can be slowed to a crawl if necessary or instantly boosted.
Green Lakes of Germany
It was late afternoon and the “Electric Days” celebration was at a close.
I sat at an umbrella-shaded table on the patio of the Munich Yacht Club
thinking about all the people I’d talked to during the day. Certainly,
there’d been consensus on a number of things. Everyone had agreed,
for example, that E-Mobility is at least a partial answer to the perils of
climate change. And there was general agreement that battery technol-
ogy is increasingly sophisticated. But there’d been a few comments that
were less straightforward, less positive.
Norbert Geissler, a long-time Munich Yacht Club member: “We are
beside one of Germany’s so-called green lakes, a pollution-free, all-elec-
tric lake if you will. So, excluding the boats used for our sailing regattas
on Lake Starnberg, we have only 265 licenses here for petrol power for
this huge body of water. And there is a 20-year waiting list.”
Peter Minder, Designboats owner: “What’s happening now in Ger-
many is driven by government regulation. If you admit, as I think you
must, that most politicians today want to have a green agenda, or at
least appear to have a green agenda, a certain dynamic is created. In
Germany, for instance, there are much fewer owners of boats compared
to owners of cars (which are the largest polluters by far) so the politi-
cians will move against the weakest, smallest segment of the popula-
tion, the boaters, to get their green agenda. Not the car owners.
“Then there is Austria to consider. Almost all the lakes in Austria are
strictly all-electric except for the Woerthersee, which is a large, beauti-
ful lake mostly for the rich and the famous. Yes, you are still allowed to
run a limited number of combustion engines on the Woerthersee, but
a license will cost you the equivalent of $280,000 U.S. dollars. And the
waiting time—you can’t even believe it.”
So, was there a gloomy side to E-Mobility on the water, I had to ask
myself, as I watched an electrified mahogany runabout ghost silently
across the lake towards the Alps. Would E-Mobility make boating so
expensive, so exclusive and so regulated that the average person could
no longer afford a boat?
Frauscher’s Florian Helmberger had given me at least a little hope
earlier in the day. “New technology is always expensive in the begin-
ning,” he’d opined. “But then companies like Torqeedo and others cre-
ate better and better products in higher volume and the costs come
down. So electric boats will eventually become quite common and
competitive on the water. That’s what I think. And, I presume, they will
be increasingly efficient, versatile and affordable for, let us hope, the
average person.” U35