33Torque, Torque and More Torque
I was a little disappointed in the Frauscher 740 Mirage Air, the first boat
I sea trialed that afternoon. Not that the 24-foot speedster wasn’t a sleek
beauty. But then again, shortly after I’d throttled up on the lake, I knew
something was fishy in Bavaria.
“You’ve got some serious vibration here,” I observed to Florian Helm-
berger, Frauscher’s head of marketing.
Both Helmberger and I were crestfallen. The 740, with a pair of Ballin’s
much touted Deep Blue 40 kWh batteries on board, was the only water-
craft at the event to showcase Torqeedo’s latest and greatest motor, the
new 100-kW (134-hp) 100i. And I’d certainly been looking forward to
the top hop Frauscher was claiming—26 knots. Fast for a single-engine
inboard, electric or not.
“We perhaps have a propeller issue,” said Helmberger, as we made
our way back to the marina.
My second sea trial went more smoothly. The Designboats Tender
O8 was a lightweight, fully-infused 26-foot inboard megayacht side-
kick built in Switzerland, with twin 60-kW Deep Blue 50i motors
(80-hp apiece) and two 31-kW Deep Blue batteries (progenitors of the
new 40 kWh battery), one stacked atop the other. Before operating the
vessel on the lake, I gave her a dockside once-over with Designboats
owner Peter Minder.
The Tender seemed conventional at first, with the usual suspects
at the helm (Garmin GPSmap 7410 MFD, sport steering wheel and
binnacle-type engine control), an Aquadrive system spliced into each
straight-shaft drive train and crisp, teak-laid decks. But as I continued
my dockside examination, checking out the batteries (in the engine
compartment), motors (under the after deck) and controllers (inside
the center console), two foreign-looking shore power plugs eventually
captured my attention.
“We are charging at the 380-volt rate,” Minder explained when I
pointed at the plugs, one on either side of the battery/engine compart-
ment. “This boat handles all voltages automatically—you simply attach
the cord from whatever source is available. And you can use both plugs
at the same time.”
Minder further explained that from zero charge, a 380-volt source
could top off the boat’s battery pack in approximately six hours. He
added that topping off with two 230-volt sources would take more
time—eight hours approximately—and the time to charge via a combi-
nation of the two voltages would fall somewhere in between.
I was surprised by the sea trial itself. Here apparently was a genuine,
bluewater watercraft that exhibited real high-performance handling.
Top speed was 26 knots, the cornering was tight, flat and speedsterish
and the acceleration—well, time to plane, at just 4 seconds, reminded
me of punching it in the fully-electric BMW.
“Your speed now,” suggested Minder as we zipped across a smooth
Lake Starnberg at wide-open throttle, “is limited to about 50 minutes
and 20 miles or so. A slower pace of eight miles per hour will give us
10 hours maybe and about 70 miles of range. The display will make
you aware of all this and give you an alarm if it is necessary to slow to
displacement speeds to get home.”
My final sea trial of the day, the ZenPro 580, was even more impres-
sive than the Tender. She was a tough little 20-foot patrol-type RIB
with an aluminum hull, Hypalon tubes and, in lieu of fuel tanks and
a combustion engine, a 50-kW (80-hp) Deep Blue 50 R outboard with
a 40-kW Deep Blue battery under an after-deck hatch. And unlike the
vessels I’d driven earlier, she’d been expressly built for electric power
by French manufacturer Naviwatt, according to the Naviwatt rep on
board, Berenger Laurent.