Plugboats Podcast: Interview with Leif Stavøstrand of Evoy on the Past, Present & Future of Electric Boats

Norwegian company Evoy was one of the first in the world to develop all electric boat motors with power ratings of 100 kilowatts and beyond. They now have lines of high powered outboards and inboard systems like the Breeze 120+ HP, Storm 330+ HP and Hurricane 400+ HP that are on the transoms and in the hulls of dozens of vessels from leading boat yards around the world.

One of those is Axopar. I was able to chat with Leif out on the water in an Evoy propelled AX/E 25 at the Cannes Yachting Festival in September, and then back on land after the Metstrade boating trade show, where Evoy and sister companies Vita and Taiga had announced some exciting and groundbreaking battery news.

This article is a lightly edited transcription of the podcast interview with Stavøstrand in which he talks about the past, present and future of electric boating.

SCENE: Speaking in the ‘go-slow / no-wake zone’ at the Cannes Yachting Festival

Plugboats: Leif, when you and I first talked, I had just started Plugboats, and you had just started Evoy.

Leif Stavøstrand: 
Yeah, it’s been a few years. We started in 2018, I think, and you and I talked pretty much the first year. So it’s been seven years now.

PB: And does it seem like seven years…or five seconds…or a couple of lifetimes…

LS: 
It’s funny, when you look back at time, it seems like it’s fast, but like you say, it’s kind of been a lifetime. You can have really good news and really bad news in the same day, and you have this roller coaster of emotions and news.

PB: 
And as I recall, it didn’t take you long to go from the concept to reality.

LS: 
We brought the product to market pretty early, which was a conscious choice. It also meant that our customer knew in the early days that there could be hiccups, but that we would be there to help them when stuff occurred, and I think that has been the right choice for us. Instead of doing R&D for 10 years, we got to adapt the product to customer feedback.

PB: and that’s been helpful?

LS: Yes, the customers sometimes manage to provoke things that we don’t see when we do our testing. It’s like, oh, yeah, you can do… ‘Oh, we hadn’t thought about doing it like that. Okay, let’s adapt to that’. So that’s been good for us

PB: 
And overall, has the adoption of electric propulsion been faster or slower than you thought

LS: 
I think we did expect things to move quicker. I think everyone did. Looking at the car market, it’s maybe not so surprising that things do take time, and it’s really different from region to region and country to country, because you have some markets that quite ready.

But if there is a generalization, you could say that markets that are heavy on electric cars are typically also more interested and ready to go electric with boats. Where we see really good traction is often where there’s incentives in place. That really helps a lot.

We’re seeing a good uptake in the U.S., both East Coast, West Coast, and we also have a good uptake in Norway, and there’s some along the Mediterranean. There’s some in Sweden, and there’s the commercial side – aquaculture, strong port and harbour, some tourism. We have quite a bit in there, tenders used for going out on the water with 12 passengers or so. We have got a few of those.

PB: And what’s the split between new boats and repowers or refits?

LS: 
It’s mostly new boats. I think the driver there is that when people are getting a new shiny electric system, they typically combine it with upgrading the boat at the same time. I think we’re probably at somewhere between 80 to 90% on new boats versus retrofitting.

We think that percentage might change over time, especially when we get like, cost down, then it will be easier for people to think, okay, my my motor is about to conk out here, and price isn’t that much more for for electric in many ways, with the outboard. Then again, the inboard is about 50% smaller than your normal inboard. In some cases 60%, in some cases 40%, but as a rule of thumb, about 50% smaller in volume.

PB: That’s interesting that markets where electric cars are going well are also good for electric boats.

LS: 
Yes, with those that have electric cars, it’s a whole different conversation. People that are experienced with trying. Charging and how it works, and that they have to plan a little bit when it comes to how they use their car. They bring that state of mind into the boat as well. So it’s a lot easier conversation to have.

SCENE: The boat we were out on with Leif was an AX/E 25, one of the models Evoy worked on with Axopar boats to create a line of electric models. The AX/E 25 has 220 kilowatts of continuous power and peak power – about 440 kilowatts, or almost 600 horsepower. I asked Leif about the battery and the charging time for an electric boat with that kind of power.

PB: As we both know, Leif, charging is one of the things that people always ask about,

LS: 
After speed and range, charging is the most common question.

PB: And so how big is the battery on this boat?

LS: 
This has 126 kilowatt hours, with 112 of them usable.

PB: And what kind of charging time are we looking at?

LS: 
This boat can recharge in 45 minutes from 10% to 80%, which is the typical charging that people do.

PB: So that’s high speed charging. And other than that…

LS: 
Using semi fast chargers, and that’s more common, the time is three hours, We encourage our customers to use Type 2 charging.

PB: In that situation the smart cable can read how many amps can safely come out of the outlet and into the battery?

LS: 
Yeah, that’s Type 2. However, if you only have Type 1, you can just set the amps on the screen, 10, 16, 32 amps…basically, if you have power in your marina, you can charge on it.

SCENE: We then had an opportunity to get out in the big waters and go a bit faster.

LS: 
Are you ready for a little bit of speed?
PB: Let’s do it!
YOU CAN HEAR THE BOAT SPEEDING UP (IT IS VERY QUIET!)
PB: We’re going 32 knots, now Leif, and we’re talking in a normal tone of voice.
LS: 
That’s electric!

PB: 
Both leisure and commercial boats are using Evoy electric inboards and outboards. Can you talk to us a bit about the different usage?

LS: 
A lot of our commercial customers are what we call ‘A to A’ customers – they go from one court, where they typically have the boat in the night time, and then they go back out and do something, if it’s lobster traps or oyster or monitoring or guard work, and then they go back into the same port.

Recreational users typically have an ‘A to B to A’ use. They go out, they do something, they stop by at a restaurant, or those type of things, and then come back in.

PB: So when people say they go out in their boat for three hours, they’re probably not driving for all of those three hours. Do they usually go as far or as long as they think they do or say?

LS: 
Never. They always overestimate. When you talk to them, they always give their worst case, which is fine in one way, because it was the same with the car industry that people typically told them “Well, I go for this one long trip a year, and I want to do it without charging.” But a lot of the electric car owners have adapted, and I guess it is the same for us.

PB: On another note, when you started Evoy, you were pretty much the only manufacturer specializing in high power electric marine motors. And now you’ve got some competition out there. There are about four or five others.

LS: 
Yes. Healthy competition is healthy for everyone. It sharpens us and keeps us on our toes, and it opens up the market too. I mean, if it was only us, everyone would be pretty skeptical, right? But seeing a lot of different manufactuers and motors in there actually makes it more believable that this is something that can work for more users.

PB: I think that’s kind of true for electric boats in general. The more people see them, at their marina or wherever, the more they say ‘Oh, that looks cool, that works, Joe likes his.’

LS: 
Oh, for sure, the neighbour effect is very strong.

PB: Then there’s batteries. You must have seen so many changes and developments in batteries over the last eight years.

LS: 

It’s amazing, actually, to follow the development of the batteries and see how that’s coming, but it’s also kind of painful to see how long it takes to trickle down into the maritime industry. Obviously, the cars are in front of us, but one thing that’s been really positive to see is in the last couple years, there’s been a lot of focus on increasing how fast the batteries can charge, because that’s also very helpful for us.

If a battery can charge fast, it typically can discharge faster and you need to have a C Rate that is better adapted to the boat industry, because we use more continuous energy than you do in a car. (ED NOTE: C Rate is how fast a battery can charge and discharge)

So that’s one thing that we see. And then, of course, the whole price thing, it hasn’t really come into the maritime industry yet, but I think in the next couple years, we definitely will see some prices coming down.

PB: We always hear news big things about solid state batteries and different chemicals and big breakthroughs. Do you think that there’s going to be a big breakthrough in batteries, or are they just going to keep getting better and better all the time?

LS: 
It’s mostly going to be incremental. But there are some companies doing very interesting stuff, and there are some things in the market, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some really nice new batteries coming into the industry. Now, it’s not necessarily a revolution, but a good step. I think that’s something we can expect.

SCENE: When Leif said ‘that’s something we can expect’ he actually knew something at the time that ‘we’ didn’t know. But we’ll get to that later in the podcast, when we speak with him after Metstrade.

Back at Cannes and in the quiet, no wake zone, I asked Leif about the data aggregation and analysis element of electric boats.

LS: 
Yea, it’s kind of the heart of what we do. We get really exact data. We have around 500 data points on a boat, things that we can monitor on board. I think a boat loads up around five gigabytes per month.

A big chunk of that is from the battery. We can monitor anything – alarms, temperatures, amps in, amps out, SOC (State of Charge), health of the battery, all these type of things. And then, of course, it’s the rest of the system that we have built, and the temperatures and pressures and amps.

All the data makes it so much easier if something comes up, we can go through it all and see what’s going on, if something’s off, or a customer calls about something, see if it’s charging, or a fuse that’s blown, or whatever.

Each boat loads up 5Gb of data every month

PB: That must be very powerful when you aggregate that data from all of your boats

LS: 
Extremely. We analyze the data on how people use their boats, how they use the systems, what’s the output, and also how we can use it in the user interface. We’re now using that data in our app, so that the customer has a good overview of the boat and all those things. In many ways, I would claim we have the best app in the maritime industry, and there are still a lot of opportunities to use that data going ahead as well.

PB: Did you know at the beginning that the data aspect was going to be that useful?

LS: 
Our hypothesis was very early that this was going to be important to us, but I don’t think we saw all the use cases. We didn’t understand the magnitude of it and how useful it would be, really. It just keeps on building and keeps adding value over time. And there’s tons of sets of different ways that you can analyze the data, some of which we haven’t even done yet, but it’s there. It’s very useful when you’re sitting and working on the next generation of products.

We see from the car industry that there are still things that we can optimize and do in that regard, and we also have some stuff on our plate that we think is going to be pretty unique…that we don’t even see in the car industry.

PB: Leif, thanks for this great perspective on the industry, where it’s been and where it’s at. I guess the question now is, ‘What’s the next five years? Where are things headed? Where’s it going?’

LS: 
Five years is a long time. Thinking back to five years ago, we’ve doubled the range on our boats, we have better efficiency, better batteries. The thing is, now that there is us and others also, we’re really coming into what I would call a high maturity state on the systems – they just work. And so more and more people are getting bored, the different boats, trying different boats, different systems.

As an industry, though, on the electric boat side, the volumes are still small, so nobody has managed to really press down the cost yet. But I would say it’s likely that we will see prices down in the next five years, which also should open up more for the recreational side of things.

I still think it’s going to be 10 years before your regular Joe is gonna go electric. But there’s are early adapters, there are people with lakefront properties that are definitely going to move. We see from the Taiga jetski side now – they’re close to a price parity, or you can even say they’re AT price parity – and that just makes the whole difference.

So I think it’s, it’s more a price play now than a range play. And of course, the range will improve, if not daily, at least weekly. There are new customers coming in. I’m not exaggerating when I say there are hundreds of boat builders we’ve been speaking with over the years. Not all have decided to move yet, there are different reasons, – cost or their customers, or they weren’t ready, or multiple reasons – but there is huge interest in what we do and what we can do. So a lot of boat builders are ready to go as soon as they have a customer, or as soon as they’re they’re lined up.

SCENE: A few weeks after the chat at Cannes where we talked at some length about batteries, Evoy introduced their new battery at the Metstrade show. I later had a chance to talk to Leif about that.

LS: 
You’re right, Jeff, we had a nice chat there in Cannes, but I couldn’t say too much at that point, about what we had been working on, for quite a while. We decided to launch the new battery at Mets along with the next generation inboard Breeze 120+ HP, which is adapted to the new battery pack, from Taiga.

As you know, Taiga does jet skis and snowmobiles, and they’ve done really well around their technology, their battery packs, which they build themselves in Canada.

If you rewind a year, you’ll see that all the sister companies – Evoy, Vita, Aqua superpower and Taiga – we’ve all started working much closer together, and the first thing we agreed on is that we needed to present the maritime industry with a better battery than what we could find in the market today.

Based on the battery modules that Taiga already has and produces in their facility, we decided to make a battery pack after a lot of thought about how to integrate it, the best way to make it manufacturable, producible, what would fit well in the boat. So it’s in the same footprint as the batteries that we were already using. The specs on the new battery are that we can do a continuous C Rate of 2 on discharge and charge, meaning we can do 10% to 80% charging in 20 minutes.

That’s one benefit of it. Another benefit of the battery is it can be charged quite fast on land. We know that a lot of customers, especially in the US, do actually put their boats on trailers in between using them, so being able to charge it faster on land is important.

The battery is a great update to the new inboard Breeze. We brought the whole system weight down about 150 kilograms. On pricing of the battery itself, we’re down by about 60% and on the system overall about 35% less, so we’re definitely now at a point where it gets a lot more interesting for a lot of users, and that’s something we’re really looking forward to pushing out into the market in 2026

PB: When we were talking in Cannes, you were saying that you think the changes in batteries will be incremental. I mean, this is still incremental, it’s not solid state, but it’s a big step.

LS: 
Yea, a big step in the right direction. And as of now, the battery will be something that Evoy uses for our own power trains, but we’re also looking into being able to supply this to others in the industry in 2027 and already have some interesting dialogue going on there. So we’ll see what that can bring.

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