The debut of an electric yacht

Sampriti Bhattacharyya is bringing a 30-foot electric yacht to the upcoming CES gadgetshow in Las Vegas.

The co-founder and CEO of electric hydrofoil startup Navier hopes its debut line of luxury boats sparks a broader shift to a cleaner maritime industry, much like Tesla did for electric cars.

Headquartered along San Francisco Bay in Alameda, California, the startup’s influential supporters include Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Bhattacharyya spoke about her company with The Associated Press.

How would you describe your first product?

It’s a 30-foot electric hydrofoiling boat. It has a 75 nautical miles range. Hopefully in the next year, we aim to push it to 100 nautical miles.

How much does it cost? $375,000, starting base range.

How many have you sold?

Our first year, we are only making 15. Those are all sold out. But we have a pretty massive waitlist.

Is there a parallel to Tesla where you’re launching the luxury vehicle first and down the road looking at more accessible options?

I love being out in the water and I don’t think it should be limited to just a few. So there will be more announcements on that. The big picture is the N30 is really a technology platform, where we are perfecting our hydrofoil control and parts of our autonomy technology. Then you’ll be seeing much more scalable options, even for recreational boaters.

How important is autonomy?

Docking can be pretty overwhelming, especially if you’re a beginner. Even for experienced boaters, some slips can be really tight. So if you think about a 6-passenger water taxi, you have to have a commercial captain license. That’s very expensive, like a $50-an-hour job. So removing the captain has a huge cost benefit in making water taxis accessible.

Who do you see as Navier’s customers 10 years from now?

There is a huge untapped opportunity in boating. Today, boats are looked at something like a wealthy person’s toy. With technology, making the waterways more accessible will open up a huge new mode of transportation that we have never imagined before. If you are able to make small vessels move things and people on the water, suddenly the waterways are no more an obstacle and every marina can turn into a train station stop, essentially.

Who are your main competitors?

There are other hydrofoil boats, obviously, but that’s not what we see as competitors. We’ve got to transition to cleaner options. So the main competitors would be your gas boats that are out there that are polluting our waterways. That’s what we want to replace. Electric boats are still a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the total number of boats.