eOutboard, de Phatching

High Performance Electric Outboard Motor System and Supply Chain Innovation

There are 4.8m boats with outboard engines in Europe, and 99% percent of them run on petrol or diesel. These conventional boat motors are highly polluting (emitting CO2, methane, carbon monoxide and other substances), burn a massive amount of fossil fuel and are excessively noisy. So why aren’t we electrifying boats like we are electrifying cars?

Small and light boats can indeed run on electric engines; however, current outboard solutions have performance limitations and are very expensive. Larger boats require powerful, higher-performance electric engines (over 80 horsepower), which are prohibitively expensive due to the low availability of components and the resulting high production costs associated with them.

Our client, the Swedish company pHatching, has the solution: eOutboard.

The eOutboard project offers a new electric outboard engine design with customized belt-drive and horizontal drive shaft, allowing us to stack multiple small engines in a modular system. At the same time, they take advantage of the established supply chain and high-volume standard components from the auto industry to dramatically lower the cost of production and maintenance (53% less than current outboard solutions), thereby eliminating the major market barrier to adoption of viable high-performance electric marine engines. They also provide a useful second life for used electric vehicle batteries.

As a result of combining a new design with an innovative use of auto parts, their new electric outboard engine is:

1) green, quiet and powerful (up to 200 hp);

2) easily retrofitted into existing boats;

3) modular and scalable and

4) highly efficient in terms of production and operation.

The goal of pHatching is to achieve the electrification of maritime transport because, for the first time, an electric outboard engine can compete with conventional engines in terms of price and performance.

To develop their project, pHatching submitted their proposal to the February 2018 call of the SME Instrument Phase 1, and we are pleased to say that, after getting a score of 13.72, they obtained the necessary grant to carry out the tasks required in this phase. We are very glad to have been able to participate, together with Avanoa AB, in pHatching’s success, and we wish them a lot of success in the development of their project.