FLY ELECTRIC

The extraordinary story behind the world’s first 100% electric foiling sportsboat

- Hugo Andreae

For something that looks as cool as the Candela Seven, it’s hard to believe that the starting point was a mathematical equation. But that’s exactly how it came about. In 2014 a crack team of boffins with experience ranging from fighter jet control technicians to America’s Cup hydrodynamicists, assembled in Stockholm to try and solve a seemingly intractable problem – how to create an all-electric boat with the range and performance to match a petrol one.

The fact is that a 25ft sportsboat uses 15 times as much fuel as a family car, yet pound for pound even the most advanced battery holds 15 times less energy than petrol. To resolve these two conflicting issues, they had to find a way to drastically reduce the energy consumption of their proposed boat. The mathematical equation they devised looks as dense as a block of concrete but it worked and the result is the Candela Seven – a lightweight carbon-fibre sportsboat that uses active foils and computer-aided flying controls to skim above the waves.