This Boat Is Much, Much Cooler Than Your Boat

As the great American poet T-Pain said, "I'm on a boat." This boat, though, does extraordinary things. It's all electric, and as you can see, it more or less flies through the water. This means that you can cruise around choppy places like the San Francisco Bay at high speeds and still have your spine intact and talk to your friends in in normal tones. Basically, it's the opposite of this. This boat is made by a company called Navier, and it's made at least partially in America, which is a big deal since we kind of suck at making boats these days. We'll get into the whole story after you take one more look at this.

I'm on a boat. I'm on a boat.

I'm on a boat.

Everybody on a boat.

Everybody look at me, 'cause I'm sailing on a boat. I'm on a boat. I'm on a boat. Take a good hard look at the motherfucking boat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In any other video, we'd take you right to the boat building. But it would be an egregious hate crime against everything weird and awesome not to begin here. It's the Pinball Annex in Alameda, California. And if you saunter around these aisles long enough, you will in fact end up in the midst of a boat factory. To explain how and why this happened, may I introduce you to this embodiment of engineering ambition?

I'm Sampreeti Bhattacharya, and I'm the founder and CEO of Navier.

Sampreeti came to the US from India and got a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT a few years ago.

What was really cool for me was to see people solving hard problems. When you solve hard problems, you're able to explore new frontiers, do things that wasn't possible before.

As a kid, she was obsessed with NASA and space. But not long after graduating, she got obsessed with the ocean.

When I got into MIT, my background was control systems aerospace. But when the Malaysian airline got lost in the ocean, it dawned to me that, wow, we do not know much about our own backyard. Yet the future of food, the future of trade depends on this, you know, 70% of the world. And as I looked into the industry, I was like, there is like no innovation here.

When Sampreeti started Navier in 2020, she wanted to electrify boats and change how we get around the waterways. And she wanted to bring shipbuilding back to the U.S.

I just became convinced that there is a huge potential to build a next-generation American maritime company. The future of maritime is going to be electric. We started there.

Navier's first product is called the N30, and it's basically the Tesla Roadster of boats. It can go 75 miles on a single charge, is packed full of sensors and software, and for the moment, it's eye candy. Aimed at the rich and hotels, resorts, and cities.

Miami, Maldives, Bora Bora— this is almost a black car on the water.

But the bigger mission is to build bigger boats, both for commercial purposes and for defense.

The recreational boats, we are going to be building only a fairly small number, and that will be like much more of a limited edition. Always what's really the big focus for us, the way We will transform our waterways, right? Places that were not very accessible by land because it's 2 hours. When you make that 30, 40 minutes, it's fundamentally changed how coastal cities are built, how people live. Like, imagine like the workforce that you can like access, which otherwise you wouldn't have access to. But then it's goods, right? So why have a semi-truck, you know, go all the way roundabout routes when you can have single containers, you know, autonomous barges that are way more efficient from point A to point B. And first we will do coastal, then we will do, you know, for example, islands like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. And then you are going to go, you know, intercoastal and transoceanic. Also, like, hydrofoiling technology is critical for United States military, our defense. Other countries like China, Japan, Korea, Greece, they really focused on shipbuilding. We are producing maybe 200 vessels a year, and China is producing a couple thousand hundreds of thousands a year, right? I think that's a huge national security, geopolitical, and economic and a trade risk.

To learn how the N30 works, we took a tour around Navier's factory floor.

This is the foil, the actuation system. This portion is the strut, right? And this is your wings. These are the flaps, right? This is all carbon fiber. Then this foil can, you know, lock into multiple positions depending upon the shallows and the depths.

And then the flaps obviously go up and down.

Yeah, like 30 to 50 times a second. Very, very fast micro adjustments.

And what's that— what purpose is that serving?

So you got to keep it at a level. You're like making fine adjustment very, very fast. The computer is doing all of that. So that's the active stabilization system. So 2 back foils, 1 front foil. These are the wings underwater. So that's your front wing. That's the motor. There are ultrasounds looking at how high you're above the water and keeping you at a particular height above the water.

The foiling technology, it had a really big moment during the America's Cup 15 years ago or so.

Yeah, yeah. So hydrofoils are not new, you know. So why do you see a lot of hydrofoiling boats now becoming more popular? This is a computer-driven boat, so the computer is so much cheaper. And then obviously electric and hydrofoil goes hand in hand. If you can change like the cost, speed, convenience of how you can move on the water, you can turn waterways to highways.

Well, I can appreciate Sampreeti's grand vision and all. The truth is that I really just wanted to take a ride in the N30. And so we did.

So this is the boat of the future. Come on in.

Stylish in here. We were joined for the cruise by Kenneth Jensen, Navier's Chief Technology Officer.

All my past experience has been doing autopilots for drones. So this boat is like an airplane.

Yeah.

Like the boats are filled with cameras. So when we want to do vision-based auto docking, everything's electric. Like the steering actuators are electric. All of that makes it very easy to control from a computer. Lets us do things like go sideways.

You can turn in place.

That's cool. So like auto docking, something that you'll build in the future?

Yeah, that's in the future. So you can like deliver a boat and then, you know, if you want later to pay for auto docking, we can upload that to the boat. Make it better. Yeah.

There's a virtual anchor right now.

What's a virtual anchor? You just hover?

Yeah, it stays in place.

Oh, crazy!

So in Tahoe, you cannot drop an anchor, right? I mean, it's so deep, but you can just put a virtual anchor and do this, do your picnic, and, you know, yeah, do your thing.

Yeah, that is cool!

So if you turn around, you will see the wake, and the wake will disappear as we take off. And you're off!

That's crazy! You can feel it.

So look at the chops you're going over right now.

Yeah, that's insane. Oh my God. Yeah, that was super cool. No bullshit review, this is like incomparably smoother than being on a regular boat. Even though the top speed is lower than a gas-powered boat, you can win out on consistency because you just feel like you're not fighting the waves all the time. If they were going to build this as a commuter-type boat, which they, they are for these first ones, it would totally be legit. We went from Alameda to San Francisco. I used to work right near here and I think that took about 15 minutes. You could totally be on a laptop typing away.

Checks out. So there it is. Navier has indeed made a nice boat for hopping around the San Francisco Bay and points beyond. And this is something the company can be proud of.

I don't think I started my journey thinking I'm gonna start a company. I think it was always like, If I could solve a problem, how that can change the world.

The rest of the journey, though, is a question not just for Navier, but for the US itself. Do we want to get serious? I mean, really serious about boatbuilding again? Do we have the energy and the drive to cure what ails us and rectify an obvious problem? On this front, I'm hopeful, but far from certain. For there is much work to do. Sorry for going Debbie Downer. Whatever. Enjoy the foils and the majesty of San Francisco Bay.