September 26, 2007
By DEE GILL
ALMOST since its introduction more than a century ago, the electric pleasure boat has been known as the golf cart of the sea, loved mainly by the oldest of the retiree set. With an old-fashioned canvas canopy and a top speed of about eight miles per hour, it is a notoriously unhip craft, holding little appeal among the younger sail-and-power crowd that has made recreational boating an $11 billion-a-year industry.
But a two-year-old company owned by the Learjet heiress Shanda Lear-Baylor is hoping to broaden the electric-boat market by producing a model bearing little resemblance to those scallop-topped vessels. With new designs and options, Lear Baylor of Newport Beach, Calif., is one of two new manufacturers hoping to attract younger buyers to the niche.
The Lear 204, created by Ms. Lear-Baylor’s husband, Terry Baylor, an industrial designer, looks like a craft associated with luxury, wealth and speed. In its cruising position, it is a sleek 20-footer shaped a little like a racer, allowing driver and date to snuggle at the end of an elongated bow.
With the flick of a toggle, however, four electric motors raise the bow cover to become the hard top of a party boat suitable for entertaining 10 guests. There is a fridge, freshwater sink, fold-out table, deck and private head. Hard plastic windows flip down and slide to enclose the cabin. It goes six m.p.h., tops.
Ms. Lear-Baylor says they designed the boat partly to appeal to women like Lynne Butterfield, who was not a boater before she saw a Lear 204 cruising near her Newport Beach home. She cashed in a retirement account to buy one on her 58th birthday last September. She says she often cruises alone in the early mornings, and with family and friends in the afternoons.
To crack that demographic, Ms. Lear-Baylor says she pestered her husband to simplify every aspect of the boat’s operation, including launching and setting up the cabin. She says she wanted a boat that a woman could take her girlfriends on, sans husbands, “without breaking a nail.”
Electric pleasure boats are most popular in lakes where speed is restricted, and in some seaside harbors, like Newport, R.I., the Potomac River Basin in Washington and the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia.
Although the boats experienced a brief heyday after making their debut at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, their appeal has been limited. The National Marine Manufacturers Association says sales in this category are too small to track, and only a few small businesses build these boats.
The Duffy Electric Boat Company, a privately owned firm in Adelanto, Calif., is the largest American manufacturer, selling eight models, swamping the waterways where these boats are popular, particularly with the 21-foot model, which starts around $30,000. (The Duffy boats range in price from about $28,000 for a 16-foot classic to about $50,000 for a decked-out 22-footer.) Lear Baylor, on the other hand, has sold 33 boats since July 2005, starting at $52,000 and going up to about $70,000 fully loaded.
No one has figured out how to make a purely electric boat go fast, as speed declines with the weight of every extra battery. Instead, buyers tend to be seeking a quiet, easy cruise and low maintenance.
Nancy Frainetti is another boat maker who is confident that there is a younger market for electric boats.
In St. Petersburg, Fla., Ms. Frainetti advertises her 24-foot Vision boat by hiring a 16-year-old girl to drive it in the Vinoy Basin of Tampa Bay.
Ms. Frainetti sold Duffy boats for nine years before joining two partners who thought they could build a model more attractive to younger buyers, particularly those with children, by adding features like a head, swim deck and pullout shower.
Their company, Vision Boatworks of Pinellas Park, Fla., has sold seven boats since January, at prices ranging from $35,000 to about $50,000.
The Vision’s traditional canvas canopy can be lowered electronically or opened above to accommodate fishing. Its hybrid-electric model, in which a diesel engine gives the batteries longer life by charging them while in use, includes air-conditioning. A new design will allow users to convert most of the deck into one big bed.
Curiously, the green argument that has made hybrid cars cool has not helped sell electric boats. “I have had no luck whatsoever selling this boat with an environmental angle,” said Todd Sims, a former Bostonian who left an information-technology career last year to sell Lears in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The electric boats’ clean power appeals to people in their 20s, but that group has not been buying them, both Mr. Sims and Ms. Frainetti say. Their buyers are younger than traditional electric-boat buyers, but not really young. “When I was selling Duffys, it was 85-year-old buyers,” Ms. Frainetti said. “Everyone who has bought this” — a Vision boat — “so far has been closer to 50.”
Mr. Sims says he has yet to sell a Lear to a Floridian, which confounds him. He points out that Fort Lauderdale alone has some 75 miles of no-wake canals that prohibit going much faster than the Lear’s top speed. Yet he sells mainly to New Englanders.
Launching his Lear 204 from a public boat ramp at George English Park in Fort Lauderdale, Mr. Sims raises the top with a key-chain remote and starts the engine with a push of the throttle. He glides quietly down the Middle River, passing dozens of waterfront homes and their private docks, filled, almost exclusively, with cabin cruisers.