“Isn’t electric just too slow to be practical?” It’s the second question, right after range, and it comes from a good instinct — you don’t want to trade your diesel for something that turns a day-sail into an ordeal. But the instinct hides an assumption worth pulling apart: that the power a boat needs rises gently with speed. It doesn’t. It climbs a cliff.
The cliff nobody shows you
The relationship between speed and power is cubic — push a little faster and the demand doesn’t nudge up, it leaps. On SV Endurance the trial found a clear sweet spot: at 2.5 to 3.5 knots the motor drew somewhere between 200 watts and 1 kilowatt. Ask the same boat for the roughly 4.2-knot pace a small diesel likes to hold, and the draw jumps to about 3 kilowatts. A fraction of a knot faster costs you a multiple of the power.
Read that the other way and it becomes the best news in electric boating. The 200 watt-to-1-kilowatt band is a load the array can meet in daylight. Slow down by a knot and you aren’t sacrificing — you’re moving into the range where the sun quietly carries you. That’s the whole trick: the efficient speed and the self-sustaining speed turn out to be the same speed.
Why this kills range anxiety
Range anxiety is really a knowledge problem. As Ed puts it, you don’t feel it when you have a well-designed battery system and you know how much power you still have. Once you can see the cliff — where the cheap knots end and the expensive ones begin — a slow passage stops feeling like a limitation and starts feeling like a choice you’re making on purpose. That picture, drawn for your exact boat, is what the configurator exists to hand you.
Electric isn’t slow. It’s honest about the cost of speed — and it rewards you, generously, for choosing the pace the sea was always cheapest at.