A propulsion system built the way nature builds — paired organs, graceful degradation, nothing that fails all at once.
Every claim on this page is labelled by how far we can stand behind it — so you always know what is proven and what is still ahead.
- MeasuredProven on the FY25 sea trial — a thousand nautical miles on real water.
- ModelProjected by our propulsion model, calibrated against that trial — not yet measured on your hull.
- In developmentDesigned, not yet proven. We tell you before you count on it.
Four buses, one organism
The system that sailed 1,000 nautical miles on SV Endurance runs four electrical buses, each doing one job well, with a Victron Cerbo GX supervising the whole metabolism. Every figure below was measured on that voyage — not projected, not brochure copy.
- 100 VDC solar bus — a 1 kW array run at high voltage to cut line loss Measured · FY25
- 48 VDC propulsion bank — 24.48 kWh across three isolatable banks Measured · FY25
- Torqeedo Cruise 6 kW drive — the motor the trial ran on, five-blade prop Measured · FY25
- 12 VDC house bank — 5.496 kWh for instruments, navigation and living Measured · FY25
- 110 VAC shore bus — Victron MultiPlus II charger/inverter for shore-style loads Measured · FY25
- Victron Cerbo GX — the central controller supervising all four buses Measured · FY25
Redundancy as a design religion
Battery banks are paired and parallel. Charge controllers are duplicated. When something fails at sea — and at sea, things fail — the system sheds capability gradually instead of going dark. We call it graceful degradation; a sailor calls it getting home.
What the trial taught us
Honesty is part of the engineering: the trial’s transom-mounted outboard was prone to cavitation in high sea states — fine for coastal work, not good enough for blue water. That finding is exactly why the next generation moves to more robust, integrated drives. We publish our limitations because we design against them.
Where we’re headed next
The next generation is on the bench, not on the water yet. These are the pieces we are building toward — stated as intent, so you can tell them apart from what the trial already proved.
- POD drive — a permanently-submerged Torqeedo POD is in design to become the all-weather primary, with the transom outboard stepped back to fair-weather maneuvering. In development
- LFP bank option — a LiFePO4 alternative to today’s proven AGM propulsion bank is being explored for owners who want more energy in less weight. In development
- Hydrogeneration — spinning the drive as a turbine under sail is being developed to harvest energy on passage, targeting roughly a kilowatt at cruising sail speed. In development
How we work with yards
If you retrofit boats for a living, we hand you the engineering, not a lecture. The configurator becomes your design-and-quoting tool; behind it, every conversion leaves our side as a documented package your shop can build against. Here is exactly what changes hands.
- A design package — the configured system for that specific hull, produced by the same model the sea trial validated.
- A bill of materials — a pre-configured hardware kit sized to the boat, not a shelf of parts to guess your way through.
- Our review of your install plan — a second set of engineering eyes on the layout before anything is fitted.
- A commissioning checklist — the steps to bring the system up and confirm it behaves the way the model said it would.
Your shop owns the boat, the customer, and the installation itself. We own the engineering behind the numbers and the kit that meets them. Licensing conversations are open now — start a project brief →
What this means for your boat
The trial proved the system on one hull. The configurator takes what we measured there and projects it onto yours — a modelled curve, calibrated against real water. Model