Electric Boats Take Off : Sellers of Newport’s Silent Craft Have Global Ideas
Years ago, Marshall (Duffy) Duffield’s electric boats were a Newport Harbor novelty.
As he cruised past gasoline-powered yachts and speedboats, their captains would yell jokes about long extension cords or shout words of surprise that such “cocktail cruisers” would run at all.
That was before Duffield, founder of Duffield Electric Boat Co., sold nearly 1,000 of the watercraft to the affluent residents of the area. The blue-canopied, silent motorboats are now commonplace, so much so that the market in Newport is saturated. So Duffield and partner Gary Crane are taking their innovative pleasure boats nationwide.
“My goal is to make the boat popular all over the country, not just for the rich people in Newport Beach,” said Duffield, 40. “We’re transforming it from a rich man’s toy to a more practical boat.”
The effort could be paying off: In 1985, Duffield made only about three boats a month. Now, the company makes about one boat a day. More families--not just retirees--are buying the craft, which have dropped in price from about $16,000 in the beginning to as low as $11,500 now.
And the company is finding a market internationally. Of the nearly 200 boats it sold last year, more than a third went to Europe and the Far East. A resort in Thailand bought one boat and placed an order for four more to use for tours.
The simple, boxy-looking boats, made of fiberglass, are covered by a blue canopy and often shielded by plexiglass. The cruisers, which conjure up images of Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise tour boats, are designed and built by 17 employees at a 20,000-square-foot warehouse in Newport Beach.
The company also hopes to sell boats to residents of lakefront areas, where powerful homeowner associations have grown wary of gasoline engines; and in the largely untapped Florida market, where waterfront canal homes are popular.
“You have to just get out in ‘On Golden Pond’ America and go with it,” said Gary Crane, 29, a former accountant who joined the company five years ago. “They’re kicking the gas boats off. They want no noise, no gas, no pollution.”
Duffield stumbled onto the idea. In 1970, when he was still a teen-ager, his father gave him $200 to buy the electrical system from an old golf cart and install it in the family boat.
The contraption caught the attention of Ray Godber, the co-owner of Trojan Battery Co. in Santa Fe Springs. Godber marveled that the boat was silent and blew no smoke. When he found out that Duffield’s boat was powered by Trojan batteries, he encouraged Duffield to turn the idea into an enterprise.
Godber, who provided some start-up capital, directed Duffield to engineers who could redesign the prototype. Slowly, the company made itself known in yachting circles.
The motor, manufactured by General Electric, is a simple device with only one moving part. The boat runs on as many as 12 batteries--similar in size to car batteries--each of which uses the same amount of electricity as a 100-watt light bulb left on for 24 hours. The boats’ top speed is about 6.5 m.p.h.
The batteries, which last five to eight years, must be charged for 12 hours to run for about 16 hours at cruising speed. Each boat has a gauge that tells how much charge is left.
The early boats, Duffield said, “were expensive and hard to build. We said, ‘If we want to grow, we have to make some major changes.’ ”
So in 1987, Duffield threw away the molds and revamped the line to a simpler craft that is easier to maintain. There are now three models--at 16, 18 and 21 feet--that range in price from $11,500 to $30,000. Amenities include TV sets, gas-powered grills, microwave ovens and refrigerators.
The boats soon gained the attention of a handful of distributors. The turning point came five years ago, when Duffield and Crane took a model to the International Marine Trade Exposition Conference in Chicago. They had no booth but set up shop just outside the front doors.
“I gave out all the brochures in two hours,” Duffield said.
Nearly 40 distributors now sell the boats, contrasted with none five years ago.
Still, electric boats only make up a small sliver of the leisure boat industry. Duffield expects his sales to top out at 1,000 annually by 1997. He said he knows of only two other electric-boat builders in the United States; one makes only high-priced, custom deluxe models; the other, only small pontoon boats.
Lars Granholm, director of technical services for the National Marine Manufacturers Assn. in Chicago, said the boats face the same problems as electric automobiles: “They’ve got a hell of a lot of weight to move for an extended period of time.”
Granholm confessed that he was not familiar with electric boats. He had heard only of electric motors that owners place on small fishing boats.
“It’s auxiliary power,” he said. “You can probably row faster.”
To provide enough battery power to make an electric speedboat viable would be prohibitively expensive, Duffield said, and manufacturers haven’t had the incentive yet to make the batteries more efficient.
So for now, Duffield has been touting the boat as an easy-to-use, simple means of relaxing after a hard day’s work. “A no-brainer” is the company’s term for starting the boat and operating it.
“What we build is a social event that just happens to be in a boat,” said Duffield, cruising past the homes in Newport Harbor in his own boat, called Outagas.
Electric Boat Sales Soar
In the past five years, Duffield Electric Boat Co. has increased its sales by expanding its distribution beyond Newport Beach.
Yearly Sales
1987: 6
1988: 32
1989: 125
1990: 168
1991: 196
1992*: 200
* Projected
Where They’re Sold
More than half of the electric boats sold worldwide last year were bought by Californians, and more than half of those purchases were in Orange County.
Newport Beach: 40 (20.4%)
Huntington Harbour: 12 (6.1%)
Elsewhere in California: 47 (24.0%)
Elsewhere in the U.S.: 70 (35.7%)
Outside the U.S.: 27 (13.8%)
Source: Duffield Electric Boat Co.
