I got a $1,000 electric boat from China two years ago. Here’s what it looks like now
My regular readers may remember that two years ago, I was winning so hard at life that I bought myself a brand-spankin’ new boat as a treat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still on an independent journalist’s salary here though, so when I say that I had “boat money”, I mean I scraped together enough to buy a $1,000 electric boat directly from China. It’s now been two years since that Alibaba delivery, so let’s see how it’s held up and what it looks like now.
As a bit of a refresher first though, here’s what I got at the time. Inside of a surprisingly well-made steel frame and plywood-lined crate (that probably would have cost $1k by itself to have made in the US), my five-seater fiberglass boat awaited me.
It was powered by a cute little 500W inboard motor with a belt and pulley drive connecting it to a rudimentary prop fashioned out of 1/8″ (3mm thick) steel plate bent and welded onto a section of pipe.
The boat didn’t have batteries, so I added my own pair of 12V 200Ah LiFePO4 batteries to create a 5 kWh battery pack that was likely way bigger than I needed.
You can check out my unboxing and testing video here, which went viral with nearly four million people having now joined me at the beginning of this crazy adventure.
The boat seemed to work, in that it stayed above the waterline of our local lake and could move both fore and aft under its own power, fulfilling the major requirements of what it takes to be a motorboat.
However, its performance left a lot to be desired. The prop was only around 75% submerged, meaning there was a lot of cavitation and wasted power churning air through the water. Not only did that make it inefficient, but also slow.
It was hard to travel over a single knot, though I did briefly hit 2 knots on my GPS speedometer app (and I’m counting that, even if I can’t be sure it wasn’t a fluke).
In other words, the boat was surprisingly decent, yet the performance was underwhelming.
For a while now, I’ve been chipping away at a few upgrades to the boat each time I visit my parent’s house, where I keep it. It’s been a fine little boat for my dad to take the grandkids out on and teach them about boating, but it has been due for some deferred love, maintenance, and upgrades.
First of all, here’s how it has aged. Without regular cleaning, there was some serious marine grime building up, but the fiberglass has actually held up surprisingly well in two years of harsh Florida sun and UV.
After two years, the chrome railings had a decent amount of corrosion and what looked like pitting, though it pretty much all buffed right out when I disassembled the canopy to clean everything really well.
After buffing the shine back into the rails, I applied a clear coat so that the rails will hopefully keep their shimmer and I won’t have to re-scrub the life back into them next year. The rest of the boat’s hull and canopy got a simple soapy scrub down.
As I put the canopy back together, I finally made a big addition I’ve been planning ever since I got the boat: solar panels. I put a pair of 100W solar panels on the canopy and wired them into an MPPT solar charge controller that feeds back into the batteries. The panels don’t charge quite as quickly as the boat drains, but it has meant that I never need to pull the boat out to charge it anymore since it just slowly charges up all day while it’s floating around at the dock.
Solar panels on electric boats are a game changer, especially those used for only a few hours a week, such as a Sunday cruise. You can run your battery nearly empty on the water in a day, then let it charge itself up over the next few days.
The next big upgrade I’ve been planning is more power. To get there, I had a slick idea that would let me replace the old rudder and motor in one fell swoop.
The rudder was horribly rusted out at this point, though amazingly that terribly inefficient propellor looked nearly as good as new, so I suspect they actually used stainless steel to fabricate it.
Since the design of the propellor shaft meant that its angle forced the propellor to be too high, I decided to simply replace that entire system with an alternative. Instead of yanking out the propellor shaft and needing to seal the stuffing box, I left the existing seals in place and just cut off the propellor. It ain’t pretty, but it’s below the waterline. It was also a rare case of the easiest solution and the safest solution converging on the same answer, since the shaft is already perfectly sealed against water ingress.
I found an 80 lb thrust Minn Kota trolling motor used online and snagged it for around $200 (it cost over $1,400 new for this American-made motor). It has what Minn Kota refers to as an indestructible shaft, which I believe since it was hard as hell to cut it down to length using a pipe cutter, which was necessary to preserve the wires that run down the shaft.
I removed the rudder and replaced it with the entire trolling motor, now with its shortened shaft, and welded up some new linkage to connect it to the old rudder controls. After yanking out the Minn Kota’s control board and wiring it into my batteries, I had a Frankenstein setup that I figured would give me much more power and also some effective thrust vectoring since I could control the direction of the motor from the wheel, like a real outboard.
I hadn’t yet run the wires up to the helm, so the boat temporarily required a crew of two when I put it back into the water. My dad took the wheel while I stayed in the ‘engine room’ in the back to control the throttle.
It was immediately apparent how much more powerful the boat was now, actually leaving a wake. Unfortunately, it was also immediately apparent why boats have rudders, since this flat bottom boat now had the worst case of oversteer I’ve ever seen.
With the powerful thrust, the boat basically shoved its ass-end all over the place with just a bit of nudging. The cool thing was that it could literally turn in its own length, though we were basically always turning until we could find neutral on the wheel.
My dad described what we had done as “like putting an outboard motor on a pie tin”, and I have to say that felt pretty accurate. It made for some great laughs (see the testing video here, highly recommended!) but was barely controllable. It felt like a bumper car on water.
To fix it, I added a simple bolt-on rudder on the motor shaft. Putting the boat back in proved that there was more control, but it still tends to oversteer a bit. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun as hell, but it’s still doesn’t have the precision control I was hoping for. Oh well, it’s good enough for a $1,000 Chinese boat with nearly half as much added into it as part of the upgrades!
Now, the boat is solar-powered, so it never needs charging, and the power is much better to allow for some actually fun cruising at speeds of up to approximately 5 knots. I don’t think we’ll be pulling a water skier anytime soon, but we’re definitely leaving a wake now.
The last thing I need to do is add a pair of bilge pumps (it’s got two sponsons that create low points on either side, so I need two pumps). I had been putting off that project because I never thought I’d really need them, and it was more of a precaution in case of some type of freak accident where I rammed something submerged that holed the hull. I was also dreading putting a hole in a perfectly good fiberglass boat for the pump outlet, even if it was going to be well above the water line.
However, what I didn’t account for was Hurricane Milton, which put so much rain into the boat at such a steep angle that it actually started working its way under the rear bench and filling up the “engine room” area below deck. The boat is self-bailing, at least in normal rain, and has a central scupper that funnels rainwater down through the hull. With around a foot (30 cm) of freeboard, it’s never been an issue, even in hard Florida rains. But a Cat 3 hurricane is a different animal, and once enough water worked its way under the rear bench and the sideways wind/rain duo started tipping the boat, physics took the wheel and the below picture is how things looked after the storm passed.
Fortunately, this was pretty much the only damage my parents’ place took. The boat had probably 100 gallons 380 liters) of water below deck and so my dad couldn’t right it by himself. It sat that way for around six weeks until my next visit, when we pumped the water out. The hull was still secure and she floated right back to her former self.
Having survived two years of use and a Category 3 hurricane, it was time to finally give the old girl’ a name. I asked my subscribers for their recommendations and received hundreds of great ideas (including dozens of Boaty McBoatface) but finally decided on what I felt was the best name of all.
As you read this, the Sunny Side Up still floats, basking in the battery-charging sun and cruising the local private waterways at speeds fast enough to get a fist shaken at you in a no-wake zone.
She ain’t the prettiest boat out there. Nor the fastest. But she’s mine, and she’s beautiful to me.
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For years, Tesla has been the go-to EV recommendation for “normals” looking for a painless, low-effort experience from their first electric cars. In light of questionable recalls and its CEO’s recent involvement in controversial politics, however, people are starting to distance themselves from the trailblazing company.
All that begs the question: what should we recommend to EV noobs now?
Despite early quality issues and ongoing service headaches, the groundbreaking S3XY lineup of EVs have always had a secret weapon in the form of the Tesla Supercharger network.
That network of dependable high-speed chargers, paired with solid app integration that makes it easy for Tesla drivers to find available chargers just about anywhere in the US, gave the brand a leg up – but no more. By opening up the Supercharger network to brands like Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and others, Tesla has given away its biggest competitive advantage.
Add in charging and route-planning apps like Chargeway, that make navigating the transition from CCS to NACS easier than ever with its intuitive colors and numbers and easy on/off switch for vehicles equipped with NACS adapters, and it feels like the time is right to start suggesting alternatives to the old EV industry stalwarts. As such, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Here, then, are my picks for the best Tesla S3XY (and Cybertruck) alternatives you can buy.
Less Model S, more Lucid Air
Developed by OG Tesla Model S engineers with tunes from Annie Get Your Gun playing continuously in their heads, the Lucid Air promises to be the car Tesla should and could have built, if only Elon had listened to the engineers.
With panel fit, material finish, and overall build quality that’s at least as good as anything else in the automotive space, the Lucid Air is a compelling alternative to the Model S at every price level – and I, for one, would take a “too f@#king fast” Lucid Air Sapphire over an “as seen on TV” Model S Plaid any day of the week. And, with Supercharger access reportedly coming later this quarter, Air buyers will have every advantage the Supercharger Network can provide.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Model 3, more Hyundai IONIQ 6
Hyundai has been absolutely killing it these days, with EVs driving record sales and new models earning rave reviews from the automotive press. Even in that company the IONIQ 6 stands out, with up to 338 miles of EPA-rated range and lickety-quick 350 kW charging available to make road tripping easy – especially now that the aerodynamically efficient IONIQ 6 has Supercharger access through a NACS adapter (the 2026 “facelift” models get a NACS port as standard).
The company’s sole electric sedan hasn’t seen the same sales success as IONIQ 5, of course – but that has more to do with America’s insatiable lust for crossovers and SUVs than any shortcoming inherent in the IONIQ 6 itself. All the same, Hyundai is helping dealers clear out its remaining 2024 and ’25 models with 0% financing for up to 48 months through June 2nd.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Model X, more Volvo EX90
Once upon a time, Mrs. Jo Borrás and I were shopping three-row SUVs and found ourselves genuinely drawn to the then-new Model X. Back then it was the only three-row EV on the market, but it wasn’t Elon’s antics or access to charging, or even the Model X’s premium pricing that squirreled the deal. It was the stupid doors.
We went with the similarly new Volvo XC90 T8 in denim blue, and followed up the big PHEV with a second, three years later, in Osmium Gray. When it’s time to replace this one, you can just about bet your house that the new 510 hp EX90 with 310 miles of all-electric range will be near the top of the shopping list.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Model Y, more Kia EV6
If half the fun of driving a Model Y is terrifying your passengers with its straight-line speed, then the Kia EV6 has to be a serious contender for a replacement.
The sporty EV6 GT made its global debut by drag racing some of the fastest ICE-powered cars of the day, including a Lamborghini, Mercedes-AMG GT, a Porsche, even a turbocharged Ferrari – and it beat the pants off ’em. Combine supercar-baiting speed with an accessible price tag, NACS accessibility, $10,000 in customer cash on remaining 2024 models ($3,000 on 2025s) and just a hint of Lancia Stratos in the styling, the EV6 is tough to beat.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Cybertruck, more therapy
It’s not bulletproof, it’s not easy to upfit, it shouldn’t be used for towing, and it won’t win in a straight fight against a vinyl picket fence. By just about every standard “truck” metric, the Tesla Cybertruck falls short against the competition from Chevrolet, Ford, and Rivian. On a more subjective front, the Cybertruck has become a symbol for a conservative movement that is (depending on your point of view) either making America great again or plunging a once-great democracy into an era of fascist oligarchy and widespread stupidity.
In short, it’s probably best to skip the CT.
If you disagree with that statement and feel like driving a new Tesla Cybertruck is the key to happiness, I’m not sure an equally ostentatious GMC Hummer EV or more subtle Rivian R1T will help you scratch that particular itch – but maybe therapy might!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Original content from Electrek.
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Republicans launched multiple attacks against EVs, clean air and American jobs this week, at the behest of the oil industry that funds them. These attacks won’t be successful, and EVs will continue to grow regardless, and inevitably take over for outdated gasoline vehicles.
However, these republican attacks on EVs will still have some effect: they will diminish the US auto industry globally, leading to job losses and surrendering one of the jewels in the crown of American industry to China, where there is no similar effort to destroy its own domestic EV industry.
Republican attacks on clean air this week included moves to block funding that has led to a renaissance in US manufacturing and also to illegally block clean air laws. They also moved forward with a procedural step towards increasing US fuel costs by $23B, an effort which the former reality TV contestant posing as the head of the DOT announced in January.
These moves shouldn’t be a big surprise – republicans have opposed clean air and American jobs for many years now, and they’re doing it because they want to maintain the bribes they get from the oil industry.
But they should inspire worry for Americans, because they will only harm the country’s domestic manufacturing base in the face of a changing auto industry.
Republicans keep trying to kill clean cars
The last time a republican occupied the the White House, we saw similar efforts to try to raise fuel and health costs for Americans, and to block superior EV technology from flourishing. That didn’t work in the end, and EVs continued to grow both during that period and after.
All the while, fossil fuels have maintained their privileged policy position, being allowed to pollute with impunity and costing the US $760 billion per year in externalized costs. Much of that subsidy is accounted for in the cost of pollution from gas cars, which are one of the primary uses of fossil fuels, which means that, in fact, gasoline vehicles receive much more subsidy than EVs do.
And yet, EVs still managed to grow substantially, despite these headwinds. EV sales have continued to grow, both in the US and globally, even as headlines incorrectly say otherwise. The republican party’s attempts to kill them were futile, and will continue to be.
It didn’t work, but it did delay progress
However, anti-EV actions from Mr. Trump and the republican party did manage to delay progress from where it could have been if America actually instituted smart industrial policy earlier.
What if, instead of the bumbling, idiotic nonsense we went through the last time Mr. Trump squatted in the White House, we could have had something more like President Biden’s EV policy, which created hundreds of thousands of jobs and attracted hundreds of billions of dollars of manufacturing investment?
Surely the American auto industry would be ahead of where it is now if those investments had had time to come online. But instead, republicans are currently trying to kill those jobs, which has already led to several manufacturing projects being cancelled this year, depriving Americans of the economic boost they need right now.
Meanwhile, there’s one place that this sort of stumbling isn’t happening: China.
China is taking advantage
China has spent more than a decade focusing on securing material supply, building refining capacity, developing their own battery technology, and encouraging local EV manufacturing startups.
This has paid off recently, as Chinese EVs have been rapidly scaling in production in recent years. It took a lot of the auto industry by surprise how rapidly Chinese companies have scaled, and how rapidly Chinese consumers have adopted them, after having an initially slow start.
But that adoption hasn’t just been local, it’s also global. Last year, China became the largest auto exporter in the world, taking a crown that Japan had held for decades. But the change was even more dramatic than that – as recently as 2020, China was the sixth-largest auto exporter in the world, just behind the US in 5th place.
China’s dramatic turn upward started in 2020, and now it’s in first place. Meanwhile, because of all the faffing about, the US remains exactly where it was in 2020 – still in fifth place. Well, sixth now, since China eclipsed us (and everyone else).
Tariffs won’t fix it
The reaction of the rest of the world’s automaking countries has been to put tariffs on Chinese autos, hoping to forestall the country’s dramatic rise to dominance. (Although, due to Mr. Trump’s idiotic flailing, Europe is already talking about removing these trade barriers with China)
But tariffs have been tried before, and they didn’t work. When Japan had a similarly meteoric rise to global prominence as an auto manufacturer in the 1970s and 80s, largely due to their adoption of new technology, processes, and different car styles which incumbents were ignoring, the US tried to stop it with tariffs.
All this did was make US manufacturers complacent, and Japan still managed to seize and maintain the crown of top auto exporter (occasionally trading places with Germany) from then until now.
Then as now, the true way to compete is to adapt to the changing automotive industry and take EVs seriously, rather than giving the auto industry excuses to be complacent. But instead, republicans aren’t doing that, and in fact are working to ensure the American auto industry doesn’t adapt, by actively killing the incentives that were leading to a boom in domestic manufacturing investment.
US auto industry jeopardized by republicans
Make no mistake about it: destroying EV incentives, and allowing companies to pollute more and innovate less, will not help the US auto industry catch up with a fast moving competitor.
As we at Electrek have said for years, you cannot catch up to a competitor that is both ahead of you and moving faster than you.
This applies to individual companies, which took their sweet time responding to the challenge from electric upstarts like Tesla, and have now lost market share to said upstarts and let a competitor establish itself in a big way (even though Tesla’s CEO is now trying desperately to harm his own company specifically, and the US EV industry as a whole, by being the largest funder of the party working to destroy said industry).
It also applies to nations, which could have spent the last decade doing what the Chinese auto industry has been doing, but instead non-Chinese automakers have been begging their governments for more time, even though it’s not the regulations that threaten them, it’s competition from a new and motivated rival that is moving faster and in a more determined manner towards the future.
The way that we get around this should be clear: take EVs seriously.
But that’s not what republicans are doing, and in doing so, they are signing the death warrant for an important US industry in the long term.
Another thing republicans are trying to kill is the the rooftop solar credit, which means you could have only until the end of this year to install rooftop solar on your home before the cost of doing so goes up by an average of ~$10,000. So if you want to go solar, get started now, because these things take time and the system needs to be active before you file for the credit.
To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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International equipment manufacturer Vermeer has unveiled a full-scale prototype of its Interlune excavator, a machine designed to ingest 100 metric tons of rocks and dirt per hour, extracting valuable helium as it makes its way across the surface … of the Moon.
Helium plays a critical role in the manufacturing of semiconductors, chips, optics, and all the other stuff that makes EVs, autonomy, the Internet, and the rest of twenty-first century life possible. The problem is that, despite being the second-most common element in the universe, helium is pretty rare on Earth – and we are rapidly running out. As such, there are intense economic and political pressures to find new and reliable sources of helium somewhere, anywhere else, and that demand has sparked a new modern space race focused on harvesting helium on the Moon and getting it back home.
To that end, companies like American lunar mining startup Interlune and the Iowa-based equipment experts at Vermeer are partnering on the development of suite of interplanetary equipment assets capable of digging up lunar materials like rocks and sand from up to three meters below the surface, extract helium-3 (a light, stable isotope of helium believed to exist in abundance on the Moon), then package it, contain it, and ship it back to Earth.
“When you’re operating equipment on the Moon, reliability and performance standards are at a new level,” says Rob Meyerson, Interlune CEO. “Vermeer has a legacy of innovation and excellence that started more than 75 years ago, which makes them the ideal partner for Interlune.”
Enter: Japan
America isn’t the only spacefaring nation eyeing a helium mine on the Moon. Japan announced similar plans back in 2023, with Japanese construction giant Komatsu announcing plans to develop a fully electric excavator capable of operating on the lunar surface.
The company showed a scaled prototype of the machine at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas (above), emphasizing the need to develop new ways to operate equipment assets in the extreme temperatures of extraplanetary environments beyond diesel or even hydrogen combustion.
On the airless surface of the moon, it would be impossible for an internal combustion engine to operate on the moon’s surface because there is no oxygen for combustion. Electrically powered machines seem the obvious solution with solar power generation supplying the electricity. But the answer is not that simple.
Temperature changes on the surface of the moon are extreme. They can soar to 110° C and plummet to -170° C. Developing electric construction machinery to perform in this environment is no easy task, but Komatsu is tackling issues one by one as they appear. Using thermal control and other electrification technologies, we are engineering solutions.
Despite Komatsu’s apparent head start, however, Vermeer seem to pulled ahead – not just in terms of machine development, but in terms of extraction potential as well.
“The high-rate excavation needed to harvest helium-3 from the Moon in large quantities has never been attempted before, let alone with high efficiency,” said Gary Lai, Interlune co-founder and CTO. “Vermeer’s response to such an ambitious assignment was to move fast. We’ve been very pleased with the results of the test program to date and look forward to the next phase of development.”
Interlune is funded by grants from the US Department of Energy and NASA TechFlights. In 2023, the company received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research award to develop the technology to size and sort lunar regolith (read: dirt). Interlune has raised $18 million in funding so far, and is planning its first mission to the Moon before 2030.
Electrek’s Take
We’ve got space travel, weird mineral extraction from another planet that’s essential for our technology, and a rapid, unchecked proliferation of AI. All we need now is big worms, a whole bunch of hallucinogenic narcotics, and the will to smash up a bunch of data centers with baseball bats – then we’ll have a pretty decent Dune LARP going. Yee-ha!
SOURCE | IMAGES: Interlune.
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