Arc boats announces new, cheaper Arc Coast center console electric boat

Arc, the company behind the powerful Arc One and Arc Sport electric boats, announced its next model today: the Arc Coast, a center console boat with many of the capabilities of its predecessors at a significantly lower price.

As a reminder, Arc is a relatively new company, founded in 2021 in Los Angeles, targeting the luxury boat market with high-powered electric boats. Its cofounders, Mitch Lee and Ryan Cook, are engineers who met while working at Boeing.

The company has since grown to over 170 employees, and boasts that many of them are former SpaceX, Tesla, and Rivian workers (like, well, every other electric startup).

It started with the Arc One, a $300,000 limited-edition 500hp electric speedboat, of which only 20 were made. Then Arc moved onto the Sport, a powerful wake boat made for lake activities (which we drove and it literally knocked us off our seat), starting at $258k. It’s also working on an electric tugboat for the Port of LA.

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Sales are going well with a substantial backlog and the Sport is sold out through the summer. It’s currently hoping to ramp up production of the Sport “into the hundreds of boats a year,” but it isn’t there yet.

But even while it ramps Sport production, it’s looking to address other markets, and its new Arc Coast announced today is an impressive stab at that.

The Arc Coast is a “center console” model. For those of us in the car world, it might sound confusing to name a vehicle after one of its parts, but the term makes for a meaningful distinction on a boat: the helm (or “console”), where the pilot operates the boat, is smack in the middle, offering mobility all around the edges of the deck.

This mobility is helpful for certain applications, for example fishing. Being able to move around all sides of the boat means that your rod won’t get caught up on rigging or a canopy.

It also just makes it easier to hang out and get around the boat. Instead of having to squeeze between seats or flip open a door to get towards the bow, you can just walk all around the boat without much obstruction.

However, these types of boats tend to have less luxuriant upholstery, less protection from the elements (sun shades, windshields, etc), less sitting space than other boat formats.

Because of this, Arc has been able to save a good amount of money on materials, and it allows them to offer the Coast model with similar performance and many of the same features as its others, but at a lower price.

• Length: 24ft
• Battery: 226kWh (the same as the Sport’s battery, which was good for 4-5 hours of use there)
• Horsepower: 400hp
• Top speed: 50mph (~43 knots)
• Hull Material: Fiberglass
• Seating: 10 people
• Pricing: Starting at $168,000

The Arc Coast maintains the benefits of its electric powertrain, which Arc highlights that it designed and built from the ground up. By starting from scratch and designing a boat around its own powertrain, instead of just building a fiberglass hull and attaching an off-the-shelf outboard (like the vast majority of other center console boats) and console gauges from random suppliers, Arc is able to offer a more consistent experience.

It’s the same thing we at Electrek notice and comment on in automobiles – cars that were built from the ground up to be electric generally do a better job of it than cars which are retrofitted from gas models or share platforms with them.

Arc thinks that the difference is even starker in boats, as outboard motors are notoriously unreliable and offering a properly-sealed electric powertrain will make maintenance much easier, even in harsher saltwater environments (as compared to the Sport model, which was more freshwater-focused).

It also offers usability benefits. By moving to inboard motors, the rear of the boat can be utilized for a low swim step, making ingress and egress easier, and a sunpad for lounging. It also takes away the fumes and noise that normally plague the back end of a fossil-powered boat, giving you more usable space and making it much more pleasant to hang out back there.

That usability carries over into the boat’s software, which Arc has also designed from the ground up in a modern, consistent interface. When we saw this ourselves on the Sport we were impressed, though the software wasn’t done yet (and will surely be in a constant state of getting updates for some time to come).

This interface includes connectivity and over-the-air updates, which offer big benefits for a boat owner as it’s a lot easier to check your boat’s charge, or perhaps see a feed from the boat’s cameras, through an app rather than having to head down to the marina and take a look yourself.

We haven’t yet had a chance to try out the Arc Coast – and in fact, you’ll notice that the photos and videos on this page are backlit renders, as Arc is still working on some of the specifics. Nevertheless, preorders are open today over at Arc’s website, and Arc says the boat is “coming in 2026.”

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