Yep, I did it again. I bought something weird and crazy from China. It’s a mini electric jet boat. “What’s a mini electric jet boat?” you might be asking. Think: comically small one-seater boat with an electrically powered jet ski drivetrain.

Basically, I plopped down a not insignificant amount of money online and then crossed my fingers. Here’s what happened next.

Firstly, this is kind of par for the course for me. If you’ve been following my writing for any significant period of time, you’ll have learned two things about me. I like e-bikes and I like buying weird electric vehicles from China that I don’t need. It’s a problem, I know. I’m going to get help one day. But that day is not today.

Because today I’ve got a new electric jet boat. You can see my unboxing and testing video of this aquatic miracle here, or keep reading below for the full story of how this happened.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

So here’s how it went. I’ve spent years writing a mostly-weekly column on the fun and weird Alibaba electric vehicles I find in my time-wasting window-shopping searches. A couple of years ago, one of them was a mini electric jet boat. And I’ve wanted one ever since.

So I started researching factories in China that build these things and talked to a number of them. Some seemed fairly new. Others seemed like fronts or merely trading companies. And they all seemed pretty shady. But this isn’t my first rodeo and so I chose the one that seemed the least risky and started talking details. I use a Chinese messaging service similar to WhatsApp that makes it a lot easier to communicate with the factories, and the lovely girl who works their sales office showed me several models and features. Together, we worked through the details and specs until I had planned out basically what I wanted.

Then it came time to pay.

This is always the scariest part and so I wired to China more money than a bad idea should cost. Over there, it’s common to do a 30% down payment and 70% balance payment upon completion, so that’s what I offered. I’m glad I did because production took several months longer than I expected, and I was starting to get worried, but fortunately, the factory was sending me fairly regular pictures and video updates of progress, which was comforting. After a few months, my order was finally ready, and so they packaged it up and shipped it off to me.

I should also mention that while I normally use FOB (free on board) or CIF (cost, insurance, freight) terms for these kinds of deals where I get some new toy in from China, this particular case was a bit riskier, and so I went with DDP (delivered duty paid) terms. The two former options leave most of the work on me to ship and import the thing, while the last option means the seller basically handles everything until there’s a janky wooden crate dropped in my driveway. DDP terms are always more expensive, and many factories don’t want to mess with it since it leaves most of the work of shipping and importing on the seller or their freight forwarder, which I preferred in this case.

This was also before all the new Trump tariffs this year, and so duties were much lower (somewhere around 27-28% total, I believe. Now they are probably 2-3x that much).

But with all of the work of actually dealing with getting the thing now finished, it was time to crack open the box. Inside was my shiny blue electric jet boat! I had it shipped to my parents’ place in Florida because they have a decently large pond where I could test it. There I got it open and hauled it back to the pond in what else but my electric mini truck that I bought from China nearly four years ago. It has since lived a loving but not easy life as a farm truck, and this isn’t even one of the weirdest things that has graced its bed in the last few years.

The little boat is so small that it actually fits nicely in the little bed of my mini-truck, and it was a great example of why I even wanted this thing to begin with: it’s small enough to fit in a car, so you can take it to the lake or ocean without needing a boat trailer.

Even a jet-ski needs a trailer, but you could take this little vessel to the shore with a kayak rack on your Tesla, or even on a decent car! Just kidding, I don’t even own a car… unless you count that mini-truck that I gave to my parents.

At the pond I dropped the boat down onto the grass, dragged it the last bit of the way down the bank and splashed it right into the drink. From there, I just needed to plop the 5 kWh LiFePO4 battery into the underseat compartment and I was ready to go.

There were no instructions, so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out the right combination of buttons to push and key turns to actually start it up, but from the first push of the accelerator, I knew this thing was wild!

It was supposed to be just over 30 mph capable (50 km/h or 27 knots), but the pond is only around 300 feet long and so the opposite bank comes at you mighty fast. I think I only got it up to around half its top speed because 1) I didn’t want to run aground, and 2) I was legitimately scared to go faster.

The boat comes with these weird stainless steel mounts on the side, and it turns out they are for this ridiculous looking inflatable bumper thing that reminds me of a big toilet seat. I didn’t install it because I hate how it ruins the sleek look of the boat. But I instantly discovered why they designed it, since the jet boat feels horribly unstable at slow speeds. As soon as you turn sharply and let off the throttle at slow speeds, you start heeling over significantly. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling since you’re sitting at the water line and feel like you’re going to be thrown out of the boat. The ballast of the huge battery sitting so low, plus whatever actual ballast they build into these things, probably means you won’t really capsize. But it sure feels like you’re going for a swim soon.

Turning at speed is much nicer, but if you’re not yet planing (going fast enough to rise out of the water and glide over the surface instead of just floating due to water displacement), it just feels like you’re going to rock yourself right out in a turn. The boat was obviously designed to handle at high speeds, not low speeds. It doesn’t have the wide beam of a jet ski for stability, so that inflatable toilet seat gives it low-speed stability.

But alas, I just couldn’t bring myself to install the nautical version of training wheels on that beautiful thing, so I pushed through it and just kept it at fairly high speeds in the pond. It was a blast, and with my dad there watching me, I was excited to give him a turn too.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I actually bought two of them.

With my dad’s boat unboxed, we both got in our own mini jet boats and had a blast ripping high-speed loops around his backyard pond.

These things are insanely powerful for what feels like a stubby kayak when you sit inside it, and the performance gives you an ear to grin.

Just be prepared for your face to turn to terror the first time you let off the throttle too abruptly and take a sharp turn.

As fun as they were though, we still weren’t even past half way down on the accelerator pedal, and so I knew that a larger body of water was going to be in our future.

These are motorized vessels and so they require registration to use them in public waterways in most states. It’s not like a kayak or canoe where you can just put in anywhere and pretty much be alright with the law. And in Florida, where the state makes a lot of its money from its waterways, they actually enforce this stuff.

I imagine I can get the boats properly registered with hull numbers for use in public waterways, but for expediency’s sake, I set my sights on a big private lake in a local eco-friendly planned community. The cool thing is that these huge lakes are off-limits to combustion engine watercraft, which means they’re basically only for kayakers and canoers, or the rare person who has an electric boat.

I’m a rare person.

So with the entire lake empty, I brought my jet boat over in the back of my family’s car and put in at the kayak dock.

If you watched my video above, you’ll already know how that went (complete with Beach Boys-style song montage). But for those who prefer to read instead of watching an awesome little jet boat rocket around a big lake, just know that it was an absolute riot. The mini electric jet boat is insanely fast and skipped the glassy surface of the pond like a pebble with a rocket engine on it.

Of course, the surface didn’t stay glassy long with the massive wake I was sending out, and that meant soon I was getting airborne, hopping my own wake while pulling tight figure eights.

With around 25 minutes of boating and filming, I had dropped the battery from 100% to 70%. Despite the high power, that big battery was impressively lasting!

The whole experience proved to me how right I was about the convenience of this boat format. This whole exploit was simple, a word that is almost never used when discussing boat ownership. To get to the water, I simply loaded the boat in the back of the car and then used a cheap Amazon kayak trailer to waddle it the 100 feet or so from the parking lot to the dock. The boat is still quite heavy – I’d guess at least 150 lb (70 kg) or so. But lifting one side at a time is doable by one dude, and the kayak trailer made it easy enough to move on my own across land.

There was no boat trailer necessary. No searching for a boat ramp. No hoping to stay off of Miami Boat Ramp YouTube channels lampooning people who don’t know what they’re doing with a trailer, etc. It was the boating experience of a jet-ski meets the ownership experience of a kayak.

For anyone who lives along the water, this would be an amazing toy to own. There are so many people with lakefront property who could have their own mini electric boat to tool around on whenever they want. Or if you live close to the coast, you could keep the boat in the garage with a kayak hoist and just drive it on down to the coast for fun. These things practically sell themselves. Cheaper than an electric surfboard and nearly as portable.

Which brings me to cost. I ended up paying around $5,500 for each boat, which is a lot to risk on this stuff, with only a hope that it would work out and that I could make some of the money back on my video and writing. And if you’re thinking, “Wow, this guy plopped down $11k on this stuff,” then I have two things to tell you. First, a Jet Ski would have cost more and been a huge hassle. And two, I didn’t spend $11k; I spent a lot more.

In fact, I couldn’t stop myself at the time (and considered it something of a business expense – hey, I’m working right now, people!), so it turns out that I actually bought three of these things. I know this sounds like an excuse, but it just made sense with how much shipping was already costing me! I mean, c’mon – I couldn’t afford not to.

Though I still have the third one in the crate and I’ll probably end up selling it new in box, if someone wants to find my email and make me an offer.

That also means I have two boats that I plan to keep, and I need names for them. Please hit me with your suggestions in the comment section. One of my subscribers suggested an absolute banger of a name with Sunny Side Up for my yellow and white solar-powered Chinese electric pleasure boat, and that’s what I went with.

Now I will say that as fun as these things are, they aren’t perfect. One of the boats arrived with its bilge pump motor always running due to a faulty float switch (oh yeah, they even have a bilge pump!). The factory also told me that they couldn’t install real cleats through the hull, though at least they did give me a bow eye that helps with tying it up.

I’ve technically been sitting on this story for a year, and I can tell you that after a year of living out in the Florida elements, one of the boat’s paint is a bit cracked near the hinges of the seat where it gets stressed from lifting the seat up to remove the battery.

The boats are also surprisingly loud. These are the loudest EVs I’ve ever seen, and I thought the F-150 Lightning was loud! A neighbor has one and I once remarked that it sounded like a jet turbine in the summer because of all its fans running, but now I know what an EV with an actual jet turbine sounds like, or at least a water jet turbine. To be more accurate, it’s not the boat that’s loud, but rather the cavitating water inside the jet turbine that is constantly screaming as its vacuum cavities repeatedly expand and collapse as they shoot out the back of the boat’s vectored thrust nozzle. It sounds like a wet, angry bat out of hell. A guy watching me from the shore of the lake actually asked if it was a two-stroke! So don’t think this is going to be a silent boat. The motor is silent, but the shooting water is loud.

Then there’s the battery. It weighs nearly 80 pounds and you have to pull the battery out to charge it – you can’t leave it in the boat and charge it since the charge and discharge port are one and the same.

I also burned out one of the chargers when I accidentally let the charger tip fall on some wet grass while it was plugged in. Poof. The magic smoke was out of the charger, and it wasn’t going back in. I’ll have to find another 84V charger and solder this massive and unique charging connector onto its output wire.

Speaking of the chargers, they are 2,500-watt chargers. They’ll impressively fill the batteries in just over two hours, but they are so powerful that they won’t run on any normal household 120V outlet. I got lucky that my dad’s garage had an RV outlet with a 30A breaker; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to use the charger.

But downsides aside, the rest of the experience was incredible! I love these things! They’re just so much fun, and they bring a smile to everyone’s face. Since I bought them a year ago, I’m seeing many more options on Alibaba for other factories starting to make and sell mini jet boats. I can all but guarantee you that within a year or two, there will be people re-selling mini jet boats in the US. Just make sure you go with a reputable company that has done its homework and can stand behind these things. A couple of years ago, I started an electric tractor company based on making a long list of improvements to what was originally a German-designed and Chinese-produced electric loader. We developed it (and subsequent models) into our own new design, offer full warranties, and keep a US warehouse stocked with replacement parts. That’s the only way to do business right, so don’t get hosed a few months from now by some fly-by-night company that read this article and then thought it would be a good idea to start hawking Chinese mini jet boats in the US. These things are quite rough around the edges (literally and figuratively) and would take some significant work to make them safe and reliable for a Western market.

And in the same vein, I don’t actually recommend anyone try and buy one of these from China, either. There’s just too much risk and too big a chance that you’ll get ripped off in the end, or you’ll get bent over a shipping container by customs and end up paying several times the purchase price in shipping and import fees.

I don’t have any plans to import and sell these, largely because of the liability (imagine how much I pay in business liability insurance just to run a tractor company) and the fact that there are too many design changes I’d need to make to turn it into something I’d be proud to stand behind and put my name on. I mostly go on these real-life Alibaba escapades because 1) I enjoy testing the weird and fun things you can find in a country that has certain product safety and manufacturing advantages compared to the West (i.e. less of the first and more of the second), and 2) so that I can share these experiences with my audience, most of whom will never have the ability to try these things themselves.

But hey, as a neat toy for my parents’ pond and the local lakes or Gulf of Mexico fun days, these are going to be perfect for us!