Arc’s $160M tugboat deal shows how electrifying big boats is the right choice
Arc boats has announced a deal with Curtin Maritime to build 8 electric “ship assist” tugboats, meant for moving large cargo ships in and out of port. But the big takeaway is that nobody’s doing it because of grants or subsidies, but rather because it just makes economic sense.
We at Electrek have covered Arc before, but if you remember them it would probably be from their Arc One, Arc Sport or Arc Coast consumer models. It’s a fairly young company, founded in just 2021, and staffed by several former SpaceX, Tesla and Rivian engineers.
But Arc hasn’t just done consumer boats, earlier this year it unveiled that it was working on an electric tug for the Port of Los Angeles, which is now in service as the “Aaron P”. That boat is all-electric with 600hp, and is classified as a “truckable tug,” which means it can be transferred inland on a truck if so needed.
But now Arc has its sights set higher, and it’s building a tug (or, well, 8 of them) with ten times the power, made to move giant cargo ships in and out of America’s biggest port, or wherever else they’re needed.
The new tug is classified as a “ship assist” tug, which are the boats that control giant cargo ships in port. Since precise maneuvering isn’t really the forté of these giant ships, small but powerful tugboats are used to get them where they need to be inside a port complex.
To accomplish this task, Arc’s tug will have 4,000hp worth of electric propulsion onboard, along with a 6MWh battery, sized to be able to handle the average job these tugs are called on to do.
However, the boat is technically a hybrid – it has an onboard diesel generator to provide backup power if needed, whether for a particularly heavy day or for some sort of oceangoing operation that might be a little further off shore than its typical fare. But it’s been designed to be electric first, and to have megawatt charging capability to help fill those batteries back up from shore power inbetween jobs. (Arc is planning to install MCS chargers at the Port of LA)
And, even if the boat were never plugged in, it would still offer big benefits. A smaller diesel engine operating as a generator can work in a more optimal part of the powerband, and battery power can be used to power onboard electricity loads when the ship is idling, which tugboats spend a lot of their time doing. And the lack of exhaust stacks means 360º visibility for the captain.
Further, electric motors offer more precise control. Many large ships already use electric motors for this reason, and for their higher efficiency, though that is not something that has made it way to too many tugboats yet.
The 8 tugs are being designed and built alongside Curtin Maritime, which has been in the tugboat business for 28 years. The design of the ship itself and the shipbuilding effort will be done by Curtin, on the West Coast of the US, and Arc will provide its expertise with electric powertrains.
Electrification makes sense ‘from a purely spreadsheet level’
Arc says that the agreement it’s signed with Curtin, for 8 tugboats at $20 million each, represents an inflection point for the industry. While there have been a number of other electric tugs, ferries, and so on, most of them are the result of grants, government partnerships or the like – whereas this deal is between two profit-seeking companies who simply decided that electrified equipment offers a better value proposition, all things considered.
Reliability and maintenance is also an important consideration for a tugboat. The tug needs to be the most reliable boat around, the one that others rely on when things go south. And any time spent doing maintenance means lost revenue and more stress on every other boat that is relying on you. Arc says that the electric powertrain should help to maximize uptime.
All of this makes a compelling economic argument, even without taking into account any grants or awards to encourage electrification (Arc is not relying on any of these, but isn’t saying it won’t apply for them if it qualifies for any)
Of course, in addition to the savings and capabilities of the boat, we should consider that diesel engines do actually benefit from tremendous subsidies in terms of the unpriced negative externalities they cause for the world around them.
These boats can carry tens of thousands of gallons of diesel in their tanks, and when that gets burned, it makes its way into the atmosphere causing climate change and into your lungs causing health issues. Then, when people who live near ports have higher incidence of lung problems (or basically any other health problem), those health bills aren’t paid by polluters that caused them. That’s a subsidy, and globally it runs on the order of $7 trillion per year for all fossil fuels as a whole.
Thankfully, the shipping industry is starting to clean up its act, and governments are starting to regulate the heavy diesel engines involved. This does add cost to the diesel engines, making them more expensive, while battery costs have continued coming down.
All this has led to a moment where Arc says the unsubsidized cost of its tugboat is similar to the cost of a diesel boat. But that diesel boat price benefits from the subsidy of ignored pollution costs, and electric still wins out as the better option.
So while the environmental benefits of this are clear, Arc says it can make this case at the purely spreadsheet level. And they’ll have a chance to prove it when it hits the water next year.
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Metro Detroit is about to get a big boost of fast EV chargers, with more than 40 new ChargePoint ports set to come online across multiple sites owned by the Dabaja Brothers Development Group.
The first ultra-fast charging site just opened in Canton, Michigan. It’s owned and operated by Dabaja Brothers, who plan to follow it with additional ChargePoint-equipped locations in Dearborn and Livonia.
“We started this project because we saw a gap in our community – there was almost nowhere to charge an EV in Canton, and a similar lack of charging across metro Detroit,” said Yousef Dabaja, owner/operator at Dabaja Brothers.
Each metro Detroit site will feature ChargePoint Express Plus fast charging stations, which can deliver up to 500 kW to a single port, can fast-charge two vehicles at the same time, and are compatible with all EVs. The stations feature a proprietary cooling system to deliver peak charging speeds for sustained periods, ensuring that charging speed remains consistent.
The stations operate on the new ChargePoint Platform, which enables operators to monitor performance, adjust pricing, troubleshoot issues, and gain real-time insights to keep chargers running smoothly.
Rick Wilmer, CEO at ChargePoint, said, “This initiative will rapidly infill the ‘fast charging deserts’ across the Detroit area, allowing drivers to quickly recharge their vehicles when and where they need to.”
Read more: ChargePoint just gave its EV charging software a major AI upgrade
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Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging and Starbucks have officially opened their first DC fast charging hub together, off the I-5 in Red Bluff, California.
The 400 kW Mercedes-Benz chargers are capable of adding up to 300 miles in 10 minutes, depending on the EV, and every stall has both NACS and CCS cables – they’re fully open DC fast chargers.
Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, a joint venture between subsidiaries of Mercedes-Benz Group and renewable energy producer MN8 Energy, first announced in July 2024 that it would install DC fast chargers at Starbucks stores along Interstate 5, the main 1,400-mile north-south interstate highway on the US West Coast from Canada to Mexico. Ultimately, Mercedes plans to install fast chargers at 100 Starbucks stores across the US.
Mercedes-Benz HPC opened its first North American charging site at Mercedes-Benz USA’s headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, in November 2023 as part of an initial $1 billion charging network investment. As of the end of 2024, Mercedes had deployed over 150 operational fast chargers in the US, but it hasn’t disclosed an official number of how many chargers are currently online.
Andrew Cornelia, CEO of Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, is leaving the company at the end of the month to become global head of electrification & sustainability at Uber.
Read more: Mercedes-Benz is deploying 400 kW US-made EV fast chargers with CCS and NACS cables
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The race for autonomous driving has three fronts: software, hardware, and regulatory. For years, we’ve watched Tesla try to brute-force its way to “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” with its own custom hardware, while the rest of the automotive industry is increasingly lining up behind NVIDIA.
Now that we know Tesla’s new AI5 chip is delayed and won’t be in vehicles until 2027, it’s worth comparing the two most dominant “self-driving” chips today: Tesla’s latest Hardware 4 (AI4) and NVIDIA’s Drive Thor.
Here’s a table comparing the two chips with the best possible specs I could find. greentheonly’s teardown was particularly useful. If you find things you think are not accurate, please don’t hesitate to reach out:
| Feature / Specification | Tesla AI4 (Hardware 4.0) | NVIDIA Drive Thor (AGX / Jetson) |
|---|---|---|
| Developer / Architect | Tesla (in-house) | NVIDIA |
| Manufacturing Process | Samsung 7nm (7LPP class) | TSMC 4N (custom 5nm class) |
| Release Status | In production (shipping since 2023) | In production since 2025 |
| CPU Architecture | ARM Cortex-A72 (legacy) | ARM Neoverse V3AE (server-grade) |
| CPU Core Count | 20 cores (5× clusters of 4 cores) | 14 cores (Jetson T5000 configuration) |
| AI Performance (INT8) | ~100–150 TOPS (dual-SoC system) | 1,000 TOPS (per chip) |
| AI Performance (FP4) | Not supported / not disclosed | 2,000 TFLOPS (per chip) |
| Neural Processing Unit | 3× custom NPU cores per SoC | Blackwell Tensor Cores + Transformer Engine |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | LPDDR5X |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | ~384 GB/s | ~273 GB/s |
| Memory Capacity | ~16 GB typical system | Up to 128 GB (Jetson Thor) |
| Power Consumption | Est. 80–100 W (system) | 40 W – 130 W (configurable) |
| Camera Support | 5 MP proprietary Tesla cameras | Scalable, supports 8MP+ and GMSL3 |
| Special Features | Dual-SoC redundancy on one board | Native Transformer Engine, NVLink-C2C |
The most striking difference right off the bat is the manufacturing process. NVIDIA is throwing everything at Drive Thor, using TSMC’s cutting-edge 4N process (a custom 5nm-class node). This allows them to pack in the new Blackwell architecture, which is essentially the same tech powering the world’s most advanced AI data centers.
Tesla, on the other hand, pulled a move that might surprise spec-sheet warriors. Teardowns confirm that AI4 is built on Samsung’s 7nm process. This is mature, reliable, and much cheaper than TSMC’s bleeding-edge nodes.
When you look at the compute power, NVIDIA claims a staggering 2,000 TFLOPS for Thor. But there’s a catch. That number uses FP4 (4-bit floating point) precision, a new format designed specifically for the Transformer models used in generative AI.
Tesla’s AI4 is estimated to hit around 100-150 TOPS (INT8) across its dual-SoC redundant system. On paper, it looks like a slaughter, but Tesla made a very specific engineering trade-off that tells us exactly what was bottling up their software: memory bandwidth.
Tesla switched from LPDDR4 in HW3 to GDDR6 in HW4, the same power-hungry memory you find in gaming graphics cards (GPUs). This gives AI4 a massive memory bandwidth of approximately 384 GB/s, compared to Thor’s 273 GB/s (on the single-chip Jetson config) using LPDDR5X.
This suggests Tesla’s vision-only approach, which ingests massive amounts of raw video from high-res cameras, was starving for data.
Based on Elon Musk’s comments that Tesla’s AI5 chip will have 5x the memory bandwidth, it sounds like it might still be Tesla’s bottleneck.
Here is where Tesla’s cost-cutting really shows. AI4 is still running on ARM Cortex-A72 cores, an architecture that is nearly a decade old. They bumped the core count to 20, but it’s still old tech.
NVIDIA Thor, meanwhile, uses the ARM Neoverse V3AE, a server-grade CPU explicitly designed for the modern software-defined vehicle. This allows Thor to run not just the autonomous driving stack, but the entire infotainment system, dashboard, and potentially even an in-car AI assistant, all on one chip.
Thor has found many takers, especially among Tesla EV competitors such as BYD, Zeekr, Lucid, Xiaomi, and many more.
Electrek’s Take
There’s one thing that is not in there: price. I would assume that Tesla wins on that front, and that’s a big part of the project. Tesla developed a chip that didn’t exist, and that it needed.
It was an impressive feat, but it doesn’t make Tesla an incredible leader in silicon for self-driving.
Tesla is maxing out AI4. It now uses both chips, making it less likely to achieve the redundancy levels you need to deliver level 4-5 autonomy.
Meanwhile, we don’t have a solution for HW3 yet and AI5 is apparently not coming to save the day until 2027.
By then, there will likely be millions of vehicles on the road with NVIDIA Thor processors.
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