(dramatic music) - It's our responsibility to make sure and create better options that are just better than petrol or diesel vessels, because that's what actually creates genuine impact. You don't do it by telling people you have to do it, you do it by just creating a better product. - Welcome to the Marine EV Leadership Series on the Green Boater TV. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce our guest, a true visionary whose passion is charting a new course on how we experience life on the water. We're joined by Eric Lockeman, the CEO of VESF. Now, Eric isn't just building electric forling boats, he's bringing a deeply personal vision to life, one that aligns perfectly with VESF's inspiring goal to propel a more livable world. You'll hear directly from Eric about what fuels his drive, the journey that led him to VESF and how he and his team are overcoming challenges to make electric forling personal watercraft a reality. Get ready to be inspired by Eric's story and his unwavering commitment to a cleaner, more exhilarating future on the water. Eric, welcome to the Green Boater TV. - That's quite an introvert up. Yeah, and I'm like, yeah, thanks so much for having me. Thanks for the great work that you've done promoting this space and really appreciate being here. - Well, Eric's a real pleasure to have you and our community is really interested to hear about you and your stories. So let's go back to the beginning. What were some of your earliest memories or experience on the water that truly ignited your passion for boating and your commitment to this personal connection to get a cleaner path to boating? - Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Seattle, I grew up sort of like in like an area on the water and actually my parents introduced me to it. Way early on, I had a dad that was way in the sailing. We actually sailed to Mexico, sailed to French Polynesia and yeah, I did a bunch of like cross-ertian stuff. And I think so my earliest memories, you know, I probably has driven a lot of what I've done today are on the boat with a fishing rod over the side of it, somewhere magical and just like the eight years old loving life. And I think that has definitely influenced the choices that I've made later in life. We were fortunate enough to sail to the Galapagos. So like, you know, we spent I think two weeks in the Galapagos and I remember just being blown away by the sea iguanas over there. The actual like black iguanas that like, you know, transition to like being the ocean. So that was pretty mind blowing. I think even, I feel like recall like for the long spirit of time, I wanted to be a marine biologist specializing in sharks. He was fascinated by them. Yeah, I distinctly remember one in the sea of Cortez. And like I said, I was eight year old kid sticking a fishing line over the side of the boat. I just caught the biggest snapper ever, just like not even trying that hard. I'm just like, this is life. So happy right now. From those early experiences, what has sort of prepared you in your career in your personal journey to go to where you are today as the CEO of VESA? Yeah, so I had a huge interested in engineering when I went into university. Like I knew going in that like I was going to probably study electrical engineering. So I went into school and included in Ohio. Loved it. It was a project based school. Actually spent way too much time building things and probably not enough time in class. But the cool thing was that because I spent so much time building things like building electrical oscilloscopes and things like that, you know, a recruiter from Apple came knocking at our school and my professor's actually recommended me not because of my classwork, but because of the things that was actually building. And so I remember showing up at my interview at Apple with all of my prototypes. Some, like a little briefcase, which is pretty fun. I think most people expect the interview, you go in, yes, and questions, but the laid out the things they built on the table and that focused the interview on like actually what I'd done. Which yeah, it's probably different, but ended up landing the job there. Sort of worked in iPod for a little bit in 2012 than an iPhone for a little bit and then moved over to the Apple Watch project. So worked on the original one there. Yeah, it was a super valuable experience. But I was living in San Francisco at the time. And as you may be aware of San Francisco, the rent is too damn high. So I got a Benito sale boat like three cabin from like the 1990s and lived on that in Redwood City. And it was great. And eventually I realized that, okay, actually I actually really love the sailing thing. One day I'm gonna sail across the ocean. You know, at some point upgraded the Benito to a catamaran that was gonna be more fit for purpose for what I want to do. And I ultimately ended up living in San Francisco on a boat for I think seven years. (mimics a voice) Can you sleep or mind gosh San Francisco to when I left? And I loved it. At that point I'd worked on three different Apple Watch projects and I decided it was time to go sailing around the world. So I left in 2018, sailed up to actually Alaska by the inside passage. So crews all the way up the coast from San Francisco up to Seattle with the inside passage. So back down the coast to Mexico. Yeah, did a season there and then cross the South Pacific. So French ballonnesia, Tonga, and then got some easy land in 2020. We got like a mixture of life experiences between the engineering side, the sort of like product development side. And of course the boating side that has kind of led me to where I'm in today. And all those ingredients are actually quite important 'cause like I think without one of them I wouldn't be able to do what I do. Let's just look at the market in general. You're in the mix all the time. You're looking at what's going on. What are some of the issues facing the marine EV market today in your eyes? It's just like we don't see that there's any shortage of desire to go electric. Electric boats today, especially high performing ones meet the performance requirements required for a lot of different mission types. Not everything today, but a lot of different ones. The most challenging barrier to entry at the moment, the world is charging. The reality is that where is charging, where power has been set up in the world has typically not been in ports and marinas. That's typically been in other places. And you know, previously, you know, if you're looking at a typical marina an amount of power was brought down to power basic onboard equipment. And that was sized appropriately for the last 20 years. But now that we're looking at charging electric boats and marinas, those power requirements going up. And so I'd say that that is probably the largest barrier that the space is facing. With that being said, you know, they've been a part of many different marina association conferences. You know, people are aware of what's coming. Like you lag, you know, maybe it's not there today or in the world, but new marinas are going to be set up with this in mind. And then the second one, of course, is like all of these vehicles, you know, as was the case with Tesla early days, the prices are higher than conventional gasoline and or diesel vehicles. And so for a lot of different, especially commercial operators, the cat-x upfront, it can be a challenge. With that being said, there's a number of companies out there that see quite an opportunity in this space where, oh, look, you've got, you know, much higher cat-x but much lower op-x. Can we create financial instruments and financial products and balance this out? So reality is, if you're a commercial boater and you buy a diesel vessel or a petrol vessel, you might have not paid a lot upfront for the vessel or less upfront for the vessel, but you have bought into a permanent life transcription of BP, Exxon and Shell. - Would you see the demand in this category coming from me? Is it going to be commercial? Like commercial, is it going to be recreational? Or is there another category? - Yeah, I mean, if you look at dollar values, I think the commercial space is quite interesting. Now, the recreational space, definitely interesting for a lot of applications, but I think commercial operators are seeing that, hey, if I buy a diesel or a petrol powered vessel in the year 2025, even if I assume that vessel has a lifetime of 20 years, I'm talking about that vessel still existing in the year 2045. And there's already some social pressures, there's some government pressures, there's some pressures from passengers to find a better way here. Well, what is that again, it looks like in the year 2045? Reality is though, and this is what we say, like it's not about sort of saying, oh, you have to go electric because it's the right thing to do. That's not the responsibility of the operator or the person buying a boat. It's our responsibility to make sure and create better options that are just better than petrol or diesel vessels, because that's what actually creates genuine impact. You don't do it by telling people they have to do it. You do it by just creating a better product. That's why you see electric vehicles on the roads taken off now, 'cause guess what, you can charge it in your home, and you pay a lot less in fuel, especially with rising fuel prices around the world. And even now with solar on the roof, you can now charge your own vehicle with energy that you produce natively. And so now it's not like a nice to have to have electric vehicle, it's becoming sort of just a bit off-shake. And having a gas potential vehicle. - And what are some of the technology breakthroughs you've seen or that you're excited about? - Yeah, I mean, like the prevalence of lithium iron phosphate batteries, I think is a huge benefit. And this is just generally true, like batteries, but you know, if you look from the 1990s, batteries have improved energy density by 7% for a year. And it's been really consistent. - But can you just walk the novices in this category? The fundamental differences between foiling and planning and why you chose foiling? - Let's say we lived in a world, and I sent my fingers today, and we put big parachutes on the back of every single vehicle on the road. They don't have a bit much impact at slow speeds, but as soon as you start getting fast, you've got a parachute that's dragging backwards all the time. You know, the gasoline cars are probably fine. The diesel cars are probably fine. Your fuel consumption goes up enormously. But if you look at all the electric vehicles, they're probably suffering. They're suffering because that is a huge additional portion of energy that they have to consume, travel at any kind of high speed. And you wouldn't have the same uptake of electric vehicles because they wouldn't be performing anymore. And you know, because people wouldn't be able to do what they need to do with electric vehicles because these damn parachutes that everyone strapped on to every vehicle in the world. Foiling is a little bit like the world where we were with that parachute. So if you look at like marine vessels themselves, water is the super draggy thing.
It's sticky, it's heavy, and it's quite hard to move through. You have just kind of like a parachute on the back of your car. And so when you get the boat out of the water, you reduce that surface area, you reduce the amount of water that you have to move around. You substantially reduce the drag of your vehicle, and that's what unlocks a lot of potential for electric vehicles because you can't snap your fingers and make batteries magically more energy dense overnight. That's just like physics, and so you have to chase the efficiency of the vehicles. And the analogy there, in terms of what actually is happening in electric vehicle spaces, of course, batteries are this big innovation from the consumer electronics that got brought into electric vehicles. But be generous of braking on auto-art of cars, which is a 28% to 70% energy recovery was a major hack. That's what enabled Prius to be a genuine product, and that's what enabled this new era of electric vehicles to be promising. Hydrofoiling is more than 2x gain on efficiency for vehicles. Depending on size, it can't actually be more than that. And so this massive efficiency improvement that's hard to ignore. So I think, given that it's the most efficient way to move on the water at high speeds, I think it would be crazy to imagine that a significant portion of more sustainable vessel in the nature are just ignoring this huge technological unlock that is the efficiency gain. That's why I think it's interesting. There's no replacement as well for it. There's nothing else that we can do to a boat, as far as we know, that can make it that much more efficient. There's no additional hack we can apply to planes of cars to make them over twice as efficient. So yeah, I think this technology has a place to stay. It's a little bit of why we're looking at this and this is what we're involved in. But it's hard. It's deeply hard because at the end of the day, you're making an airplane that has to fly in a 50 centimeter altitude envelope for thousands of miles unimpeded in constant turbulence in a salty and corrosive solution. Like it's not easy. But nothing worthwhile is easy. Yeah. I crack the magic formulas. In your opinion, is there some of the specifics and areas or use cases in boating where you believe a planning hall might still be the preferred or even the superior choice, even with electric power? I wish that there was a wider prevalence of sustainable liquid fuels out there to prefer a lot of recreational applications like that would be the go-to. You know, sort of like you have to create wildly available e-diesel or sorry e-gasoline, genuinely sustainable biodiesel because not all biodiesels actually are responsible specifically the scenarios where you grow. You harvest palm oil specifically to make biodiesels isn't necessarily the right way, but if there are genuinely sustainable liquid fuels available, there's a lot of recreational applications that don't cost huge miles per year. That's a totally appropriate solution for. But going back to what hydrofoiling is not going to cover in the future, slow boats, there's a lot of slow boats out there and the realities that slow boats are super efficient. And really big boats. Really big boats are also wildly efficient. This blows my mind, but a cargo ship is twice as efficient as a train at moving a ton of nolical miles. A train? Not even like, yeah, like what should be one of the most efficient forms of transport? And so yeah, we're never going to see hydrofoil-ing cargo ships out the ocean. But that high speed vessels below 40 meters, that's kind of the sweet spot that gets interesting for this tech. What are some of the challenges that you've seen yourself as you've started in growing your company? I mean, like definitely unlocking your first customer is probably one of the most difficult things because if I'm mentally before you unlock your first customer, you are some crazy people with some ideas. And that's pretty much it. And so we're really fortunate to have a marine operator here in New Zealand. It's actually one of the most progressive ferry operators in the world, full history 60. They've got multiple electric vessels on order. They haven't had zero by 2040 gold. They're committed to not buying another petrol or diesel vessel again. And they're really like worked with us and like jump into a partnership, which I think was the big unlock. That first vessel that we put on the water, that's where all the hard decisions take place because you don't necessarily have like prior art to sort of base your decisions on. Luckily, I think we've pulled it off pretty well. That first vessel's now done 4,000 lb. It's done 140 consecutive scheduled services that's going out on time and come back on time. And that was the first one we built. So I feel fortunate that if you look at the surface area of all the decisions that we've had to make to like make that possible that we've gotten them right enough to enable that. That's what, because that's what unlocks the right to continue doing what we do. It could work previously. So I'd say that's the one of the biggest challenges that we've had to overcome. It's like getting that first product right, getting the right partnerships in place. And just in general, like not doing this in a vacuum. It's one thing if you make a hydrofoiling boat and it's cool and you're driving it. But it's a different thing if it's not you driving it, but it's your customer driving it. Where are you today in terms of the product? Manufacturing mentioned first customers, but tell us a little bit of the product you have today. And maybe if you could share anything that you're really excited about in terms of your specific innovations around foiling. So this, so first product is the VS. Oh, there we go. There's a logo over here. The really cool thing that we've done with this is this is a commercial boat that is nine meters long that can be trailer that can be charged in almost any marina in the world. The battery size is about a hundred kilowatt hours. And we can use normal type two car chargers. We don't need any kind of exotic infrastructure to set up shop with this in most marinas. So this is really cool because it's a bit of a unlock in terms of this nascent stage of the marine lifefacation industry where we don't need a lot more aside from the boat to start running one of these. So this one is a 10 cedar. So it's got five seats on one side, five seats on the other side, all facing each other. That's more of a tourism hospitality experience. We're just going to see if you look at, if you look around the world, there are tons of different sort of like companies that are looking to elevate their customers experiences through new technology, especially new sustainable technology. So that's where we are starting. Specifically in terms of like what goes into one of these things tech wise, you know, we especially the size of the retracting foils. So on these models, foils, fully retracted out of the water. And that's important because the water has a lot of stuff that grows in it. And yeah, I've got my boat on a mooring up in northern New Zealand at the moment. And every time I go up there, I'm cleaning muscles, barnacles, oysters off bottom. For foils, anything that grows on there, it's a big impact performance. You know, you get one barnacle or muscle on the foil and that's actually a ton of drag relative to the total amount of muscle drag. So for us, it's a really important especially about the size that we be able to pull the foils all the way out in the water to mitigate some of that growth. We separately really focus on efficiency. So these foils are like roughly proportional to like what's on the actual vessel itself. And we borrowed effectively a lot of techniques from the America's Cup. We use some of the same simulation software that Timie's Ylene uses. And we do that so we can relentlessly minimize the foil area and maximize the fish and sails. If you look at designing a vehicle, either an aircraft or a flying rain vessel, one of the other, you have your either on the divine spiral or the design spiral. Either you make a bunch of choices and you realize you don't need as much and boat gets lighter. And then your performance increases and you end up sort of on this like arc of happiness, effectively where your boat gets progressively better as you progress further into the design. You can be on the opposite side of that spiral though where as you get further in the design, you'll realize we actually need more batteries. Now the boat gets heavier. Now guess what? You need to make your foil area is actually big, which creates more drag. You need to make them a lower aspect, make turn your foils into a lower aspect wing, which means your efficiency has gone down, which means you need more batteries. And the cycle continues and you end up being unhappy. So where that all starts with is efficiency. If you can make the boat as efficient as possible and relentlessly focus on that, you need smaller propulsion, less batteries and you're happy. If you don't relentlessly focus on that, you kind of end up in a place where you might not be that happy. What about the markets that you're already playing in like where you geographically and where you vertically is your specific use case customer that you're looking at as your sweet spot? Yeah, so we've already sold this into North America in Europe. So you know, we haven't announced that yet, but it'll be coming very soon, which is cool because you know, like getting a footprint on a few different continents is one of our big goals for this next step. The reality though, and this is like a struggle for I think everyone in this space is that the interest in these products, it's quite diffuse around the world. There isn't like one hot spot where it's like that's the obvious place where we can play and then we move on to the next market and move on to the next market. Reality is there's interest worldwide and there isn't just like one place you can focus on. You think about like these early designs of vessels, you know, the hospitality markets like quite interesting because if you're running a seven star resort in an exotic place and you've got a petrol or diesel powered vessel that gets guests to you, well, if you can upgrade that with a flying electric thing, it just makes your guests experience a lot better, especially as a comparison if someone else is running a petrol or diesel vessel. So for them, it's like this big competitor advantage. But then, you know, of course, like port operations, everyone's looking for ways they can make their ports more sustainable. Singapore even has a ban. I believe it's a ban on new fossil fuel powered vessels from being introduced from the year 2030 and beyond. Kind of like the outboarded in-board market, you know, like when you look at an outboard or an in-board, you typically really define it by one number.
So like you have a 50 horsepower inward, you've got an 18 horsepower outward. You know, high to four-ling vessels might end up being something similar. It's just, it's the platform. It's everything below that's a technology package. And then you can put different things on top, different configurations like leisure, config, workboat, config, which is kind of the, you know, different structure than what's in the marine world today. Like right now if you look at marine, I don't know the exact number on this, but I say 20,000 boat builders in the world. I don't know if that's precisely correct. And a little bit that's because, you know, you can build a hull in your garage with basic composite tools or wood or aluminum. And it can be pretty good. And then you put an outward on it and you're on your way. But if you look at automotive and aviation, you know, you don't have 20,000 airplane builders. You don't have 20,000 automotive builders. And you've got a handful of big companies that are producing those vehicles. And I think this space ends up being somewhere in between the two ends of this spectrum. You're probably the best executive to ask this in the electric boating world because of your experience of a Pacific Northwest, handling the inside passage, this rye cruise. And even with my displacement hull that maxes out at 10 knots, I hit things. So what can you tell those of us who don't understand what a foiling boat that travels at X knots, much more than 10 knots, and now you encounter all that, all that's not seen just below the surface of the water. How does foiling address that? And what have you done to sort of think about that in terms of use case for your customers? - Yeah, that's a really good question. Do you have a story that kind of relates to this? So not going up the inside passage, but when it came back down from Alaska, me and the crew that I had in the board, we actually went and sailed way outside of Vancouver Island to come back down because we were just doing, going straight from Ketchikan down to Seattle in like one big round. And yeah, we're doing that because like, you know, when you're shorthanded on crew and you want to sail constantly, yeah, it's a bit easier if you don't have to worry about the rain in the water, which by sailing 200 nautical miles offshore of Vancouver Island, we thought we wouldn't have to. You know, we were, sitting at sunset one day, looking around, and we started seeing logs, 200 miles offshore of Vancouver Island and like a high density of them. And, you know, I'm in like a sailing cataron, we're going eight, nine knots. And, you know, we've got a radar on board and that's the extent of our electric detection methods that we have. And a radar is not going to detect sort of like a submerged log like that. So we're going and around 3 a.m., we hit something. We hit something pretty hard. I was in bed, I got rolled out of bed. You know, I heard it roll all the way under the boat and eggs out back. And, you know, I went up and checked and sort of like, you know, like water wasn't coming in to the boat and you know, that was okay. I didn't check the very, very, very forward lockered though. We were hauling out and see that anyways. So we get down to, I think we were in anacortis where we hauled out and haul the boat out and lo and behold, the front port bow of the boat is like this cookie cutter had been opened up by this piece of debris, which I assume was a big walk. And the forward crash compartment was of course, full of water. Yeah, luckily it was easy repair. The boat was continued to sailing at nine knots, even after that occurred. So, clearly the bow wasn't holding it back. Got in, patched up the bow. You know, I've fared it up, it comps it and we're on a wagon. The cool thing about that is the boat kept running despite that occurring. So I think that's important. The second thing that's important is the year there was 2018, the only electronic detection method that we had on board was that radar. The systems that are coming out today are so much better than what they used to be in terms of being able to detect things. We never hit anything going up in the day inside passage, you know, 'cause we were operating during the day. We just avoided things as you do. But of course, you're never gonna admit, you're gonna never gonna drop your wrist to zero, which is why these boats need to be tolerant of hitting debris. In our case, there's a breakaway system such that the pie foil fuses off, drops away, and then the T foil, which is a pulsion unit, ends up being recoverable. So you still have a pulsion. Worst cases you lose your pie foil. Worst case situation there is, or the best case situation there if you lost your pie foil is that you know where you lost it and can die for it. In which case, you're gonna recover a good portion of it. The worst case is it's your replacement, but we're designing these things to be replaceable anyways. - What is some of the detection technology? Is it forward looking sonar? What is it? - I think the infrared stuff's actually pretty good. 'Cause like even, you know, from what I've seen, infrared is actually pretty good at detecting, sort of things that are, you know, on the surface and have a little bit poking out. I have personally never seen anything floating just below the surface, you know, as I've been voting. To have something as quasi-establed at that point, seems to violate my understanding of like, how buoyancy works. So as long as it's a bit sticking out, the infrared system's seen pretty good. They do have limitations of course, but you can substantially reduce your risk. - Well, we can talk a lot about other things and details, but Eric, this has really been an incredibly insightful conversation. I love your analogies. I like to show and tell with the model that's great. But as we wrap up, what final message would you personally like to share with our viewers about the future of electric boating? And what's your sort of ultimate vision for Vest as a role in that exciting future? - I think, like, I just go back to the like, the 2013 America's Cup. So 2013 America's Cup Hydrofoiling isn't actually part of the rules. Some photos leaked from Team New Zealand testing a Hydrofoiling vote here in Auckland. And my understanding is that they received messages from people that were working in America's Cup that they had Photoshopped that. That we're in 72 foot catterns wasn't possible. Because the implications were profound. You now had sailing catterns. You could sail three times faster than the wind. And yeah, that has changed the sport of sailing since the introduction of that. We are so early into this sort of foray into electric hydrofoiling boats. Yeah, I think the very first ones that go into commercial service happened late last year. And yeah, we're at the earliest innings of this big transition. As I was saying, that's where in the conversation, this is such a step change in efficiency. And that's so important as a sustainable future. I just don't think it's going to be possible to ignore this. Anything else that we can personally expect to see from Vesev on this journey in the next just over the horizon? Yeah, so there's a new motor pod system ever pretty excited about. That's going to be launching on our next vessel over here. Our current vessel uses a motor on top of the T-Fuel. It drives a shaft down to a gearbox here, which is how some folks in this base do it. Our new one is going to have an integrated motor pod system in the hub of the foil. It's going to be quite resilient and robust and respecting. Huge efficiency improvement. And overall performance improvement as well. It'll make you very, very quiet. So yeah, like if you want to make a great blueberry pie, you have to do it from scratch. It's kind of the same thing with all the technology that's going to these vessels. Yeah, exact same thing. Yeah, Eric, this has just been wonderful. I so appreciate that you've taken the time in over different time zones. But you have a connection to North America. You've got some good people joining your team. And on your team, you've also really caught the attention of the media. And we are going to do our part to help tell your story to our community. And I really look forward to seeing foiling in the Pacific Northwest. And I appreciate your candidness. I know that you, as a bowler, have some deep, deep passions as you shared earlier. But I appreciate that you've taken this risk in leading a company. You could do a lot of things. You could have stuck safely inside of a tech company. But I appreciate the work you've doing, the passion. And to people like you that are really changing and why we have been so keen to have you on the Marine EV leadership series. So thank you very much, Eric. Thanks so much to Honors Mine. Thanks for fighting. We could fight and promoting the space. And as we just end, where can people find out more information about the company, about the things that you're doing, and where can they contact somebody at your company? But yep, we.vessiv.com.
[email protected]. But it's some great place to start. And read everything that comes through. So if anyone has anyone wants to discuss anything with us, like totally available for compensation. Wonderful. Well, we'll put all those links in the show notes as well so that people can find you. And again, we'll look forward to promoting us through our network. And hopefully through the feedback, we'll get another chance to speak with you in the near-distant future as you've got exciting announcements. And we'll follow you with great interest. Thank you so much, Eric. Thank you, Brita. Appreciate it. Hey, thank you for watching this episode of The Green to Porter TV. I would encourage you to like and subscribe and pass this information on to some other voters that you know. So that we can all help protect the ocean we love.
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