Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Are We Ready For Electric Boats? Podcast With Halevai
52 Plays7 months ago
In our latest podcast episode, Frank Heidinger, founder of Halevai, discusses his shift from ocean conservation to launching an electric boat startup. He explains the development of Halevai’s innovative design, including their efficient trimaran hull, and how these boats are charged using existing marina infrastructure.
Frank highlights the challenges of pioneering in the clean tech sector, the importance of customer education, and details of Halevai’s debut model, the 2050. He concludes with advice for entrepreneurs in the clean tech space, focusing on the necessity of passion and adaptability.
🕑 KEY MOMENTS
==================
➜ 00:00 Welcome
➜ 02:43 Revolutionizing Watercraft With Renewable Energy
➜ 07:54 Sourcing American-Made Marine Systems
➜ 10:01 The Role of Marketing in Electric Boats
➜ 14:01 Eco-Friendly Boats for Research Institutions
➜ 19:06 Efficient Cruising Speed and Range
📚 RESOURCES & LINKS
========================
- Website: https://www.halevai.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/halevai/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/halevaipower/
👉 Interview with Frank Heiding: https://www.npws.net/podcast/electric-boats-future
🌍 SUSTAINABILITY PODCAST CREATED BY NEW PERSPECTIVE
========================
This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit npws.com for more info.
🎧 SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST
===========================
- Spotify: https://bit.ly/3PSWIyI
- Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RvlHte
- Youtube: https://bit.ly/3RDzkXg
- Deezer: https://bit.ly/3PvQaof
- Amazon Music: https://bit.ly/3PQlijS
- Zencastr: https://bit.ly/48xt75s
💬 FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA
============================
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greennewperspective/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/gnperspective
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/new-perspective-marketing/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greennewperspective
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greennewperspective
Host: Dunja Jovanovic
Executive Producer: Marko Bodiroza
Creator: Nathan Harris
#cleantech #sustainability #podcast
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Focus
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, hey, you are watching a brand new episode of the Green Your Perspective podcast. If you're new to the channel, welcome and get ready to be introduced to some amazing companies that are developing tech in that combatting climate
Exploring Electric Boats
00:00:12
Speaker
change. And if you are a regular on our channel, then you might have watched the episode we have previously recorded on electric vehicles, mainly trucks and cars.
00:00:21
Speaker
And today's episode is basically in continuation to that story, so we are focusing on electric boats and their benefits on marine ecosystems.
Meet Frank Heidinger
00:00:30
Speaker
My guest today is Frank Heidinger, he's the CEO of a company called Helivi, which specializes in developing electric boats. Stay tuned!
00:00:47
Speaker
Hi Frank, and welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast. Good morning. How are you? Oh, I'm good. Can you introduce yourself to our audience and tell me what made you start a company in the electric boat space? My name is Frank Heidinger. I'm the CEO and founder of Holobai. We build electric watercraft here in America. The journey there kind of went through various stages. You know, the earliest transition started in 2012 when
00:01:16
Speaker
I realized that short fins are a product that I was aware of as being this really grotesque product. A hundred billion sharks are killed every year with their fins. It's a pretty gruesome process. I was walking down Grand Street in New York City and I noticed that this product was still legal in New York City.
00:01:35
Speaker
That's something that I was really passionate about as a child when I first learned about this. And nothing's really been done to stop it. And so that was a pivotal moment for me to say, I'm going to stop what I'm working on professionally. And I'm going to dedicate a good amount of time to activism, change, innovation, policy. But I didn't really know how I was going to
Journey to Holobai
00:01:55
Speaker
start that process. And so I did ultimately run a very successful campaign. And we made Sharkman Products Illegal in the state of New York, with the help of a lot of organizations, of course.
00:02:04
Speaker
I kind of didn't run that campaign to make it possible. And in the process of doing that, I met an individual who had just founded an organization called Parley for the Oceans. We started to spend time together and we started to talk about building events and doing this really big kickoff event. And so I co-partnered with them and produced this event.
00:02:22
Speaker
And that took me through 10 years of working in various capacities with Parlay on ocean collection, plastic pollution collection, where they then trademarked ocean plastic and started these really amazing global collaborations with big brands like Adidas, for example, big sports affiliations and artist affiliations.
00:02:43
Speaker
In the process of doing that work, going around the world and seeing the things that we were building, you notice that a lot of the really good work that happens on the water level at the dock, it was happening on small watercraft that were all powered by gas. These gas engines are extremely inefficient. In the US, regulations in the late 70s made the four stroke the common motor type, the outboard motor type.
00:03:07
Speaker
But really, nothing's been advanced since then. And if you look even today, much of these motors are consuming significantly high numbers of gasoline per mile. So for example, when we think about cars, we talk about 15, 20, 23, 25 miles per gallon. When you're talking about boats, you're talking like three to five miles per gallon. So they're really extremely inefficient. However, they take us into one of the most beautiful places on planet Earth, right? Our lakes, our rivers, our waterways, our tidal estuaries, our oceans.
00:03:33
Speaker
And so I thought, well, if we're doing good work and we're trying to clean up plastic and we're trying to help local communities, we're trying to create a better supply chain, could we not do it with a renewable energy power source? And that was the beginning of us going into the formation of Holobyte. And then, of course, that takes you through the following three years of R&D where you learn what really does exist and what you really can do and how you really can harness that power.
Innovative Electric Boat Design
00:03:57
Speaker
Are there any other companies who are doing the same things as you do? There's a few. Structurally, we're a little bit different. So batteries exist. They are expensive and they are heavy and they are complex. So when you're trying to harness power to push a boat on water, there's the one differentiating factor where we designed a trimaran semi-plaining hull is that we were trying to lower the resistances that happen naturally when you're trying to move something over water.
00:04:22
Speaker
Traditionally, gas-powered vehicles, the horsepower is cheap. Gas is not cheap, but horsepower is cheap. Meaning, if you design a boat and it's not the most hydrodynamic vessel, you can just put a lot of power on it and it'll move. When you're dealing with electric, to do that costs a lot of money, which then gets crossed over to the customer, right? We designed an open deck hull that allows us to have more space on board for recreation, for research, but it also is extremely efficient when dealing with
00:04:52
Speaker
Harnessing this power so our resistances are half or more than your traditional be all boat the traditional boat You see is what we call a displacement hall It's a just to be in the water and it takes enormous amount of energy to force that up onto a plane and to maintain that power over
Charging Infrastructure
00:05:09
Speaker
distance
00:05:09
Speaker
And is there any infrastructure for powering e-boats? When you say infrastructure, you mean? It's probably to charge them, yeah. So charging is the number one question we get, and it's the simplest answer. Because it's like any other device. It charges anywhere you plug it in. When you're thinking about recharging a car, you think about how far do I have to go today, and do I have enough power to get there? When you're dealing with boats, people typically go recreational watercraft or research vessels. We're focused on these two
00:05:38
Speaker
We're talking about families and friends going out for the day where you spend three to five hours out on the boat. You do a range of different types of travel. You do some slow speeds in harbor. Some people never go out of the harbors, right? In fact, there are places all around the country where there's no wake zones throughout the entire marina. But these are massive marinas I'm using, for example, in my mind. I'm thinking about Newport, California, which is a really cool market for us, right?
00:05:59
Speaker
The entire marina, miles long, is a no wake zone. So you can't go more than six knots. Our batteries will last 200 miles at that speed. So you wouldn't have to charge them that often. However, you can plug into any shore power. So any marina in the country that has shore power available, all you have to do is plug in there.
Industry Challenges & Marketing
00:06:18
Speaker
It requires you buying one adapter on Amazon, which costs about $12, which is a twist lock, which is the standard marina.
00:06:25
Speaker
configuration. Simply put, you can plug any level one or level two charger into the same outlet that you plug your iPhone into and you can charge. Now, charging is slower at 110 volts, right? It's an overnight charge, so you need the full 12 to 15 hours to charge our packs. However, if you have 240 available, which most people do, it's the same thing that powers your washer or your dryer rather. You can plug in there and be charged in four and a half hours.
00:06:50
Speaker
When you started the company, what challenges have you faced in starting and growing? How have I? There's challenges everywhere. There's challenges on the engineering side, which are not so much challenges as much as they are just big question marks that you have to research and trial and hire really good teams to figure out. On the engineering side, one of the first challenges we faced was the one I mentioned. It was, what is the most efficient, whole style for moving vehicles over water?
00:07:18
Speaker
You get two things when you lower the resistance and you change the hull. Our hull allows you to have a more open deck space, which means more people can be on board. You have different experiences that can happen on board. And you can take a 24 foot boat and you actually turn it into a much larger experiential vehicle, right? Because you can have three distinct sections. You have a forward section, which six people could sit and have dinner at. You have a center section where the console is, where a few people can stand around. There's hand holds. There's a full day bed in the back.
00:07:43
Speaker
There's an easy swim platform, so it's easy to get down and off. So if you're doing research or if you're a diver or if you're a snorkeler and you want to get into the water and out of the water with kids, super, super easy. So designing that stuff, there's always going to be complications in design and engineering. And there's also supply chain. Where is the best place to buy these systems from? We made a choice early on that we wanted to build as much of these parts in America.
00:08:05
Speaker
And simply because the majority of gas boats that we see sold in America are actually built in America. Obviously when you get to the super luxury categories and you start to think about a lot of the Dutch and the Italian and there's a lot of things happening in Europe on the larger formats. But the average dayboat
00:08:20
Speaker
whether it's a bass boat, or a center console, or a pontoon boat, or any of the bigger categories for recreation. Most of those boats sold in America are built in America. And so it would be a little silly if we were to be forward thinking on innovation and power and renewable energy, and we were shipping boats across the planet just because the cost of building it was a little bit lower. So that was a challenge, finding the right partnerships. We built a powertrain partnership with Hypercraft. We built OEM relationship with Mercury and Navico. These are the largest suppliers in the marine industry.
00:08:50
Speaker
That segues into another really big challenge, which is serviceability. Auto and boats operate very differently. Boats need to be serviced more regularly. Electric systems don't need to be serviced as regularly as gas systems, but they do need to be serviced. And if something goes wrong, you want to be able to bring it in somewhere local. You mentioned the other competitors. There are a few. They're building these systems from start to finish like automotive. The challenge with that is if you sell 50 boats in 50 states, you need to service 50 boats in 50 states.
00:09:20
Speaker
What we've done is integrate existing parts from marine. For example, we use stern drives from Mercury. This is the same stern drive that's on tens of thousands of boats, if not hundreds of thousands of boats. You can service this at 4,300 Mercury authorized service stations around the country. Every lake, every community has a Mercury authorized service station. So if anything goes wrong with the outdrive,
00:09:42
Speaker
It doesn't really matter that it's electric propulsion. It can be serviced anywhere. Those types of challenges are ones that you face, and those are decisions you make early days. And of course, with COVID and supply chain slows and increases in price and inflation, all those other things which affect every other business, those are part of the same challenges we face on a daily basis.
00:10:01
Speaker
How do people react to the notion of e-boats? I mean, we are used to electric cars, but I don't think that people are using electric boats as much. So what's the role of marketing in their marketing and storytelling in order, you know, to explain to people why should we use e-boats now? This is actually my favorite topic to talk about because you started the conversation with are they easy to charge? And the reality is they're super easy to charge. In fact, it's a lot easier to maintain
00:10:26
Speaker
electric boat than it is a gas boat because I have my partner's boat at our house here for testing purposes, right? And it's a gas boat and I have to constantly be thinking about where am I going to go to get gas? Is it going to be too busy? Is it going to be a line? It's very expensive to fuel a gas boat and you use a lot more fuel in a boat than you think you're going to use, right? But outside of that,
00:10:44
Speaker
There's the experience. People are not comfortable yet with the idea of electric boats because they haven't been on one. But as soon as they step on, and I find this with females, more than even males, that the first driving experience is exhilarating because it's really simple and it's different. It's approachable. When someone steps on board, you go, here, come over. Let me show you how it works. And there's a fob. So it's a keyless entry. There's no key.
00:11:10
Speaker
There's just a little fob, like you would go to open your gate to get in, you know, home or something. You fob on, and you hear a little click, and then the power's on. And you say, OK, hit this button. It says, start stops. It's really straightforward, like a car. And that means the high voltage is now active. And then there's a green button, which engages the propeller, which means that now you have power to the propeller. And that's it. And then you start navigating. And to that point, there's no roar. There's no sound. There's a little click.
00:11:38
Speaker
And then you put it in gear and it starts to turn. And you can hear a little something, but it's very, very low, very, very light. And you start to hear the water sort of slapping against the hall. And then you start the navigation. And it's like this different experience than what you're used to. And so if you've been on a lot of boats, then you'll notice it a lot. If you haven't been on a lot of boats, this is now what you think what boating is about. And that's always interesting too.
00:12:02
Speaker
And then when you go out into the area where you can actually open it up and you give it to throttle and it just responds. It just picks up quickly. It reaches a plane very nicely. And as you're at speed, it actually gets quieter because the environmental sounds become greater. Meaning when you're at low speed, you can hear a little bit of something because there's not a lot of water slapping against the side of the boat. But when you start to pick up speed, the water rushing along the hall is really the sound you hear. And so the motor kind of disappears.
00:12:27
Speaker
And there's a really nice sort of exhilarating experience of being in that type of forced environment where you're moving at speed. There's not a lot of background noise. You're really connecting with nature. So experientially, it is quite different. And I really enjoy it.
00:12:42
Speaker
And a bunch of folks that we go out with regularly who help us with demos or who are just in the area will say, oh, let's take the electric boat. I like it so much better. So there are things it can't do. We can talk
Target Audience & Unique Offerings
00:12:54
Speaker
about that too. I'm happy to share all the things it can't do, right? But it's built for a certain type of navigation and experience and it definitely rewarding.
00:13:01
Speaker
And what's your target audience? So our boats are priced in the base boats are priced at $185,000. So right off the bat, we're expensive. We are half the price of what competitor electrics look like. And we're also giving a much bigger on deck experience. There's a lot more room to move around. It's a lot more versatility with our boat, a lot more balance with the way that it's been designed because it is a trimaran.
00:13:23
Speaker
So right off the bat, we're dealing with recreational buyers who have the disposable income to be able to afford that kind of a boat. We're also working very closely with marine institutes. When colleges and universities have a demand from senior management to lower carbon in every department. And when you're dealing with marine research, this is a particularly big goal because you go out to do good work and collect really valuable data and start to help build a picture of what ecosystems health are looking like. And while
Customer Feedback & Model 2050
00:13:52
Speaker
you're doing that,
00:13:52
Speaker
you're leaking oil and your carbon and you're making noise and you have breakdowns and there's black smoke. So colleges and universities want to get away from this wherever they can. Within the limitations of the range, which is about 50 nautical miles for our extended range packs, that is well within the day range of most institutions work. When you're dealing with blue water, that's a little bit different. But when you're dealing with lakes, tidal estuaries, mangroves, bays, intercoastals,
00:14:20
Speaker
There's these big, really important biological communities. These really important parts of our ecosystem are usually the areas closest to land or just inland because they're essentially the nurseries for the next generation of fish and birds and wildlife. And so keeping those
00:14:37
Speaker
parts of the ecosystem healthy is really important to us. And so we offer a solution where these institutions can plug in for a really low price. I mean, we calculate our batteries, our batteries on the US average cost, these are extended range packs cost around $11 to fill up from zero from, you know, 15% to a hundred.
00:14:58
Speaker
The gas equivalent for that is about $120 to go the same range. So you think about that. If you're doing research, every time you go out and you run 15 nautical miles worth of research, there's $100 savings. And so think about for municipalities who are out doing this every single day, protecting communities, this is a perfect boat for that because it lowers costs over time.
00:15:20
Speaker
We had, as a guest here on the podcast, a CEO of a company called Articize Project, and they're actually developing technology that prevents the melting of the Articize and they use the boats to transfer the technology from the U.S.
00:15:35
Speaker
the acting because they wanted to make the whole process green. That's similar to what you were saying, collaborating with a lot of people actually who are interested in lowering their carbon emissions. Did you get any feedback from your customers or your collaborators? How did you handle that feedback? Have you incorporated into the design?
00:15:54
Speaker
What we've done in the first year of development testing is really work with our initial customers on beta testing. Essentially, we've had inquiries from a wide range of people around the country to buy our boats, and we've limited that to late 2024, early 2025 deliveries. The reason being is that we really wanted to know each customer, but we wanted to bring in
00:16:17
Speaker
collaboration of sorts where we say, listen, we want you to be our first customer, but we also want you to work with us. You're not going to get your boat until late 2024, but in the meantime, allow us to demo the boat with you and help us make the best version for you. So we've designed a recreational version of the watercraft and we've designed
00:16:37
Speaker
an institutional version of the water and there's some differences there are things you need in recreation like day beds in more room to lay out and enjoy things for institutions where you need a little bit more utilitarian you don't need fancy decks but you need non skids and you need the deck surface to be very clean and easy to walk around and move around on so.
00:16:55
Speaker
We've done a lot of that asking the initial client to be our beta testing facility and that way they're getting the product that they helped design. And obviously all of those design improvements will go into the scale production that we deliver in 2025.
00:17:12
Speaker
You've recently announced your debut model. It's called 2050, if I'm not wrong. So can you tell me a bit more about the model and what makes it unique? Yeah. So on the way to telling you about the model, I'll tell you about the name. Halavai is a very old Aramaic Yiddish Hebrew word.
00:17:32
Speaker
And the meaning of the word is the sort of will for it to be. Something that you know will change, that will get better. You don't know exactly how, but you are committed to the fact that it will change and that it will get better. And we really love this word. The Model 50 is, or the Model 2050, which is our debut model, was actually created as a look at the year 2050. So when we talked about COP 21, which is the significant climate
00:17:57
Speaker
conference that took place in Paris a few years ago. It was really the first time that governments and institutions had come together and said 2050 is the year that all of these big global superpowers, which are the ones creating the carbon, were going to look at as a place where they could be net zero, where they could be carbon neutral.
00:18:15
Speaker
And so we thought what a great thing to have our first model be named after the year so it's really for us it's like putting a goal out there and saying what if all recreational watercraft could be. Powered by renewable energy solutions could be electric could be others to come but what if that was the goal so the goal with the first model is to talk about the future and say this is what we have now.
00:18:35
Speaker
We can harness renewable energy. It's low cost energy. It's a low cost efficient system, lower maintenance. It's a new style of boating. What is that going to look like in 2050? The other thing that ended up happening, which is kind of fun and cool, is that our cruising speed is about 20 knots, which is about 22 miles per hour. That's a really efficient speed for us to be up on plane, going long distances. It's the most efficient speed for our boat to be in.
00:19:01
Speaker
And the range we get at that speed with our extended range battery packs is 50 nautical miles. So it was this really interesting thing. We named the boat the model 2050 because it was thinking about the year 2050, but the actual metrics of 20 knots at 50 nautical miles, which is what the boat actually performs at. So it actually has a dual
Market Opportunities for Electric Boats
00:19:19
Speaker
meaning now.
00:19:19
Speaker
Where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth in electric boats? At every level of municipality that does short-range mobility. We are building prototypes for municipalities moving away from composite structures, which is fairly common in recreation. So our first boat is built
00:19:34
Speaker
out of composite structures. So it's a vacuum infused mold. It's a very strong hull. But when you deal with municipalities, often they want aluminum hulls. They want them to be stronger. They want to use them more often. They want to use them more. They get banged into things. They get dings. And so composites
00:19:52
Speaker
tend not to be as strong as aluminum. However, in the recreational market, people don't really want aluminum boats. They want fiberglass boats. So I think at every level of municipality where there's harbor patrols, at every level where there's institutions, where groups, institutions, whether it's colleges or universities or just private NGOs, are doing marine research,
00:20:13
Speaker
in these inner or inter-coastal waterways. This is a perfect place for us. And then as our recreational market grows, we're going to be expanding to all the lake communities of the United States. 80% of boating in the US happens inside the land and doesn't happen on the coasts. It's interesting that the number of boats sold every year, 80% of those boats are for inland use.
00:20:35
Speaker
Because in Minnesota alone, it's 10,000 lakes. There's some really big boating communities inland in the US. And so I think that there's so much potential for us in the future to sort of slowly move across the country into both the recreational spaces. One of the things we'll have to do is look at models that have shorter range.
00:20:57
Speaker
that get the price down, which allow us to sell to a greater number of people in these communities. Because 15 nautical miles is a lot of range. It may sound to an offshore fisherman or an offshore boater. 15 nautical miles is not a lot. But when you're dealing with recreational use or institutional use, your average is 10 to 20, 23 miles per day max. So we may build a boat
00:21:22
Speaker
for those communities that has a slightly lower range, but it also significantly reduces the cost so that more people can buy these boats.
Advice for Entrepreneurs
00:21:28
Speaker
You mentioned that you basically entered this clean tech community out of personal passion. So do you have any advice for other people who want to start a company in this space? Do what your heart tells you to do. If you're driven by purpose,
00:21:40
Speaker
then you should do what your heart tells you to do. But be prepared that it often doesn't work out the way you'd like it to and that you will be hit with a lot of real challenges and real questions and real solutions and real financial concerns because there are entities at play that do not want this type of technology to be successful. And there's also the natural things that occur in business, the unforeseen things that come up. In America, there's a lot of innovation happening and I would encourage people to keep going.
00:22:07
Speaker
When you started, you didn't have a lot of knowledge. So where did you get it? Can you share some communities, Slack channels, the website, resource, or other people in green deck who wants to join and wants to explore
Contact & Learn More About Holobai
00:22:18
Speaker
this? Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to be the best in recommending that stuff because what we did is really, we went and did a lot of independent research initially. Well, once we said we were going to do this, we hired people. We scaled up by hiring really good engineers and really good naval architects and really good folks who had experience in.
00:22:37
Speaker
recreational and institutional and even Department of Defense voting developments. So we learned from the really great people we hired. And where can people learn more about you, about the company, maybe, you know, DM you, write you an email, ask you questions.
00:22:55
Speaker
For sure. On Instagram, you can reach us at HoliVie Power. It's at HoliVie Power. That's H-A-L-E-V-A-I-P-O-W-E-R. Our website is HoliVie.com. You can easily reach us there, send us a note, follow. Those are the main resources. We also use at HoliVie Power on Twitter or X. Those are the main channels of communication.
Conclusion & Call to Action
00:23:22
Speaker
Well, thank you. That's that's the end of our conversation. Thank you for being my guest here in the podcast. Oh, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
00:23:36
Speaker
You watched another episode of the Green New Perspective podcast. If you enjoyed the conversation on e-boats, consider leaving your thoughts in the comment section below. This episode is proudly sponsored by New Perspective, a Boston-based marketing agency working with clean tech clients only. And as always, I invite you to explore what our sponsors are doing by clicking on the links in the description of this episode. And if you want to support us and our mission to showcase some amazing, amazing clean tech companies
00:24:03
Speaker
Please subscribe to our channel on your favorite streaming platform. That means the world to us. Once again, thank you for watching the episode and hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Bye.