Moreover, much like manufacturers of internal-combustion monohull sportboats, Candela offers all kinds of options, from teak decks to underwater lighting to a variety of canvas packages. For starters, the price of the boat is $250,000, a figure that certainly exceeds the high-end runabout benchmark, but not by as much as I’d expect. There are some other conventional details worth mentioning. “She will bank in a very comfortable, conventional way,” he explains, “because the main foil can be twisted slightly by moving its leg-like supports both fore and aft, either together or not together, a feature that produces a slight inward roll while cornering and helps the foil-rudder-propeller assembly at the stern accomplish directionality.” The Candela Seven is powered by a 55-kW Torqeedo Deep Blue electric motor, energized via a 40-kW marinized BMW i3 battery. In a sense, Candela says, the boat’s constant inclination to fall over on its side is being instantaneously and recurrently computer-corrected for virtually all conditions. CleanTechnica has been tracking the goings-on over at the Swedish electric boat firm Candela for the past couple of years, and the company is very pumped.
This instability, though, is addressed by constantly and incrementally adjusting the flexible, cored-carbon-fiber main foil at a rate of about 100 times per second via a “flight computer,” accelerometers and an array of ultrasonic, barometric, gyroscopic and other sensors that keep tabs on wave height, roll, pitch, running attitude, speed and other parameters. In flying-over-the-water mode, with both the main amidships foil and the smaller foil at the stern (above the streamlined propeller torpedo) deployed, the boat is by all reports totally unstable, given that it is balancing its entire weight on an exceptionally small, highly efficient, drag-reducing footprint.
There’s no denying, however, that the Candela Seven is a VERY complicated vessel. In 2018, in an attempt to market a powerboat that would be ineffably economical to run, Hasselskog and Candela introduced the Candela Seven to the world-a fully electric, 26-foot, foiling powerboat with a reported range of 50 nautical miles (at 20 knots) and a profile that is, in my opinion, way prettier than the profiles of the few internal-combustion-driven power-foilers (including a Boeing Jetfoil) that surfaced during the 1970s and 80s and then ignominiously faded from the scene.