Hybrid boat?

I saw this on my local news tonight. They showed a brief picture of it and it was an inboard. I searched the web for a picture, but this link was all I could find. Apparently Chris Craft is going to market the boat.

http://www.ibinews.com/ibinews/newsdesk/20071114145847ibinews.html

http://video.nbc11.com/player/?id=252323

Styrer motor. Thats who Indmar is doing a diesel with. I bet the option is as much as the boat.

Indmar is doing a diesel option? Hopefully it is cheaper the the TDi for MC

So is 5 knots the limit on the electric engine? Unless the boat is really big, why not just keep a trolling motor handy instead? I admit I'm not able to pull up the video link so I can't see what's going on with link 2.

I'd personally like to see an electric motor being run off of a gasoline generator. It would be a lot more efficient and you could add a battery array to give you some juice before even using the gas motor. The torque would also be amazing. You would just have to be careful about water leaks since it would be like having a gigantic starter motor for an engine and those things are a bit finicky when they get wet.

Electric motors powered by a gas engine driving a generator are less efficient than a gas engine alone. Every time you have an energy conversion you have losses that are never recovered. A brief review of the concept of the Conservation of Energy would be helpful here. Boat motors operate, at least most of the time, as stationary engines so there is really no useful way to make one into a hybrid.

Ships and trains use diesel generators powering electric motors. It can be done on a large scale as shown. Will it ever come to small boats? The pods on ships offer awesome vessel control. That would be a huge advantage over the current driveline setup on wakeboarding boats.

Unlike a car, boats are a constant load. There is no point at which a battery bank can charge. So something like the Toyota Hybrid system will not work.

The least they can do is start using hydrofoils to control roll, startup lift, and provide downward force (like the wedge) once at speed. Of course they could also lift the boat when cruising for fuel economy. Is it time to completely redesign the wakeboard boats?

Ships and trains use diesel/electric motors because there aren't transmissions strong enough to handle the loads generated not because they are more efficient. Once a train or ship got moving directly coupling the engine to the load would be most efficient.