I felt more like an A-list actor at the Cannes Film Festival on the Côte d’Azur than a marine journalist at work on board a boat at idle in Vieux-Port.
As we waited for our turn to engage the throttles and exit the Cannes Yachting Festival, bound for the harbor, I looked through the yacht’s expansive glass at dozens of would-be paparazzi with their phones trained on us, shooting photos and taking videos. We cleared the scene and moved into the Bay of Cannes, cruising past the docked superyachts where crowds gathered at the bows, taking even more photos of us. Is this what life is like in the fame fishbowl?
The commotion was not about those of us on the boat, but instead about the craft itself, The Icon. It resembles nothing else on the water, or from this planet. It’s an all-glass, 43-foot boat with striking looks by BMW’s Designworks, which used this vessel to pay homage to the folded-paper era of Giorgetto Giugiaro’s car designs.
And, in place of a snarling V-8 engine, The Icon has an electric power train. Tyde is the builder. It’s a German electric-boat startup founded by Christoph Ballin, who also happens to be the co-founder of e-mobility leader Torqeedo. Ballin was on The Icon with me that day, and we talked about her 240-kWh Deep Blue batteries as well as Torqeedo’s 100-kW drives.
But it’s the foils that let her glide above the seas with superior efficiency—and fortunately, this was a show-me outing. As we sat comfortably in lounge chairs atop her plush, carpeted interior, the immediate torque of the electric drives put us noiselessly on plane and quickly onto the foils. We wove our way amid the moored vessels at 27 knots. When my turn came at the helm, I took the yoke and attempted to unnerve her in the wakes of other boats. Bracing for impact was useless, as it never came. She just glided by. It was among the singular moments that I have experienced on any boat, a glimpse into the future of mobility.
If only the paparazzi could have captured us at that moment instead. Boat lovers all around the world will want to see this, for sure.
This article was originally published in the November/December 2023 issue.
