University of Michigan Electric Boat is a student-led project team with the mission of driving innovation in the electric marine industry and building the next generation of engineers. We are building an electric D-Stock hydroplane to return to our national collegiate competition, and starting the design of a next generation, record breaking, all electric F1 tunnel hull race boat. These projects will require new innovations and develop real world engineering experience for our team.
In September and October of this semester, UMEB was testing and tuning our current electric race boat, TiDE, to prepare it for an electric water speed record attempt in late November, along with designing and sourcing components for our electric D-Stock hydroplane, which we will use to compete in the Promoting Electric Propulsion (PEP) collegiate competition in April 2026. We will soon be starting the conceptual design of the next generation electric F1 tunnel boat as well, with the goal of competing for world electric water speed records in spring 2027.
TiDE is a 22 ft, 800+ hp, all electric race boat built with the ultimate goal of breaking the electric water speed record. The project started in May 2023, and we spent almost two years designing, building (and rebuilding), and testing before our first successful water test in April 2025. We encountered component failures in subsequent testing, which took nearly the entire summer to fix, but we had the boat ready for our competition in late August. The competition was the 2025 Lake of the Ozarks Shootout, where we won the electric class, and became the first college team to ever compete in and win over the event's 37 year history. After the competition we were testing the boat to fix bugs and optimize speed, but in mid October, we got put on an operations freeze due to an incident with another EV project team at the University, so we could no longer test and had to cancel the November record run. Now we are focusing on our new projects with higher goals as the EV freeze is still in effect.
The electric D-Stock hydroplane is a much smaller scale boat than TiDE, and is designed to be that way. It will be 11’-12’ long with around 45 hp, optimized for circle track racing at around 50-60+ mph. We are designing the D-Stock to the ruleset of the PEP collegiate competition, so we are much more limited on what we can build. We are also on a much more limited time and money budget with the D-Stock, as the design and build process is happening over a semester and a half with a $35k budget for designing, building, testing, and traveling to compete with the boat. This is in contrast to the unlimited ruleset that TiDE was designed and built on, with an almost 2.5 year design, build, testing, and competition cycle and a $500k+ budget. The D-Stock is being used as a learning project to build the technical skills of our new project leads for this year, and allow newly recruited members to get hands-on experience and ownership of a project in a lower risk, more approachable environment. These skills will transfer directly to our next record project, the electric F1 tunnel boat.
The electric F1 tunnel boat will be an evolution of the innovation and boundary pushing nature of TiDE, using what we learned from TiDE and the D-Stock project to create a one of a kind electric race boat optimized for straight line speed and circle track records. It will be 18’-20’ long, with 550-700+ hp, but will be under half the weight of TiDE and optimized for both straight line speed and cornering, with a top speed of 160+ mph and a turning ability of 4-6 g’s. The design, build, testing, and competition cycle will happen over 1.5-2 years, and early budget estimates show that it will cost almost $500k. This project will require industry level engineering design for specific components and system architecture as a whole, which will require new innovations from our team. These challenges will not be trivial, but they will provide invaluable real-world engineering experience at the level of a company or professional race team, so our team members will be prepared for entering industry at the highest level.
It will not be an easy feat to accomplish these projects and follow through on our goals, but this ambition is what has built our team into a fully fledged project team competing with companies and high level universities only 5 years after founding, and it will lead us to continue pushing the boundaries of electrification of the marine industry in the future!
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