THE FUTURE IS HYBRID

When Volvo Penta and the Beneteau Group team up on a quest to make sustainable powerboating a reality, it's time to sit up and take notice...

The drive for a sustainable boating future is broadly divided into two camps – the passionate advocates of wholesale greenness and those who would welcome a workable market-ready improvement. As we sit at Volvo Penta’s Krossholmen test facility a few miles north of Gothenburg, Sweden, the implication is that the world’s most prolific marine engine builder belongs to the more ambitious camp. There’s a very clear understanding here that the hybrid diesel electric prototype we’ve come to see is just one element of a multi-tiered approach that needs to include fuel cell development, fossil fuel alternatives, bio-sourced materials, efficient hull designs and end-of-life recyclability.

But if that all sounds a touch speculative, Volvo Penta’s new parallel hybrid system has already been operating successfully for several thousand hours on a wind farm personnel transfer vessel and on a support boat used by arctic surfers. The fact that it’s performed so well means it’s now been integrated onto a leisure boat for the first time, and the test platform they’ve chosen to use it on is right here, waiting for us to take a look…

SYSTEM BASICS 

Jeanneau’s NC37 is a longstanding and well respected family sportscruiser. But when you lift up the engine hatch and peer inside, full of gleeful expectation, it all looks oddly commonplace.