EMO Electric

What if one of the biggest improvements you could make to your boating experience is something you barely notice? Less noise. When most people compare boat motors, they look at horsepower, speed, battery capacity, range and price. Noise often becomes an afterthought. But spend a few hours on the water and the difference becomes much easier to understand. A loud motor can become the background soundtrack of an entire trip. It can interrupt conversations, overpower natural sounds and make a peaceful journey feel more mechanical. A quieter electric outboard changes that relationship. Instead of the motor becoming the centre of attention, the water becomes the experience again. And this is where the psychology of quiet boating becomes surprisingly important. Why Does Noise Matter So Much on the Water? Sound affects how we experience a place. Think about sitting beside a quiet lake compared with sitting beside a running generator. The location might be the same, but your perception of it is...

One boater bought a 1kW motor for his 14-foot RIB and called it underpowered. The sailor who bought the same motor for her dinghy calls it the best purchase she's made on the water. They're both right, and that's exactly the problem with how this question gets answered. A 1kW electric outboard isn't one experience. It's seven different experiences depending on your boat, your load, your water, and how you actually use the motor. Here's what those scenarios honestly look like, not against the idealized conditions of a manufacturer test, but against real boating. A 1kW outboard is the right motor for most dinghies and tenders under 700–800 lbs in protected to semi-protected water. It is not the right motor for boats above 900–1,000 lbs, heavy loads in open coastal water, or any scenario requiring sustained power against meaningful current or chop. Everything else depends on your specific situation, which is exactly what the seven scenarios below cover. What 1...

The last gas outboard on Lake Michigan cuts out at 9:47am on a Tuesday in June. What happens in the next sixty seconds is something no living American has ever heard. Not silence. Something richer than silence. Something older. This question deserves to be asked seriously — not as environmental debate, but as a genuine exercise backed by real science. Because the answer reveals something unexpected: most of us have never actually heard what our lakes sound like without us. The Scale of What We've Added There are currently over 9.3 million registered small motorboats in the USA. On any summer weekend, the surface of Lake Erie, the Finger Lakes, or Table Rock Lake carries the layered mechanical noise of hundreds of outboards running simultaneously. That noise doesn't stay on the surface. Sound travels approximately 1,500 meters per second in water — nearly five times faster than in air — broadcasting engine noise across the entire water column, instantly, in every direction. What...

Run the Spirit 1.0 Evo flat out at its full 1kW output and you get roughly 1 hour 15 minutes of runtime and about 7.8 miles (12.5km) of range on the standard Spirit Battery Plus. That's the ceiling — the number every other setting on this motor gets measured against. What's actually interesting isn't that number on its own, though. It's what happens to runtime and range the moment you back off even slightly, and why "full throttle" is rarely where you should be running anyway. Why This Matters Every electric outboard has a number nobody advertises loudly: what happens at the very top of the throttle. Manufacturers love to talk about their best-case cruising range, but the full-power number tells you something more useful — how the motor behaves under real stress, and how much margin you actually have before the battery taps out. We wanted to know what "the limit" really looks like on the ePropulsion Spirit Evo , using the numbers ePropulsion itself ...

Pair the ePropulsion Spirit 1.0 Evo with a 120Ah Solid State Marine battery and you get roughly six hours of full-throttle runtime, compared to about one hour and fifteen minutes on the standard Spirit Battery Plus. That's nearly five times the capacity in a battery that's still light enough to carry down a dock. But more capacity isn't automatically the right choice for every boat — and that's what this test actually reveals. Why This Matters Runtime anxiety is the number one reason boaters hesitate on electric outboards. You've heard the stories — someone drifting back to the ramp on a dead battery, or cutting a fishing trip short because the gauge dropped faster than expected. A recent test from EMO Electric put real numbers behind that fear, running the Spirit 1.0 Evo against a third-party Solid State Marine battery to see what happens when you throw significantly more capacity at the problem. If you're comparing electric outboards to gas, or trying to figu...