Electric Boats Hit the Water

Nothing beats a day on the water.  

But pleasure boating is not all idyllic. Gas-powered boats are noisy and spew noxious fumes and greenhouse gases. Fuel at the marina is not cheap — it can cost 50% more than what you pay for a gas station fill-up. And boats are notoriously expensive to operate and maintain. “They say the best days of a boat owner’s life are the day you buy it and the day you sell it, because everything in between is just maintenance,” says Ryan Cook.  

Enter electric boat–maker Arc.  

“Electric boating makes a ton of sense — in some ways even more than electric automotives,” says Cook ’12, who co-founded Arc with Mitch Lee ’11 in 2021. The company unveiled its first mass-market model, the Arc Sport, a high-performance EV boat designed for wake sports, in early 2024. Now Cook and Lee want to cover the water with electric vehicles.  

“Boats require a lot of power to move through water. To sustain a day’s activity out on the water, you need really big battery packs,” says Lee. Thankfully, Arc’s timing couldn’t have been better. “Historically, to build a battery pack of this size would have cost billions of dollars in research and development. But the automotive industry has already [done that],” making this the perfect time to capitalize on the development of high-voltage batteries.  

Cook and Lee met at Northwestern, where they both studied mechanical engineering. Upon graduating, the two worked together at Boeing, where Lee says they developed “an enthusiasm for brainstorming.” After Boeing, Cook became a lead engineer at SpaceX, and Lee founded a software startup.  

Ryan Cook, left, and Mitch Lee studied mecahnical engineering at Northwestern, later worked together at Boeing and then co-founded Arc in 2021. Credit: Courtesy of Arc

“We were both at our separate companies, thinking about what we wanted to do next,” says Lee. They discovered a mutual interest in solving challenges that involve hardware innovation and environmental impact. That’s when they decided to invent an all-electric boat.  

Brainstorming was the easy part.  

“It sounds pretty simple on paper,” says Lee. “I’m sure a million people have thought, ‘Somebody should make a Tesla for boats.’ The hard part is execution.” 

“There’s dozens of systems that need to all work and operate well together,” adds Cook, “and that’s just to make one boat. To make hundreds of boats per year — it’s 100 times harder.” 

One challenge involved the development of a touchscreen user interface. “You usually take [boats] out when the weather is hot and sunny,” says Cook. If it’s really sunny, “your touchscreen needs to get really bright, which means you need to flow more current through [the LED screen], which means [it’s] going to get very hot. 

“So the LED is hotter and brighter at the same time the sun is hotter and brighter. It snowballs into a really bad thermal problem. We learned that [lesson] very early on and have done a lot of clever engineering to deliver a bright and compelling touchscreen for users.” 

With a team of SpaceX, Rivian and Tesla veterans and backing from high-profile investors including the NBA’s Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, the company now has more than 100 employees at a 150,000-square-foot factory in Los Angeles.  

Cook says his SpaceX experience was foundational to helping launch Arc. “Boats are different than rockets, but SpaceX was great for teaching a mentality and an approach to engineering. [SpaceX founder] Elon [Musk] likes to push a ‘first principles’ approach” which involves breaking down complex problems into fundamental parts and understanding those aspects thoroughly. “Basically, don’t look at what everyone else is doing. Don’t just [accept] the rule of thumb. Ask why is the rule of thumb that way? And you can often get to a surprising answer that could break the norm [and] create a better product.” 

At Northwestern, Cook spent a lot of time in the Technological Institute’s machine shop, building objects for classes and personal projects.  

In particular, he and a classmate created an independent study with senior lecturer Michael Beltran ’11 MS where they deconstructed and then rebuilt a 3D printer. “It was a solidifying experience in terms of what engineering is in the real world,” says Cook. “You can design things. Build them. Tear them apart. That experience always stuck out to me.” (Beltran is now a Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Lecturer.)  

Cook says the University also gave him and Lee the complementary skills that make the innovation process successful. “Maybe you can attribute this to the way Northwestern organizes its courses or just the people it attracts,” says Cook, “but Mitch and I work really well together because we contrast each other. If I have an idea or proposal, Mitch will almost immediately take the other side of that argument, whether he agrees with it or not, just so we can debate it.”  

For once, Lee agrees. “Ryan could say the sky is blue and I’m like, ‘Let’s get after it.’ I will always take the other side.” 

Lee says the McCormick School of Engineering’s Design Thinking and Communication (DTC) program was formative. The two-quarter program puts first-year engineering students to work on real design problems submitted by clients, including nonprofits, entrepreneurs and industry members. 

Contrary to Cook, Lee did not spend much time in the machine shop. “That was not where my natural tendencies led me,” says Lee, who double-majored in mechanical engineering and economics. “I loved taking psychology classes and economics classes paired with my engineering degree. And DTC really helped solidify my love for the business aspect of engineering. That exposure inspired some of the brainstorming that Ryan and I were doing at Boeing and, later on, the openness to founding our own company.”