This isn’t the first time we at The Watercraft Journal have featured the Narke Electrojet. The Hungarian company has passed around the same pictures and video of it’s claimed “world’s first electric personal watercraft (PWC)” for more than half a year now and we still haven’t seen a working prototype reach the United States yet (being the world’s biggest marketplace).
Nevertheless, the Electrojet has been designed for general consumer production, and boast some respectable performance numbers given its size, weight and limited production run, namely 60-horsepower (45-kW) capable of doing 35 mph (55 km/h) in near silence. Now if you think that’s a little dogged, consider that the carbon-bodied electric runabout is filled with an in-house-designed 45-kW electric motor and a lithium-ion battery pack, which the company claims is good for up to 90 minutes of “normal” riding.
According to a report by New Atlas, “charging takes about two hours from 0-80 percent, and there’s talk of a removable battery you can swap out to keep the thing humming. The starkly angular shell is a carbon-reinforced composite design, targeting high strength and low weight, but no weight figures are available yet.” While an official list of features is absent, observation reveals a nice digital dash display with “what looks like some Bluetooth smartphone integration built in for navigation, weather and phone features.”
Thus far, Narke has restricted general access to the Electrojet to a handful of demo events at Lake Balaton, about half an hour southwest of Budapest. Equally, the company has not released any firm release dates or prices. New Atlas critiques, “The key problem we’re seeing is as simple as this: it might not be fast enough, or go far enough, for the average PWC buyer.
“Narke claims it’s ‘for special people who get attention not because they are louder than others … who know when to let off the gas and when to throttle back gently.’ Stereotypically, these descriptions would apply to approximately zero jet ski buyers.”
