Italian hydrofoil/sub has two electric motor options
The Deepseaker, a futuristic electric submarine with hydrofoils is probably the first machine that can fly above the water and also dive below it. The company has added DeepSpeed and its hydrojet motors to its list of partners which include Huracan, manufacturer of more traditional electric boat motors. All companies are based in Italy.
The Deepseaker has been created and developed over the past five years by Giuseppe Carusi and Osvaldo Irace, co-founders of iSpace2o, which has a number of other science-fiction-like projects in progress.
€1.5M loan makes full scale production possible
A big breakthrough arrived recently with the landing of a €1.5M (US$1.66M) loan from Invatalia, the Italian Economic Ministry’s Agency for Inward Investment and Economic Development.
Carusi told Italian EV website site ViaElettrico “Now that we have received funding from Invitalia, we are about to start building a full scale model patterned after our scale models and using those calculations and hydrodynamic simulations”.
In September they announced that motors would be supplied by Italian outboard and inboard manufacturer Huracan. “We are talking about 40 kW engine coupled with a water-jet system.” Carusi said. “Batteries are lithium, from the Kokam company of Korea.’
A few weeks after that announcement the Genoa boat show came along where DeepSpeed made quite an impression with its new hydrojet, extolling its advantages over a regular waterjet system. You can read more about it here.
DeepSpeed is also an Italian leading edge startup, so the idea of joining together with Deepseaker made a lot of sense for both companies. We don’t have details, but presumably the decision about whether Huracan or DeepSpeed motors will be used in depends on the application the purchasor has in mind.
Electric submarine hydrofoil can dive to 50 meters
Carusi and Irace told ViaElettrico that the final product “would be very expensive – about one million euros” and the marketing and sales strategy would be to promote it as a “sort of car of the sea for super yacht owners or luxury eco resorts for guided tours”.
The original dream and specifications for DeepSeaker on the iSpace2o website say that it “can speed on the surface in hydrofoil mode at 23+ knots and dive to 40/50 meters depth by means of an inflatable ballast tank under the cockpit.”
It has seats for 4 and will have the ability to make decisions autonomously. “if I go below a depth that is not allowed,” Carusi said, “the descent stops and brings me back to a safe depth.
The team has a schedule to present a final working prototype in 2021, but a model will be on display at the Dubai Expo in October 2020.
With any luck the DeepSeaker will have the same success as another ambitious and futuristic dream, the SeaBubble. At last year’s Miami Boat show the hydrofoiling water taxi made its first commercial sale and has now been tested to be approved as a flying-over-the-Seine option for Paris commuters.
