Project description
Futuristic water taxi in the making
Forget buses and trams, a hydrofoil taxi vehicle could be the solution to escape traffic jams in cities. Imagine crossing the Seine river in a small, fast and efficient craft! These SeaBubbles, as they are called, will be operated as a water taxi service. The EU-funded project will create a network of mooring stations to charge the vessels and to pick up/drop off passengers. The stations will produce electricity via solar panels and hydrokinetic turbines to make them autonomous from the grid. The aim is to have SeaBubbles in more than 50 cities globally by 2024 to reduce traffic congestion while making use of underutilised waterways.
Objective
Many of the cities in EU are badly congested. Congestion increases air pollution, leads to more traffic accidents & makes the cities less accessible to its dwellers.
A lot of cities were built and developed along some body of water—typically 30-40% of locations are within a 10 min walk from a river bank or canal. This creates an opportunity for water-based transport that was not exploited before due to low speeds of existing boats or high emissions of their diesel engines.
SeaBubbles are small, fast & very efficient electric hydrofoil craft that that can carry a driver & four passengers with a max speed of 30 km/h, while producing no emissions or noise. SeaBubbles are designed by the same world-class team has previously built the unique sailing hydrofoil trimaran that broke the speed sailing record in 2009.
SeaBubbles will be operated as a water taxi service, which requires a network of mooring stations for boarding/unboarding passengers and charging the vessels. These stations will produce electricity via solar panels & hydrokinetic turbines, with the goal to make them autonomous from the grid. SeaBubbles will carry passengers between two typical urban points 2x faster than a regular taxi and at a comparable price.
Our goal is to have 60+ SeaBubbles operating by the end of 2018, active in 2-3 cities globally, as well as 12+ docks, with a total electricity production of ~100 MWh and a CO2 annual reduction of ~300+ tons with revenues of €10m+. By 2024 we want to be in 50+ cities globally. Once successful, SeaBubbles will be creating jobs in vessel and mooring station manufacturing, hydrofoil craft driving as well as software development
SeaBubbles are supported by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and received interest of other cities in EU, and positive media coverage from Bloomberg, The Telegraph, The Verge and many others.
In this Phase 2 project we will industrialize SeaBubbles and trial them is several cities in EU and in the world.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware development
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringair pollution engineering
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
- social sciencessocial geographytransportpublic transport
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
75008 PARIS
France
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.