Sustainability has been a core aspect of product design since Paal Kaperdal established the company in 2017.
Fundamentally, our focus is on the following four areas: maximizing the useful life of boats, empowering boat sharing, enabling an electric boating future, and protecting lives on the water.
1 | Maximizing the useful life of a boat
Boats can last over 50 years if treated with care. SmartBoat One extends the lifetime of a boat by keeping track of its vital functions and preventing catastrophic damage.
SmartBoat One also extends the useful life of the boat's batteries. When properly maintained, a battery can last up to 5 or 6 years before dying. Despite this, the average life of a boat battery in the real world is 2 years. Too often owners mistreat their batteries due to lack of knowledge or lack of data. We provide both.
Modern boats have 4 to sometimes 12 lead acid batteries. Lead acid batteries pose a potential threat to human health and the environment if improperly handled. The two main components of these batteries are sulfuric acid and lead. Both lead and sulfuric acid can contaminate solid and ground water. Sulfuric acid is highly corrosive, and lead has been linked to health effects in humans, particularly children. Extending the useful life of batteries by 2 to 3 times is the most effective way to limit the harmful effect on the environment and human health.
We extend the life of both boat and battery.
2 | Empowering the boat sharing economy.
A circular economy is "a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible”.
By introducing monitoring of the boat, we hope to enable more boat users to be comfortable with the idea of boat sharing. With continuous monitoring the owner has the comfort that the boat is used in a proper way, and also has the ability to detect if an event has happened and if inspection is needed.
We are proud to partner with several visionary companies who are enabling boat sharing by providing boats to rent, share, or through a subscription service.
Our partnerships with Skipperi, Boatflex, and X Yachts Greece in this regard are a major strategic priority for us, in order to empower their growth and bring boat sharing deeper into the global boating culture.
3 | The future of boating is electric.
To enable electric boating it is important to understand where and how boats are in fact being used, including popular destinations and trips and placement of fueling stations. Utilizing the vast amount of data and insight collected by SmartBoat One we can answer all of these questions and contribute to the adoption of electric boating.
What happened in terms of rapid adoption of electric cars in Norway can also happen with boats in this country. We have already processed the normal initial anxieties around electric car travel - range anxiety, on the road charging concerns, and have come to realize that most car use is daily, and short range. The long range trip is the exception not the rule. And, importantly, they are a joy to drive.
This will happen with boating, and Norway will lead the way.
By partnering with early pioneers like Evoy and Canal Boats who are already putting electric boats on the water, we are empowering the unique monitoring needs of a fully electric future.
4 | We protect lives on the water.
The sea is beautiful but it is also unpredictable and dangerous. Our partner Redningsselskapet tell us that they often spend too much time, the majority of their time in fact, just trying to locate where the boat or boater in distress actually is. What's their precise location?
SmartBoat One keeps track of the boat and her location, updating the Sensar Marine app every 15 seconds while at sea, and that precise GPS data can be shared by any app user to friends and family or rescue services in times of distress.
