- The Valo Hyperfoil is a two-person electric foiling PWC (personal watercraft) that seamlessly combines an exhilarating experience with visionary design
- The new technology offers a wide array of benefits including a super smooth ride in chop, excellent range and endurance as well as an exciting flying experience unique to foiling craft
- The Valo Hyperfoil will offer thrilling “hyperformance” while remaining safe and easy to handle thanks to proprietary active stabilization software
Tech start-up Valo has revealed more details of its revolutionary new personal watercraft, the Valo Hyperfoil. This unique new product has already seen immense demand from consumers, with the limited production run of Founder’s Edition vehicles to be built in 2024 already being oversubscribed by 300%. The general production run is scheduled for 2025 with pre-orders currently open.
Inspired Engineering
It’s a dream that Ed Kearney – the company’s founder and CEO – has held since childhood when his father showed him a video of an early foiler. “I was about 12 or 13 years old, and my dad – who was an inventor kind of guy – showed me this video of some MIT students who had built a pedal-powered hydrofoil boat that broke the world record for a human-powered boat because it was so efficient,” Kearney says. “I remember asking myself, why aren’t all boats like this? Here is a technology that can completely revolutionize how we transport things on the water by making them ten times more efficient and incredibly comfortable at the same time”. Born and raised in Australia and studying engineering before moving to California seven years ago, Kearney noticed that there was not much in the way of commercial hydrofoil development. “So I said why don’t we just do this? I wanted to create something no one else was making, because it was captivating and the world needed it.”
Taking Flight
It is these cues from other industries, and drawing on the expertise of people like pioneering foiling naval architect Paul Bieker who serves as a consulting designer on Valo’s designs, that have led to the rapid development of the Valo Hyperfoil. The team – which was joined in early 2023 by CTO Reo Baird, a tech entrepreneur and boat fanatic who had previously been developing foiling boats with the company Navier – moved from concept to prototype in just six months, showing not only the pace and flexibility of an agile start-up but also proving that the concept was built on rock-solid design and engineering principles. Since then, the team has tweaked the design to further enhance the experience for riders, moving to a twin-foil canard system for the foils aligned fore and aft on the centreline, and with the aft strut also housing the shaft-driven propulsion unit. The new design has resulted in 33% less strut drag than the alpha prototype while conferring improved stability and agility, and an increased maximum bank angle. Anhedral (swept-down) wings now deliver 30% more roll authority and contribute to the improved max bank angle.
It’s Magical!
Central to the ethos of the Valo Hyperfoil is not only to make it as thrilling and as enjoyable as possible, but also to focus on reliability, robustness and practicality. What this means in practice is that construction will draw on high-quality parts, from carbon fiber, titanium and stainless steel for the body construction to selecting known suppliers for the components – the battery system and electric motor, for example, are being sourced from experienced manufacturers in the US and UK respectively.
Further, the team has considered how the Valo Hyperfoil is likely to be used when designing key elements. Not only is the Valo Hyperfoil trailerable on a standard rig, it can also be beached just like a conventional jet ski thanks to a lifting front canard – the foil slots into a recess in the hull – and a rear strut that tils similar to an outboard, allowing for shallow water propulsion. “It may not seem as simple as having a vertical lifting rear element,” says Kearney, “but the truth is those vertical lifting struts with drive elements can be a nightmare for jamming down or up. Our solution is both highly reliable and highly practical, which means riders can focus fully on the fun without fear of something going wrong.”
Future Is Foiling
As Valo Hyperfoil moves toward production, with delivery of the first Founder’s Edition models scheduled for 2024, the company is celebrating the pre-launch success of their creation – they have taken more than US$3.3 million in advance orders already. They are also well into the development of a new product range for boat builders so they can easily enter the electric foiling era. “It very much feels like the dawn of a new age for the marine industry,” says CTO Reo Baird. “It’s clearly the right time and place for the marine industry to make this move forward toward a new type of marine mobility.” “It’s clean, with zero emissions, zero noise and zero wake; it’s fun, because you can enjoy exhilarating hyperformance in a wide range of sea conditions; it’s safe and comfortable because the Skyride software takes care of everything; and it’s practical, because you can do everything and go anywhere a conventional jet ski can go, and more besides,” Baird concludes. “It’s the future, and it’s right here, right now. We’re very excited to be moving into the production phase, and from the number of orders we’ve already received I think there are a lot of excited people out there too.”
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Source: Acnnewswire
