The Icon by Tyde and BMW
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The Icon by Tyde and BMW is a futuristic foiling electric boat that stunned onlookers at the Cannes Film Festival.
Christoph Ballin is a very smart guy. I realized this as I stood in my hotel room with him in Cannes, France, staring at two pairs of tuxedo pants strewn across the bed.
Hear me out.
Ballin is the founder of Tyde, a Munich-based electric boat startup that partnered with BMW to produce a 43-foot foiling vessel called The Icon. Thanks to BMW’s considerable influence, The Icon was making its world debut, not at a boat show, but rather the ever-glamorous Cannes Film Festival. I had met Ballin for dinner the evening after our sea trial, where he had mentioned that he had come into two tickets to a film premiere the next evening. We could attend, but we’d need to find tuxedos on extremely short notice.
Luckily, I had a guy. A girl actually—an old friend who was working events for the festival. She was able to procure us two gratis tuxedos the next morning, with the caveat that there was no time to tailor the pants. Which is how we ended up in the hotel room. I had previously worked myself into a full sweat trying to safety pin my trousers to no avail. That’s when Ballin knocked on my door holding a roll of duct tape. He promptly flipped both of our pants inside out (we were both wearing other pairs, I should mention) and neatly taped them into secure and perfect creases at exactly the right length. Which is how I ended up walking a red carpet in Cannes next to The Weeknd while wearing a pair of pants held together by tape.
Now, onto the boat.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. I’ve never seen anything like it. The Icon looks like a Swedish living room collab’d with a wedge of cheese and a spaceship. There are no side decks, it’s fully enclosed and the superstructure is nearly entirely glass. It’s so otherworldly looking in fact, that when I posted a short video of myself driving it to Instagram the clip went viral, with 90,000 likes and 1.7 million views as I’m writing this. Of the 1,200-plus comments the post received, impressions ranged from “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” to various iterations of “WTF?!”
So allow me to try to explain just exactly WTF is going on here. Ballin is the founder of Torqeedo, the groundbreaking electric-engine company that he sold in 2017. For his next chapter, he leveraged his contacts to link up with BMW to break into the piping hot electric boat market. “Everyone in this industry knows they need to change, to get away from carbon,” he told me as we walked the docks of the Vieux Port de Cannes. “And we are trying to make it obvious that it can be done.” To do so, he formed Tyde in 2021, and built this boat, named The Icon, powering its 22,000 lbs. with six, 530-pound BMW i3 batteries with a total power capacity of 240-kWh.
To answer your very first question—one of many I’d imagine—range is 50 nautical miles at 20 knots. Anyone who is trying to sell you an electric boat in 2023 who doesn’t acknowledge that their range is an issue is not being honest. However, anyone who doesn’t see improvements in that regard coming fast, most likely has their head in the sand.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given his pedigree, Ballin is an EV optimist with his eye on the future. “Over the next five years we plan to double the energy density of the batteries,” he says. “I believe we will be close to a 150-nautical-mile range at foiling speeds by then. And that covers all range requirements for a dayboat.”
Which might lead to your next question. What exactly is this thing? The Icon’s design was partially inspired by Rolls-Royce grand tourers, cars with utmost interior volume meant to offer their owners excellent views of the countryside while somebody else was at the wheel. The first people to buy this boat will most likely use it effectively as a luxury ferry. Ballin sees high-end resorts as potential customers, as they could use it to move guests from island to island or from airport to harbor. And this boat isn’t, as many have assumed, a prototype. Tyde has plans to roll out a small-volume approach over the next year, and then gradually ramp up production. “It’s not a one-off,” says Ballin. “It’s ready for order.”
Of course, for most, including readers of Power & Motoryacht, a miniature ferry, no matter how luxe, doesn’t make much sense. But Ballin’s got big plans, and The Icon is only the first jolt in his company’s formidable current. Tyde has plans to roll out more dayboat friendly designs, with heads and showers. It’s something that a certain kind of tech-forward boater might fall in love with. Because there really is a lot here to like.
The Icon’s interior is… something else. With thick carpet and rotating chairs there is an undeniable Bond villain aesthetic at play. And it’s nearly completely encased in glass, meaning the lines of sight are out of this world. The reason this boat looks like a floating greenhouse—unorthodox looking from the outside but offering a memorable experience from the inside—is because she was designed from the inside out. “With this boat we started with the interior,” says Ballin. “We said, ‘OK, I want to be on a boat and what do I want to see when I’m on board?’ And the answer was ‘everything.’ So we designed The Icon to offer panoramic views. In a closed, protected boat you typically can’t do that. This interior has infinite space and innovative character.”
One question that may seem obvious is, with all that space enclosed by glass, is the air conditioner taking up a ton of power? Ballin admits that on hot days it will need to run a lot, but typically the air-conditioner only uses about 2-percent of the boat’s total power.
At the helm, The Icon offers a truly memorable experience. Pushing the throttles forward, the boat accelerated so quickly and quietly that I was caught a bit off guard when at 18 knots it lifted out of the water onto its foils. Luckily, Tyde thought of that too. A lush score composed by none other than Hans Zimmer automatically plays when the boat rises off the water’s surface—the music evokes the sense of taking flight.
Humans accustomed to handling the wheel of a car or boat almost instinctually expect acceleration to come with a crescendo of rumbling vrooms—not so with The Icon. The Tyde’s twin 135-hp/100-kW Torqeedo engines are mouse-on-cotton quiet. That trait, coupled with the foiling technology, made piloting this boat an experience unlike any I’d ever had. Another noticeable absence here, is the wake, which is infinitesimal. With just the foils in the water, there simply isn’t enough material slicing through the water for the boat to throw anything out behind it. This minimization of drag slashes a boat’s energy usage by 80-percent versus a monohull, according to Ballin, who describes foiling technology as a “magic moment” for the industry.
When driving the boat your sense of what is happening around you is enhanced by one of the sharpest screens I’ve ever seen on a boat. The 32-inch display has crystal clear 6k resolution with ten times the number of pixels as standard MFDs. Both the display and user interface are done in-house, and feature Orca chart programs. AI and camera-based collision avoidance software will be integrated soon.
I zipped the boat around among the moored megayachts and passing tenders and was pleasantly pleased with her responsiveness. The water off Cannes was alive with some of the most impressive and famous yachts in the world. A Lamborghini 63 motored by, thought to belong to Conor McGregor. And dead ahead of us was Jeffrey Bezos’s brand new 417-foot Oceanco Koru—the largest sailboat in the world. Beyond that near Cap D’Antibes, even larger yachts bobbed in the distance. And yet every time we passed a boat, all eyes were on the Tyde. Simply put, no one’s ever seen anything quite like this thing.
Satisfied with my sea trial, I turned the boat back to port and soon eased off the throttles. Again, Hans Zimmer sprang to life, this time with mellowed out strings, as the boat nestled gently back down on the water’s surface like a mallard coming in for landing.
As we slid back toward the dock, I asked Ballin how he thinks his boat will be received. “I think very well,” he said with trademark cheeriness. “We want to show people what’s possible, and give clients a choice—burn 300 gallons per hour, or take this path. I think the answer is clear, but I think it will become even more clear in just a few year’s time.”
Ballin named his company after the Old English spelling of tide, which has the same Old Norse root as the word “time.” The etymology at play gives new life to the phrase Time and tide wait for no man. And with technology that is freely galloping at the very avant garde of what the marine industry has to offer in regard to electric boats, Tyde is waiting for no man either. And when Christoph Ballin talks about the future, you’d be wise to pay attention.
The Icon Specifications:
LOA: 43’2”
Beam: 14’9”
Draft: 2’9” (on foils)
Engines: 2/100-kW Torqeedos
Cruise Speed: 24 knots
Top Speed: 30 knots
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This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/boats/the-icon-by-tyde-and-bmw-boat-review
