Electric Yacht Tender UK: What Owners and Captains Need to Know Before Commissioning One
A tender is the vessel a superyacht owner actually uses. The mothership carries you across an ocean once or twice a season. The tender carries the same owner to the beach club, to dinner, to the marina taxi rank, several times a day, every day the yacht is in commission. That mismatch between how rarely the big boat runs its engines and how constantly the little boat runs hers is exactly why electric propulsion has taken hold in the tender market faster than almost anywhere else in yachting.
Cockwells, the Falmouth-based tender builder behind craft for yachts including the 70 metre Perini Navi ketch Sybaris, put it plainly in an interview with ONBOARD Magazine: the shipyard has received numerous enquiries about electric tenders for years, but its own sea trial data shows that success depends entirely on owners and crew accepting a real limitation on range. That is the honest starting point for this guide. Electric yacht tenders are not a compromised version of a diesel tender. They solve a different brief, and understanding which brief matches your programme is the single most useful thing this article can do for you.
What Is an Electric Yacht Tender?
An electric yacht tender is a battery-powered support vessel, typically 5 to 12 metres long, used to ferry guests and crew between a superyacht and shore, or between a private vessel and a marina, without a combustion engine. Power comes from lithium-ion battery packs driving electric outboards, inboard pod motors, waterjets, or, on newer designs, hydrofoils, and the tender recharges from the mothership's generator or dockside shore power between runs.
Why Tenders Suit Electrification Better Than Almost Any Other Boat
Speaking to Boat International in 2022, Audrey Hodgdon of Hodgdon Yachts, a US builder that has adapted its 10.5 metre and 12 metre limousine tenders to electric power, summed up the appeal directly: the environmental benefits, noise and vibration mitigation and reduced service requirements make electric particularly suitable for tenders. That is not marketing language. It reflects how tenders are actually used.
Menten of Tenderworks, quoted in the same piece, made the operational case even more bluntly, asking how often a limo tender is actually driven at 40 knots. His answer: smaller tenders wait idling behind the main yacht for hours, then drive perhaps ten minutes to shore. A vessel with that duty cycle does not need 150 nautical miles of range. It needs to be silent at the swim platform, quick off the line in a crowded harbour, and ready again an hour later.
The Physics Every Buyer Should Understand Before Speccing One
Teodor Hällestrand, of electric boat builder Candela, told Boat International that even the best lithium-ion batteries currently on the market will not push a conventional planing hull past 20 to 25 nautical miles at high speed, a figure that makes such craft inferior to petrol tenders on raw performance. That is the trade-off at the heart of every electric tender conversation: drive fast, or drive far, but rarely both, unless the hull itself is designed to cheat the equation, which is exactly what hydrofoiling tenders like Candela's own C-8 and Cockwells' Alte Volare concept attempt to do.
How Far Can an Electric Yacht Tender Actually Travel?
Range depends far more on hull design and speed than on battery size alone, and the spread across the market is wide. Hodgdon's converted limousine tenders run twin 50kW Deep Blue motors on 85kWh of BMW i3-derived batteries, reaching 20 knots and a genuinely useful 100 nautical miles at a 9-knot cruise. At the performance end, the Slovenian-built EJET 4X uses a 46.2kWh pack and 60kW continuous drive to claim 35 knots and 40 nautical miles. Candela's foiling C-8, adapted for tender use, covers roughly 50 nautical miles at 22 knots on a single 40 to 69kWh pack, according to Boat International and Candela's own published specification, because lifting the hull clear of the water removes most of the drag that limits conventional electric tenders.
The Leading Electric Yacht Tenders Compared
Specifications below are drawn from manufacturer data and marine press testing current as of 2026. Several UK and near-UK relevant builders are included alongside the international field, since a buyer researching this category in Britain will realistically be comparing across all of them.
| Tender | Origin | Top Speed | Range | Notable Detail |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ✦ Chorus Voltis | UK (London) | Not publicly specified | Not publicly specified | Bespoke solar-electric tender offered in three size tiers, 3D-printed hull, Mediterranean-inspired styling, engineered for quiet harbour transfers |
| Cockwells Alte Volare | UK (Falmouth) | 40 knots claimed | Not publicly specified | 39ft electric hydrofoil concept using AC75-derived retractable foils, shown at Monaco Yacht Show 2022, up to 80% less energy than a non-foiling hull |
| RS Electric Pulse 63 | UK | Not publicly specified | Not publicly specified | Built by RS Sailing's electric division, customisable seat layout, canopy and battery configuration for superyacht tender use |
| Candela C-8 (tender fit) | Sweden | 30 knots | ~50 nm at 22 knots | Hydrofoiling day boat adapted as a tender, C-Pod direct-drive motor, recharges to usable capacity in under two hours |
| Hodgdon Limo Tender | USA | 20 knots | 100 nm at 9 knots | 10.5m and 12m limousine tenders converted to twin 50kW Deep Blue motors on 85kWh of BMW i3 battery cells |
| Voltari 260T/T | Canada | Not publicly specified | Not publicly specified | Deep-V carbon-fibre RIB hull rated at 740hp equivalent, fully customisable Mothership Package, 10-year warranty |
| EJET 4X | Slovenia | 35 knots | 40 nm | 3.95m RIB with a purpose-built electric jet drivetrain rather than an outboard, 46.2kWh pack, 4-hour fast charge |
A clear pattern runs through that table. Every builder is making the same trade between speed, range and hull weight, and the two genuinely different approaches, hydrofoiling and conventional planing hulls, sit at opposite ends of the same equation. Chorus and RS Electric are the two UK-built entries here, and neither has published the granular speed and range figures that Candela, Hodgdon and EJET have. That is worth noting honestly rather than papering over: bespoke UK tender builders tend to quote performance per commission rather than as a fixed headline spec, since the battery configuration, hull length and fit-out change with every order.
Electric Yacht Tenders Built in the UK
Britain has two genuinely distinct approaches to the electric tender brief right now, and a buyer researching this category domestically should understand both before commissioning.
Chorus Boats and the Voltis
Chorus, based in London's Docklands, builds the Voltis as a bespoke solar-electric yacht tender offered in three tailored size options to suit different guest capacities. The studio uses large-scale 3D printing to shape each hull, a manufacturing approach that reduces material waste compared with traditional fibreglass moulding and allows genuinely flexible, one-off versioning rather than a fixed production run. Chorus states that each Voltis is engineered with advanced fluid dynamics to optimise energy efficiency, with styling drawing on Mediterranean design language, and positions the tender for discreet harbour transfers and private coastal outings that complement a superyacht rather than compete with it visually. As with several bespoke UK builders in this space, exact top speed and range figures are not published, since Chorus tailors the battery and propulsion configuration to each commission rather than quoting one fixed number.
Cockwells and the Case for Honest Caution
Cockwells' position is worth reading in full because it is unusually candid for a boatbuilder's public commentary. Rather than rushing an electric tender to market on the back of the Alte Volare concept's Monaco reception, the yard has stated its own sea trial data shows that electric success depends on owners and crew genuinely accepting the range limitation, with careful planning around how the tender will actually be used, and ideally a lower cruising speed requirement than a diesel equivalent would demand. That is a useful benchmark against which to weigh any manufacturer's marketing claims. If a builder cannot articulate the trade-off as clearly as Cockwells has, treat the pitch with some scepticism.
How Do You Charge an Electric Yacht Tender From a Superyacht?
A fully electric tender is only as useful as the charging infrastructure supporting it. According to a specification-grade guide published by Superyacht Tenders, the questions that matter before committing to any electric platform are the mothership's available charging output in kilowatts, whether there is physical space and safe cable routing for a dedicated charging station at the tender bay or transom platform, and what the tender's expected daily operational profile looks like in nautical miles, number of runs, and idle time at destination.
On a yacht with a modern shore-power management system and spare generator capacity, overnight charging is straightforward and the tender is ready at first light. On a yacht that runs tight on generator headroom, or spends long periods at anchor away from shore power, the logistics become a genuine design consideration rather than an afterthought, and this is precisely the conversation worth having with a builder like Chorus or Cockwells before, not after, the mothership's own electrical system is finalised.
What Does an Electric Yacht Tender Cost in the UK?
Pricing across this category is thin on public confirmation, which is typical for bespoke and semi-custom marine builds. Candela's hydrofoiling C-8, the closest thing to a fixed-price production electric tender on the market, starts from roughly €330,000 according to Top Gear's 2024 review and Candela's own published pricing. Bespoke UK builders including Chorus and Cockwells do not publish list prices, since each commission is specified against a particular yacht's guest capacity, garage dimensions and styling brief, a pattern consistent with the wider custom tender market, where YachtWorld's own listings for tenders of all propulsion types span from under $2,000 for the smallest utility craft to over $2 million for the largest custom builds.
Common Mistakes Buyers Make When Specifying an Electric Tender
Sizing the battery for an aspirational trip rather than the actual duty cycle. Menten of Tenderworks' observation still holds: most tenders idle for hours and run for minutes. Specify against real use, not the one dramatic long-range day you might take twice a season.
Finalising the mothership's electrical system before the tender's charging requirement is confirmed. Retrofitting generator capacity or dock charging infrastructure after the fact is more expensive and more disruptive than designing it in from the start, which is why the Superyacht Tenders guide recommends resolving charging logistics during the yacht's own commissioning process.
Assuming every electric tender behaves the same way. A conventional planing hull on batteries, a hydrofoiling design like Cockwells' Alte Volare or Candela's C-8, and a jet-drive platform like the EJET 4X each carry a different range, speed and maintenance profile. Comparing them on a single headline number, rather than against your actual programme, is the most common and costly mistake in this category.
Underestimating lead time. Cockwells has noted that owners who involve their tender builder early in the mothership's own commissioning process avoid the tender garage becoming a late-stage constraint on space and specification, a lesson that applies just as directly to a bespoke electric build.
Recreational Day Tender, Hydrofoil Tender or Conventional RIB: Which Fits Your Programme?
There is no single right answer here, only the right answer for a specific yacht and a specific pattern of use.
Choose a Conventional Planing Hull Tender If
Your runs are genuinely short, mostly harbour transfers or beach club shuttles, and silence and instant torque matter more than outright range. This is where builds like the Chorus Voltis, RS Electric's Pulse 63 and Hodgdon's converted limousine tenders sit.
Choose a Hydrofoiling Tender If
You want higher cruising speed without sacrificing range as heavily, and you are comfortable with the added mechanical complexity of an actively stabilised foil system. Candela's C-8 and Cockwells' Alte Volare concept represent this end of the market, though the Alte Volare remains a concept rather than a confirmed production model.
Choose a Jet-Drive Electric Tender If
Beach landings, shallow water access, or proximity to swimmers are a regular part of the tender's job. The EJET 4X's purpose-built jet drivetrain removes the exposed propeller risk that comes with a conventional electric outboard or pod motor.
[H2] Frequently Asked Questions
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Yes, for the majority of tender use cases. Most tender runs are short harbour or beach transfers rather than long-range passages, which suits current battery range well. UK builders including Chorus Boats and RS Electric Boats produce bespoke electric tenders domestically, and Cockwells in Falmouth has developed an electric hydrofoil tender concept, so buyers have credible UK-built options rather than relying solely on imports.
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It varies significantly by design. Conventional planing hull tenders typically manage 20 to 25 nautical miles at higher speeds, according to Candela's Teodor Hällestrand, while hydrofoiling designs like the Candela C-8 reach roughly 50 nautical miles at a 22-knot cruise. Hodgdon's converted limousine tenders achieve around 100 nautical miles, but only at a slower 9-knot cruising speed.
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Charging time depends on the onboard charger and shore or generator power available. The EJET 4X charges in around 4 hours using its 12kW fast-charge option. Candela's C-8 can reach usable capacity in under two hours from a suitable DC supply. Bespoke builders typically size the onboard charging system to match the yacht's own generator or shore-power capacity during commissioning.
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Generally no, at comparable range. A conventional diesel tender can sustain 35 to 50 knots over long distances without a range penalty, while an electric equivalent trades some top speed and range for silence, instant torque and zero emissions. Hydrofoiling electric tenders like Candela's C-8 narrow that gap by cutting drag, but even these remain slower over distance than a large-engined diesel RIB.
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Bespoke UK builders including Chorus Boats and Cockwells do not publish fixed list prices, since each tender is specified against a particular yacht's guest capacity and garage dimensions. As a market reference point, Candela's semi-production C-8 hydrofoil tender starts from roughly €330,000, though bespoke builds can run higher or lower depending on size, materials and fit-out.
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Range at speed. Cockwells' own published research states plainly that for an electric tender to succeed, owners and crew need to accept the range limitation and plan the tender's use accordingly, ideally with a lower cruising speed requirement than an equivalent diesel tender. Buyers who specify against their actual daily use pattern, rather than an aspirational long-range trip, tend to be better served.
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Yes, this is the standard setup. Most electric tenders recharge from the superyacht's own generator or a dedicated shore-power connection when docked. Confirming the mothership's available charging output in kilowatts, and where the charging station and cable routing will sit at the tender bay, should happen during the yacht's own commissioning process rather than after the tender is delivered.
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Generally less. Electric drivetrains have fewer moving parts than combustion engines and no oil changes, fuel filters or exhaust systems to service. Hodgdon has cited reduced service requirements as a core reason tenders in particular suit electrification. Hydrofoiling systems, however, add mechanical and software complexity around the foils and flight-control electronics that a conventional electric tender does not carry.
The mismatch that opened this guide, a mothership that runs occasionally and a tender that runs constantly, is exactly why electric propulsion has found a genuine foothold in this corner of yachting rather than remaining a novelty. Chorus's Voltis, built and engineered in London on the same bespoke, 3D-printed hull approach the studio applies across its range, sits alongside Cockwells' considered caution and Candela's hydrofoiling performance as three honestly different answers to the same brief. The right one depends on how your tender is actually used, not on which specification sheet reads most impressively. Get in touch to discuss a bespoke Voltis commission suited to your yacht's garage, guest capacity and cruising grounds.
