BMW expands into boat-building with The Edge

The collaboration has resulted in The Edge, a reversed-bow foiling trimaran-styled vessel capable of skimming across the top of the water at 30 knots. That’s because the design sits on top of a set of hydrofoils that can lift the boat out of the water, greatly reducing drag than if it sat on its hull.

The BMW Designworks-styled boat was first teased in April but has now had its full reveal timed to coincide with the start of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Powering The Edge is a pair of 100kW electric motors built into the bottom of the aft foils and using forward-facing propellers to pull the boat through the water.

Energy comes from six battery packs with 240kWh of capacity. The batteries were originally developed for the game-changing BMW i range of fully electric and petrol range-extended vehicles, and images show the concept may use the same BMW wall charger as the road-going  

The battery pack is good for what BMW claims is around 100km of range in ideal conditions.

The automotive links don’t end there. If you sit down to skipper the 13.2-metre The Edge, you’ll notice it runs the same OS8 operating system that provides the neural network for BMW’s road-going cars, using a 32.0-inch multifunction touchscreen.

It even has an iDrive rotary controller, shaped much like a joystick control we note, for navigating the onboard menus just like in a road car.

Inside, the modular fit-out looks more like an office space than a saloon with deep floor-to-ceiling windows providing a connection with the water, and glass panels overhead connecting with the sky.

Down the back, a large glass bulkhead opens up to a large boarding platform that looks to be the main way that people will step aboard or go ashore, with the transom designed to seamlessly slot into a floating jetty.

BMW envisages The Edge filling an important transport role as cities and their surrounding suburbs merge into one giant metropolis, the so-called “conurbation”. It’s essentially an option to avoid driving on the road.

BMW has traditionally used the Cannes Film Festival to host the premiere of a Hollywood-directed film featuring one of its vehicles as the star of the show.

This is not the first time BMW has had a starring role in moving from the road to the water. In the 1950s a one-off boat was built incorporating a 3.2-litre V8 that powered the BMW 507 coupe, one of the rarest BMW models worldwide.