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Nautique
Nautique Wake Surf
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Nautique
Nautique dash
By Ed Sherman
In February I served as a judge for the Miami International Boat Show Innovation Awards, an experience that is invaluable to me because I get to see what’s truly new in a variety of product categories. It’s also an opportunity to analyze industry trends that I might miss as they come to me randomly in press releases during the year.
Several things jumped out at me. First, wakeboards are capturing a giant share of the new-boat market. Second, it became clear to me that there is a huge engineering effort among competing builders to figure out how to create the perfect wave using very trick technology; and last but not least, fully integrated digital switching systems are trickling down into this same “tow boat” category.
Certainly nothing new, digital switching in the midsize boat market came on strong before the most recent U.S. financial meltdown, with a lot of major players from the United States and abroad competing for market share and acceptance. When the market collapsed in 2008-09, the interest in digital switching for the mainstream market collapsed with it. As builders retrenched, the cost associated with a switchover to a totally new technology not proven in the marine world fell by the wayside.
As a true believer in the potential of digital technology, I found myself waiting for the boatbuilding industry to catch up yet again to virtually every other industry sector you can think of and get back to embracing integrated digital switching technology. As I saw the technology trending into boats in the under-30-foot category this year, I’d say we’re back on our way. But there is more to the trend than meets the eye. Read on as I share my observations.
The big-boat side
Sophisticated, user-programmable digital switching systems have been in use right along on larger, high-end boats. The economy did not force those builders to look back; their customers demand the functionality that only a digitally controlled network can offer and the systems just keep getting better in that class of boat.
Systems produced by companies such as Trigentic (EmpirBus), Digital Switching Systems (omni-BUS), E-T-A (PowerPlex), Mastervolt (CZone) and Carling Technologies (Octoplex) continued to find their way onto new builds for boats that weren’t as driven by price points.
In the midsize power and sail markets the CZone system has taken a strong foothold and seems to be emerging as the leader in off-the-shelf systems for the production-boat builder, at least here in the United States. Recently, though, Raymarine said it’s partnering with the Swedish company Trigentic and will integrate that company’s EmpirBus distributed power system with a typical onboard Raymarine network. Perhaps partnering with Raymarine will help to expand Trigentic’s market share. Time will tell on that count.
Both of these systems have their pros and cons, but I think one of the compelling features of either system is that they can be customized to the specific application in a field situation to meet the desires of the customer. Additionally, they offer the ability to mix and match fairly well with NMEA and CAN bus systems, albeit with adapters needed in some cases.
So in what I’ll call the midrange, we see builders such as Scout, Boston Whaler and (on the sail side) the Dutch builder Contest embracing the CZone system. I can recall asking Scout president and CEO Steve Potts whether he thought he was saving money in production costs by using the technically easier-to-install CZone system in his boats.
Was he cutting down on build time? The answer was no, not really, but he believed he was doing a much better job of meeting the demands of his customer base by being able to offer programmable functions that he was previously unable to offer with analog systems. Perhaps more important to him was the ability to match his customers’ expectations for their boat’s functionality to their luxury automobile or home electronic systems.