Torqeedo, the German electric-propulsion company, is best known for outboards, inboard motors and battery storage systems. The company’s first product, the portable Torqeedo Travel outboard, made its debut in 2006. Today, the company has sold 250,000 electric motors.
Fabian Bez became CEO in October 2022. He has years of experience in corporate development, including building up the electrification and battery production areas as vice president of e-solution and services at Webasto SE. As divisional CEO of Webasto Thermo and Comfort SE, he was responsible for the end-customer business, and the leisure and marine segments. Most recently, Bez worked as an independent management consultant in the field of alternative drives and renewable energies. He studied industrial engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Bez grew up on the water on Germany’s Lake Starnberg, where he rowed and sailed several times a week. Coincidentally, the lake is the same place where Torqeedo’s first commercially viable products were developed.
Soundings Trade Only caught up with Bez at Metstrade in Amsterdam, where he discussed the state of electric motors and sustainable fuels, and trends in marine propulsion. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You became CEO in October 2022. How’s it going so far?
It’s been intense. When I joined Torqeedo, I saw a company with a great brand and heritage. I also realized we are in an exceptional, growing market and that we needed to find a way to go into the next chapter and prepare Torqeedo for what’s coming.
I’ve also seen that we have demanding customers in all areas. Our volume is going up, and it’s not just early adopters anymore. We are the major player in the market with the broadest product range from 500 watts up to several hundred kilowatts. I believed we needed to recalibrate. We also needed to understand our market, where we stood, our customers and, of course, ourselves. Then we had to come up with clear positioning, a clear strategy, and ask where we want to go looking forward.
I’m quite happy with what we did as a company. Here at Metstrade, we are purely focusing on the new Travel family of electric outboards. This product defined a new market years ago; we’ve sold it over a hundred thousand times. Now this product is in its fourth generation. It’s important for us.
Did you have the competition in mind when you reimagined the Travel line? Or do you innovate independently?
I’m happy you say that because absolutely, that’s exactly what wanted to do — innovate. At the beginning, we did not have much competition. Today, we have a lot more companies having that electric vision and believing in it. It doesn’t make the life easier, for sure, but it’s sometimes good to push yourself to the boundaries. I want to place Torqeedo at the forefront as a leader in multidimensional products, and this is exactly what we are right now.
There are plenty of use cases for electric propulsion in Europe with canals, smaller lakes and other bodies of water. Is Europe your biggest market?
The European and American markets are similar in size, but growing at similar rates. We see the American market growing a little faster, but we also see the European market is going to be slightly bigger by 2030. The Asia market is half the size of the American or the European market.
Of all your product lines — inboards, battery packs, outboards — which is Torqeedo’s largest segment?
The outboard line is the largest, because it’s small, affordable, and the interface is standardized. You just take off your combustion engine, replace it with an electric engine, and it’s simply plug and play.
Battery technology seems to have plateaued in terms of capacity and energy storage. Do you see that changing in the next 12 months, or is that farther off?
When it comes to battery development, technology and chemistry, there is a lot going on. The question is which of these developments will end up in serious production. Not everything, because this is a very investment-driven area, and manufacturers generally decide not to implement every single minor step in technology. When they see a huge step, they go and invest in that.
We always try to be at the top end of the technology with our batteries. That is very important for us. Safety is the highest priority, but so are power density and battery size. If you look at the Travel family, we managed to reduce our package size by 33%, but also with 56% more capacity.
What you have to be careful of is pricing, because the battery is not only the most expensive part for us as the manufacturer, but also for the customer. We all need to see battery prices go down so that it’s affordable for the customer.
That sounds like a difficult balance to achieve.
It is a difficult balance. Of course, people always want to have the highest capacity and longest range, but they’re also price conscious. The cost is what we must manage on our end.
Microchips have been difficult to come by for three, four, maybe five years. Are you still facing challenges there?
The good thing is that it’s getting better. We still have some challenges for older-generation models, but the good thing is that this is not one of our priority topics anymore. Something we learned is that it is never going back to what we had before the pandemic. We must adapt, change our organization, and be more dynamic. Now we have a number of contracts with many different suppliers. It’s much different than the way we did business before.
Are there any areas where you hope to expand?
There is one thing that’s important for our future offerings: customizing the software capabilities. We recently announced a new app that allows a customer to see the boat’s speed, position, revolutions per minute and more. We also have the product connected, which means we can do over-the-air updates. This is something people expect, not a luxury option.
Now, talking about the future a bit, we’re starting a new chapter. I’m happy to do it with our most important product, the Travel series, which we just completely overhauled, but we are more mature, and we can evolve. So we sat together, thought about our purpose, what we stand for. It’s the pleasure of powerful movement in respect to our human natural environment. This is also our brand core. It’s the pleasure, power and respect. And based on this, we’re building the new Torqeedo. It’s products like the Travel, which you can put in a box and ship online. On the other side, it’s our customized solutions. This is the business we do with our boatbuilders, shipyards and commercial projects, especially the high-voltage boat projects.
In the branded retail business, we see today’s products starting at 500 watts, going to 12 kilowatts. On the customized solutions side, we will start at, let’s say, 20 or 25 kilowatts. We have a small overlap, but then we will go up to 300, 400 kilowatts, and this will mainly be in the high-voltage segment.
“High voltage” is a term we’re hearing more these days, especially with on-board power systems. Is Torqeedo developing batteries or components for these systems?
I don’t see us focusing only on propulsion. We are more than the company that provides the propulsion. We provide the energy storage. By integrating energy storage into your boat, your yard, your vessel, you are the key integrator. To go into the future successfully, to push the business forward, you need to be able to be the system integrator for these systems.
There’s a lot of talk about sustainable fuels, decarbonization and hybrid solutions. What are your feelings about these areas?
I like that question because I grew up in the combustion world and was very early to get my fingers on more sustainable solutions. I spent the past 15 years in alternatives to gasoline and diesel.
We will not see only one type of power going forward. There is not one single solution that’s best. I believe we will have different ways of doing sustainable propulsion, and you named a few. I obviously believe in full electric propulsion. I also believe we will see hydrogen and methanol used in boats. The question is whether I believe these fuels are 100% sustainable. Hopefully, they will be, but I feel that I’m more realistic than that.
At Torqeedo, we already have our electric propulsion products and provide battery storage for hybrid solutions. We also have fuel-cell applications up and running. I just recently talked to a diesel outboard manufacturer about a hybrid solution that uses two of these engines.
The concern I hear about electric power is the effect that recycling batteries has on overall sustainability.
I’m very much involved in this circular-economy discussion. It’s something where you must have options. First of all, reuse. That’s where you start, but how to recycle and how to bring the elements inside batteries back to life and use them in new products is key.
So as long as the sun is shining and the world is turning, we have energy. The other resources — the raw materials — we do not have enough, probably. That’s why we need to do it. This is also something we put into our strategy. First of all, we must engineer our batteries to last as long as possible, and we do. Ben Ellison, the electronics writer, has an 11-year-old Travel outboard, and the battery still performs as it should. The longer we can make these batteries last, the less reuse and recycling becomes an issue.
What do you love about Torqeedo? What makes you want to come into work every day?
Do we have another hour? I think for me, Torqeedo combines everything I love to work on. I also love the industry and water sports. I am giving my best to show my passion to our team and see that things are changing. To see our people also feeling that kind of motivation, it’s something that needs time. I can feel that things at Torqeedo are changing. People have that motivation. They see it, they can get it, and they understand it. Now it’s our task to also show it to the world and then, of course, to deliver it.
This article was originally published in the January 2024 issue.
