This Sleek New Water Taxi Is Coming Straight Out of Science Fiction to a River Near You

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Traffic-choked cities like London and New York have underused assets for moving people, and those are waterways like the Thames, and the Hudson. 

French innovators SeaBubbles want to change that, with speedy, efficient, electric hydrofoil sea taxis that can zip passengers around traffic jams on the cities’ waterways.

Some key advantages of the vessel’s Star Wars–like design include silent electric operation and the fact that the hydrofoils leave no wake even at full speed, so the boats won’t erode river walls. 

The SeaBubbles taxi can rise up on its hydrofoils at speeds as low as 6-8 knots, so it can easily operate in low-speed no-wake zones.

The hydrofoil design slashes drag by 40 percent compared to conventional boats of the same size, and the SeaBubbles taxi has a range of 50 to 60 miles per charge.

The company has tested prototypes and has announced production availability of the boats in June, so we could see an alternative to yellow cabs and Uber in the Big Apple as early as this summer.