It’s not something we ever set out to do… electric outboard motors were a sideline for us when we started selling them 15 years ago. But, for the last four years running, we have been confirmed as the World’s Largest Retailer for ePropulsion … and one of the largest dealers for market leaders Torqeedo too.

What does that mean for you? Well it’s quite simple, it’s indisputable that we’ve sold more ePropulsion electric outboards than anyone else, so logically we have more experience and user feedback than anyone else… and that means we can give you the best advice!

It was a very inauspicious start. Our founder and managing director Ian Thomson remembers a phone call with, and then hosting the new UK rep for Torqeedo in his living room (which was then also Nestaway Boats HQ!), and thinking “might as well give it a go”. That was back in 2008. Torqeedo were a little known German start-up company but the thing they had, pretty much unique at the time, was an electric outboard with an integrated (but easily removable) lithium battery. Almost everything else on the market – and there wasn’t that much else on the market! – required connection to a bulky separate battery that you had to lug in and out of the boat, wires trailing all over the place.

As an experienced boater himself, the thing that appealed to Ian most was the overwhelming convenience compared with a petrol outboard. Torqeedo were making a big thing about the environmental benefit, a valid point but perhaps somewhat ahead of its time (in the UK at least) in 2008. Nobody had heard of Tesla and diesel cars were still being incentivised by the government! But Ian saw the marketing potential for an outboard that was lightweight, quiet and easy to use… particularly in combination with his growing range of nesting dinghies developed for easier transport and storage.

To start with Nestaway Boats only sold the Torqeedo electric outboard motors as accessories, with our boats. But that very early start gave us an advantage when talking to other potential electric outboard customers at boat shows – we already had lots of customers using them.

When ePropulsion came along in about 2014 it seemed natural to us that customers would want to see both options (there were still only two really). It was controversial at the time but we stuck to our guns and the evidence soon backed us up: we seemed to sell more of both marques as a result. In fact we became Torqeedo UK’s largest retailer, and so far as we are aware have never not been ePropulsion UK’s largest retailer.

Fast forward 15 years from that beginning in a living room and Nestaway Boats Ltd is a very different company. The original nesting dinghies are no longer part of the line-up (we sold the tooling etc to Drascombe Boats a couple of years ago), but we have our own range of SpearFish branded inflatables and are retailers for several other lines of portable boats and kayaks. And, as mentioned earlier, the World’s Largest Retailer for ePropulsion

Nowadays we are even involved with some of the marketing and product development at ePropulsion and – despite being “only” a retailer – were invited to the recent ePropulsion Distributor Meeting 2023, at their very impressive Songshuan Lake HQ in China. We are only a retailer yes, but if we were a distributor our sales would put us well into the top 10…

A FOOTNOTE. It happens less and less these days but we do still get comments like “why do you sell the cheap Chinese copy?”. Apart from the fact, presumably obvious by now, that we sell large numbers of them that is! It was never actually the case that the ePropulsion was a copy – indeed it could well be argued that they innovated some features that have since been copied by their European rivals – and is most certainly not the case now. Epropulsion have over 150 R&D engineers and successfully applied for over 200 patents in the field of electric marine propulsion, last year alone. During the distributor meeting we visited some of their suppliers, of mostly bespoke parts (their motors are custom-engineered to boating, not borrowed from another industry, for example), and the attitude to quality control and inspection is truly impressive.