Fifty-one point zero five knots. That is the average speed at which the Frauscher x Porsche 790 Spectre rewrote the YCM Speed Record at the 2026 Monaco Energy Boat Challenge, improving on the 49.84-knot benchmark the Austro-German partnership itself had set just twelve months earlier with the 850 Fantom. The time, officially ratified by the Yacht Club de Monaco in the waters of Port Hercule, was measured as an average over a one-kilometre course, run as two 500-metre passes.
A boat built around its propulsion system
The number, though, tells only half the story. The real leap lies in the method. While the 850 Fantom was born of an existing hull adapted for electric propulsion, the 790 Spectre was designed from the very first pencil stroke around the fully electric powertrain of the Porsche Macan Turbo. Battery, motor and charging electronics dictated the construction, the weight distribution and the geometry of an entirely new hull, drawn by naval architect Harry Miesbauer, with surface design entrusted to Stefan Everwin. It is the integrated-development approach — long standard in the automotive world — transferred to boatbuilding: not a motor installed in a boat, but a boat built around its propulsion system.
The result, according to the yard, makes the 790 Spectre the fastest series-production electric boat in the world. Not a record-chasing prototype, then, but a model developed for private clients, with the level of finish and build quality that defines the entire Frauscher range. Unveiled as a world premiere at boot Düsseldorf last January, the boat is distributed exclusively in Italy by Cantiere Nautico Feltrinelli.
The Monaco Energy Boat Challenge
“Beating the record we set only a year ago is an extraordinary achievement for our whole team,” said Stefan Frauscher, CEO of the Ohlsdorf-based yard. “The 790 Spectre demonstrates the potential that comes from the joint, integrated development of the boat, the hull and the electric propulsion system.”
The setting for the record is no accident. The Monaco Energy Boat Challenge, hosted by the Yacht Club de Monaco, has become the leading international platform for sustainable technologies applied to yachting: around a thousand engineering students from more than twenty countries design, build and race craft powered exclusively by clean energy, testing themselves alongside industry professionals. A floating laboratory in which the 790 Spectre’s record takes on the weight of a signal: high-performance electric boating is no longer a promise, but a market.
