The petrol can lived in the lazarette for years, sweating fumes into a hot locker every Mediterranean afternoon, and I never questioned it. Then a friend in the Glenan archipelago handed me the tiller of his electric-powered dinghy, I twisted the throttle, and the silence as we slid towards the beach did something to my brain. No two-stroke snarl, no oily slick on the transom, no fight to start the thing on a cold morning. Three months later my own petrol outboard was sold. Here is the case for an electric tender, made by a convert who resisted for a long time.
Why the tender is the easy win
Electrifying a main engine is a big, expensive decision, the kind weighed up in electric and hybrid propulsion for cruising France. The tender is the opposite. It is the low-hanging fruit of green cruising, because the way you actually use a dinghy fits an electric motor almost perfectly.
Think about it. The tender does short hops. Boat to beach, boat to quay, boat to the next boat for sundowners. A few hundred metres at a time, rarely flat out, almost never far from the mothership where the battery charges. That is a use pattern an electric outboard handles without breaking a sweat, while a petrol outboard spends its life cold-starting for a two-minute run and fouling its plugs.
The range, honestly
Range anxiety is the first objection, so let me front it. A small electric outboard in the 3hp range, a Torqeedo Travel or an ePropulsion Spirit, will give a typical inflatable roughly 15 to 25 nautical miles at a gentle cruise, dropping steeply if you pin the throttle. A Torqeedo Travel 1103 claims up to about 62 km in ideal flat conditions on a single charge.
Now compare that to what a tender actually does. My logbook says my dinghy almost never covers more than 3 or 4 miles in a day, and usually far less. The range that sounds marginal on paper is, in practice, days of normal anchorage life between charges. The few times I have genuinely run low were my own fault, exploring a long estuary on a whim, and even then a slow crawl home always made it.
Solar is what closes the loop
The phrase solar-electric is not marketing fluff. The reason an electric tender works so well on a cruising boat is that the mothership is a floating power station. A decent coachroof solar array, the kind that underpins any serious solar and lithium for a French summer cruise, generates a surplus on a sunny French day that has nowhere better to go than your tender battery.
My drill is simple. The tender battery comes aboard or plugs in when we anchor, the solar tops it overnight and through the next day, and it is full before we want it. On a settled week in a Corsican anchorage I never once touched shore power for it. The sun that was beating down on the bay was also driving the dinghy to the beach. There is something neatly closed-loop about that which still pleases me.
What you stop carrying, and stop smelling
The benefits that do not show up in a spec sheet are the ones that converted me:
- No petrol aboard. No jerry cans baking in a hot locker, no fuel fumes in the cabin, no two-stroke oil to mix and spill.
- Nothing to service. No carburettor to gum up over winter, no impeller, no spark plugs. You charge it and you use it.
- Instant, reliable starts. A twist of the throttle, every time, including the cold Atlantic mornings that used to defeat my pull-cord.
- Near silence. You arrive at the beach without announcing yourself to the whole anchorage.
That last point is not just pleasant, it is part of cruising responsibly. A quiet tender does not shatter the calm of a bay full of anchored boats, and it sits squarely within the thinking on reducing your wake and noise in sensitive areas. Buzzing a two-stroke across a still morning anchorage is exactly the kind of thing that earns visiting boats a bad name.
Where it really earns its place: the sensitive bits
France has a lot of water where motoring gently and quietly is the whole point. Inside the 300 metre coastal band the limit is 5 knots, dropping to 3 knots inside reserves like the Lerins waters, and an electric dinghy is built for exactly that pace. You are not throttling back an engine that wants to roar, you are simply gliding at the speed the law and the seabed both prefer.
In the marine reserves and over seagrass, a small electric outboard also means no fuel sheen, no oily discharge, nothing to leak into water that the marine reserves of France by boat exist to protect. When you nose into a shallow posidonia bay to land on a beach, you do it clean. It is a small thing, but multiplied across every dinghy in every protected bay it stops being small.
The honest costs and limits
I will not oversell it. A quality electric outboard with battery, in the 3hp to 6hp equivalent range, runs from roughly 2,000 to 4,000 euros at 2025 to 2026 prices, which is more than a basic petrol equivalent up front. The battery is the bulk of that cost and, like all batteries, it will not last forever. Plan for an eventual replacement years down the line.
The other honest limit is the big, fast, far trip. If your idea of a tender is a 15hp planing RIB that screams three miles to town and back twice a day with a crew of six, electric is not there yet at sensible cost and weight. But that is not most cruisers, and it is certainly not most French anchorage life.
Charging and security in a French marina
Two practical wrinkles are worth knowing before you commit. The first is charging when the sun is not co-operating. Most small electric outboards take a removable battery that charges from a standard socket, so a night on a marina pontoon with 230-volt shore power refills it easily. French visitor berths typically offer 16 amps, far more than a tender battery needs, so even a grey week in port keeps you topped up. The dependency on solar is real at anchor, but it is not the only option.
The second is theft. A removable lithium battery is light, valuable, and tempting, and tender and outboard theft is a genuine nuisance in some of the busier Mediterranean marinas in high summer. The neat upside of a removable battery is that you simply take it aboard and lock the cabin, leaving an outboard that is useless to a thief without it. A petrol outboard, by contrast, walks off complete. In practice the electric setup is easier to secure, not harder.
How it fits the bigger green picture
An electric tender is not a grand environmental gesture on its own. It is one sensible piece of a low-impact cruise, alongside holding your tank, anchoring carefully over seagrass, and provisioning with less plastic. What makes it satisfying is that it is the rare green choice with almost no downside in daily use: it is quieter, cleaner, more reliable, easier to secure, and after the up-front cost, cheaper to run than the petrol outboard it replaces.
The pattern across all of it is the same. The greenest options in France tend to be the ones that also make the boat nicer to live on, and the electric dinghy is the clearest example I know. You do the right thing by the water, and the reward is a calmer, simpler, better-smelling life aboard.
My verdict, with the lazarette finally empty
For the ordinary job of an ordinary cruising tender in France, getting people and shopping between the boat and the shore, an electric outboard is now the better choice on almost every axis. The range suits the use, the solar closes the loop, there is nothing to service, and you stop living with petrol in a hot locker. It is also quiet and clean in exactly the waters that most need it.
I think about that silent run to the beach in the Glenan archipelago more than I expected to. The dinghy did its job, the same as the petrol one did, but it did it without the noise, the smell, or the slick. The lazarette smells of sun cream now, not two-stroke, and I am not going back.
