How Candela’s flying ferries could bring commuters back to the water

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:10]Well, I'm on a boat that's literally flying above a water surface. It's a pretty amazing feeling, and it's the idea of a Swedish company that wants to revolutionize water transport.

[00:00:31]We're in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Sitting on 14 islands, it's also called the Venice of the North. This is where these unusual boats were designed by a Swedish startup with a plan to change the lives of commuters worldwide.

[00:00:48]>> Hello, my name is Sim Malber. Welcome to Candela in Stockholm. We build the very first electric hydrooiling feries here.

[00:00:58]We have a sales department here, legal and procurement.

[00:01:05]We have around 60 engineers at Candenna and we're producing one vessel every two weeks. Set in the port of Free Hamn in central Stockholm, Candela has built its own testing dock for its electric powered boats. The company has gone a long way since it was founded in 2014 by this man, a trained engineer.

[00:01:30]>> My name is Gustav Hassog. I'm the founder and CEO of Canada.

[00:01:34]>> And here we have the first prototype of the ferry P12. Uh we put that one into water some almost 3 years ago. Since then, we have built a lot of boats. So, welcome aboard.

[00:01:50]This boat is the world's first commuter scale electric hydrooiling vessel using computer controlled foils to fly above the water.

[00:02:00]We have now uh 7 knots of speed. We will uh go full power up to 17 and then she lift above the water and then we fly in around uh 25 knots, 30 cm uh uh over the sea and uh with a consumption of uh 9 kW per nautical miles. That's uh $1 consumption uh electricity. When we lift the boat, the drag from the water reduces 80 to 85%.

[00:02:34]We charge this boat fully in approximately 1 hour. We can drive normally 14 nautical miles and we can have 30 passengers.

[00:02:43]>> And one of the most striking things you can see is that you have almost no wake behind the boat. We don't burn a lot of energy creating massive uh changes of the direction of the water. when you can uh reduce the energy consumption and we reduce it with something like 80%.

[00:02:59]Uh then we also take out a lot of the fuel cost. So that means that operating this type of ferry is cheaper than operating traditional old diesel fairies. Ferry traffic consumes something like 15 times more fuel per seat or per kilometer seat than if you go by a city bus. So although in most cities the the fair transport is fairly small, it contributes a lot to the total emissions from the public transport. So there is a tremendous potential to go after this big bucket of CO2 emissions uh with this new technology.

[00:03:35]>> The Candela P12 shuttle started operating in late 2024 on a 15 km route linking the Echaris suburb and central Stockholm.

[00:03:44]Compared to traditional fairies, travel time was reduced by half and CO2 emissions was slashed by over 90%.

[00:03:53]Plans to expand the service to other routes are in the pipeline and surveys have shown high levels of passenger satisfaction.

[00:04:02]It's easy to understand why while we're filming the P12 ferry from one of the high-speed electric foiling leisure boats, also designed by Candela.

[00:04:12]I'm actually steering the computer and the boat boat is steered by the software in turn. When the boat is flying, it needs to be micro adjusted by the hydrophones 100 times per second to be kept stable and smooth. I just go full speed like this and then the boat will automatically turn off. So, we're approaching a speed of 70 knots here and the boat is now fully foil. So, we're flying roughly a meter above the water.

[00:04:41]This is a digital pill against seasickness. The greatest benefit of this technology is that it's really a better experience. I mean, now we're sitting here and we can talk to each other without screaming. It opens up a new world of water transport because you start to talk to your passengers instead of just sitting in silence and holding on to the airline. And the whole idea with the the hydropholic constant is to take the discomfort out of boating at the same time to reduce the operating costs and of course spare the environment for emissions, local oil spillage and above all wake and noise.

[00:05:23]>> Back in Stockholm, production is in full swing at the Candela factory.

[00:05:29]>> We have multiple boats on the assembly line right now. So we have three ranges right now. We have the lounge version, the business and the uh tour.

[00:05:39]>> Efforts at the moment are focused on the P12 fairies to meet increasing demand.

[00:05:44]>> We have around 10 uh P12 vessels on the assembly line and there's quite a lot of challenges being the first time we're serial producing these boats. A lot of electrical assembly, a lot of mechanical assembly, a lot of communication through the boat. A vessel is leaving every month at the moment and we're scaling the production to be leaving every two weeks and interest is rising with 65 orders including from India, Thailand, the Maldives, Saudi Arabia or the US.

[00:06:17]Candela recently secured a contract for 20 feries with a major operator in Norway, the world's largest electric hydrooil fleet order so far. Yet Europe is the company's slowest customer.

[00:06:32]>> It takes a long time to get this type of transition to a new technology in Europe. You need long political processes and then you have public tendering processes that can be terribly slow. We see strong uh growth in in Asia. We also see a good sales in the US uh but weaker in Europe so far.

[00:06:52]>> Talks however are ongoing with several European countries. A Berlin-based operator has already bought a P12 commuter ferry. Candela now has broader ambitions. It plans to increase staff from 250 to a,000 people, open a new factory in Poland and scale up production to 50 boats a year.

[00:07:13]>> We see a strong demand throughout the world and I don't think we have seen uh more than a percent of it yet. uh there is tremendous potential to scale this globally and I think it's important to see that um the waterways are the oldest way of transport in Europe and elsewhere in the world and uh now we have a way to to get get back to that in a new way and I think also that compared to going by bus or or by car going by boat makes people happy. Yeah, I think soon we're going to see uh thousands of fairies uh throughout the world. So, uh, whatever city you get to, you're going to get tired to find, uh, tired of finding candalas also there.