Tesla Never Built an Electric Jet Boat, So This YouTuber Spent Three Years Making One

Tesla makes a lot of things. A jet boat is not one of them. So the crew behind the Prop Department YouTube channel built their own, and after three years of iteration, it's finally hitting the water.

As InsideEVs reports, this isn't a kit or a conversion of an existing hull. It's a ground-up custom job: hand-made hull, hand-made battery enclosures, and a custom motor, controller, and inverter setup driving a pump-jet.

From Model 3 Power to Model S Power

The first version of the boat ran a Tesla Model 3 motor making roughly 280 horsepower. For a hull this small, that's genuinely a lot. It wasn't enough for these guys.

The upgrade: a custom-tuned Tesla Model S motor putting out more than 350 hp. To get that power to the pump-jet, they fitted a custom stub shaft directly to the motor's output shaft. That deletes the original transmission entirely and raises final RPM, which is exactly what you want feeding a jet pump rather than a set of wheels.

The Battery Was the Hard Part

Anyone who has poked around a used Tesla pack will recognize the problem they ran into. Two of the four battery modules had dead cells, and under hard throttle the pack would cut power output entirely. The fix was replacing those two modules with fresh ones.

The rest of the pack setup is worth noting:

• An aftermarket BMS instead of Tesla's original battery management
• Liquid cooling on each custom module, mirroring how the factory Tesla pack handles heat
• An aftermarket controller board for the motor inverter, which lets them command the drive unit without Tesla's built-in safety guards getting in the way

That last item is the real unlock and the real risk. Bypassing the factory guards is how you make a car motor behave like a marine motor. It is also how you turn a very expensive pile of cells into a very expensive problem if something goes wrong.

Charging: J1772 Only

Here's the detail EV owners will appreciate most. The boat charges through a J1772 port. No DC fast charging, no NACS, no Supercharger stops on the way to the ramp. Plug it into Level 2 and wait.

That's a completely reasonable choice for a project like this. Adding fast-charge capability means adding contactors, communication hardware, and a whole additional layer of things that can fail. J1772 is simple, cheap, and universally available at home. It also means this boat charges off the exact same equipment sitting in most EV owners' garages.

It's a hoot to drive, with more than enough power for such a small hull, and there are still a lot of small things left to finish.

What This Means If You Own a Tesla

You are almost certainly not building a jet boat. But the build says something useful about where the Tesla ecosystem is right now.

Tesla drive units and battery modules have become genuinely viable industrial components. People are dropping them into Land Rovers, vintage BMWs, and now boats. That secondary market is why parts availability keeps improving and why the aftermarket around Tesla hardware, from BMS boards to cooling components to charge-port adapters, keeps getting deeper.

The practical takeaway for the rest of us is smaller and more useful: J1772 remains the universal handshake of EV charging in North America. Whether you're plugging in a Model Y at a hotel, a friend's Bolt in your driveway, or apparently a homemade jet boat, that connector is what makes it work. If your Tesla came with a NACS port and you travel, a good J1772 adapter is still one of the highest-value items you can keep in the frunk.

The Bottom Line

Three years, several iterations, a Model S motor pushing 350-plus hp, and a hull built by hand. It's the kind of project that only exists because someone looked at the market, found nothing they wanted, and decided to make it anyway. There's still finishing work to do, but the hard part is done and the boat runs.