On a Saturday morning in July 2019, Mamix Hoekstra arrived at the Yacht Club de he was there. Come and meet a group of people,” Dennis Frederiksen from Fraser had told the co-creative director at Dutch studio Vripack. “You won't regret it.” Frederiksen, a broker who has sold $1 billion of boats in his 40-year career, is a meeting worth taking for any supeiyacht designer, no matter how cryptic the brief.
The group Hoekstra would see was Foundation Zero, a set of impact investors whose headline ambition was to create the world's first fossil-fuel-free superyacht; no combustion engine, no fuel tanks. But it would be as much about the journey to get there as the finished project – outside-the-box solutions, brave experiments, new (and expensive) testing, capacious data collection and analysis. An ecosystem of creative engineering and exciting leads, all of which would be gifted to others via open-source publishing. Nearly five years later the yacht, which is in the outfitting phase at Vitters Shipyard, is a showstopping proof of concept.
The members of the foundation knew yachting — that's why they wanted to develop sustainable marine hospitality solutions. They also knew a bare-bones “test boat” wouldn't be much use to an industry whose customer base expects top level luxury; comfort and appealing aesthetics had to be built in with no compromise. The leaders of the foundation had the germ of
