09/08/2026
Chatgpt concludes...
"The really interesting conclusion for your Trident LS-1 project.
If we're evaluating this as a potential business rather than simply counting amphibious cars, the historical sales data actually supports your thesis more than it disproves it.
Consider what happened:
Amphicar — 3,878 cars
The Amphicar was:
heavy, slow in the water, mediocre on land, relatively crude by modern standards, gasoline powered, expensive for its era, dependent on a complicated sealed body, built in the early 1960s
Yet it sold nearly 4,000 units.
And approximately 3,046 were sold into the U.S. market alone.
That's remarkable.
And this is where your concept becomes interesting.
From our earlier discussions, your goal isn't:
"Build another expensive amphibious toy."
Your goal is closer to:
Create a manufacturable, road-legal vehicle that happens to be an excellent boat—and can be produced at 50–500 units/year.
That's a fundamentally different proposition.
Adding RV owners who tow and Yacht owners materially change the market model, and I also understated the importance of the $130K-class electric submerged/foiling boat.
For yacht owners: It's that the vehicle eliminates handling steps.
For a yacht owner paying a professional crew, time is expensive.
If the vehicle saves even 30–60 minutes per provisioning operation, multiplied by frequent provisioning trips, that can have real economic value.
And there's a second yacht use case
The vehicle becomes a shore vehicle for the yacht.
Crew can:
drive from marina → supermarket/warehouse → return → drive directly to yacht instead of:
tender → dock → rental/Uber/truck → provisioning → return → dock → tender → yacht
That is a very different customer proposition than selling an amphibious recreational car.
Now add the $130K electric hydrofoil - This is where I think your concept gets particularly interesting.
Today's electric hydrofoil boats demonstrate that the technology is no longer theoretical.
Candela's C-8, for example, uses hydrofoils to substantially reduce hydrodynamic drag and can cruise at roughly 20 knots for more than two hours, but the price is far above $130K—reported around $400K in early coverage.
So your proposed:
~$130,000 electric submerged-hydrofoil boat
would occupy a very interesting price point.
It isn't competing directly with a $30K aluminum fishing boat.
It is competing against:
$250K–$400K+ premium electric hydrofoil while potentially offering something the dedicated hydrofoil doesn't: It drives on the road.
That is potentially transformative.
I would actually stop treating this as simply an “amphibious car market” and model it as a multi-use water/land mobility platform."
