New technologies offer great promise, and all come with bugs that have to get worked out. Some of those bugs may be simple/harmless and just a cost/inconvenience thing. Some can be much more serious. One thing I see from my casual observation point is trouble in many application attempts for Lithium Ion battery technology. I know that has been discussed here. Use in each owner's boat is a personal choice, but I hope a well-informed one. We now have another example of where Li-Ion isn't working out so well. Here's a quote from a cnet.com article:

"According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, there have been 12 incidents in the United States where the lithium ion batteries in these hoverboards reportedly caught fire -- destroying bedrooms and even entire homes. In January, the CPSC updated that number to at least 40 reports of hoverboard fires in 19 states."

The reported number has shot up due to Christmas gifts I gather. That hasn't taken long to show up. I'm going to exercise my right to haul around full-weight batteries until such time as the issues get worked out for this technology as a whole.

Interesting but I'm not sure comparing the toy batteries and boat batteries would be apples to apples.

Are you aware that a Li-Ion "boat battery" is actually a case built to be similar to a traditional boat battery, but with lithium-ion cells inside? Think of it like a "box" that the Li-Ion cells have been encased in for standardization. The root level issues appear to be with with the construction of Li-Ion cell technology, not just isolated applications - their apparent fragile nature, temperature sensitivity, etc. I'm not sure a hooverboard is a "toy" in the sense of typical toy power profiles. They have a DC drive motor that requires a good bit of power. Sound familiar? Boeing had issues with them in the 777 (fires); that's not toy stuff either.

As I said, each owner is free to decide what to use. But, no engineer I've spoken with who owns a boat would be willing to use them even at parity pricing with conventional technology due to the uncertainties involved - I'm one of them.

Imagine those batteries sitting next to 50 gallons of gas in your boat!

You won't, to date, find any of our long established lead acid battery manufacturers such as East Penn, Johnson Controls or EnerSys willing to be manufacturing a marine lithium ion battery.

So far we do not seem to find any ReLion or Lithium Pro lithium ion cell manufacturing plants. They do not even seem to own any of the patents governing lithium ion cell manufacture. Even the lithium ion cells they have bought from others that are assembled into batteries are each under contract at plants owned by others. The way to know who will be selling them is from the label attached on the outside of the battery case.

Lithium cells are not new or cutting edge...Sony who produced the 1st one, has sold over 5 billion over many years. For powering small loads, they excel. The results when cells have to be large and are charged and discharged grouped as a battery have not been so successful.