Canada couple try and get their 45ft Bayliner Bodega boat powered by a Toyota Prius to see if they can get it running for free

Turning a Toyota Prius into a Bayliner boat engine probably isn’t on most people’s DIY project lists, but this Canadian couple decided to give it a shot.

Their 45-foot Bayliner Bodega needed a new powertrain, and a wrecked Prius offered an unusually cheap way to get one.

The Yacht City Life YouTubers, Dima and Ana, bought the 2008 Prius at auction and set about removing everything they didn’t need before transplanting its hybrid drivetrain into their boat.

What followed was supposed to be a one-month project, but things didn’t exactly go according to plan.

The Toyota Prius was about to become a boat engine

The project started with the Bayliner yacht already having a problem – one of its engines was broken, and another old engine was proving increasingly difficult to keep running, plus many parts were rusting away.

The couple had previously experimented with a tiny 600 W electric motor, which was enough to move the enormous 45-foot boat at around 1.5 knots.

That gave them an idea of how much power they would eventually need to get the boat moving at a more useful 4 to 5 knots.

Then they found a wrecked 2008 Toyota Prius.

The car cost around C$3,000 at auction, but its drivetrain was still in remarkably good condition. The engine ran smoothly, the air conditioning worked and the high-voltage battery was still functional.

More importantly, the Prius hybrid system offered three potential advantages for the boat.

It could provide gasoline-powered propulsion, electric power and act as a generator for the boat’s onboard batteries.

The couple stripped the Prius down to its essentials, keeping the drivetrain, battery, electronics, and other components they needed, and then the plan was to sell the leftover parts to recover as much of the original purchase price as possible.

But fitting a Prius drivetrain into a boat was considerably harder than simply dropping an engine into the existing engine bay.

The free Bayliner upgrade took 100 days

The couple initially thought the entire conversion could be completed in about a month because that was all the time they had paid for at the boatyard, but that quickly became unrealistic.

They had to fabricate custom parts because there was no off-the-shelf Toyota Prius boat conversion kit – obviously.

The drivetrain was repeatedly lifted in and out of the boat while they worked out the best position for it, modified the gearbox and fabricated a new subframe.

There were also problems with wiring, cooling and the exhaust system.

At one point, the couple even had to deal with a water leak after testing the system, while other parts arrived damaged or took longer than expected to arrive.

The project eventually stretched into a second and then a third month.

They also had to build a custom control system so the boat’s existing helm controls could operate the Prius drivetrain.

That was particularly useful because the boat had two helm stations but the Prius only had one gear selector.

The biggest test came once they finally got the boat back into the water.

The Prius initially refused to deliver its full power, leading to more troubleshooting, but once that was sorted, another test revealed that part of the exhaust system was getting too hot.

The couple fixed that problem and replaced the water pump after discovering it wasn’t providing enough water flow, but after all those setbacks, the Prius finally started doing what they wanted.

During a test trip, the hybrid-powered Bayliner used around 3.5 liters of fuel per hour, compared with approximately 15 liters per hour previously.

And the Prius wasn’t just moving the boat.

The couple also discovered they could use the hybrid system to charge their onboard battery system, with around 2 kWh of electricity available for an additional 0.5 liters of fuel per hour.

Even better, selling the leftover Prius components brought in around C$2,743, with some parts still left to sell.

That meant the couple ultimately calculated that the bizarre Prius-to-boat conversion had actually ended up in positive territory financially.

What started as a one-month experiment eventually took 100 days, but the couple decided the Toyota Prius had earned its place aboard the 45-foot Bayliner.