Prev posters have good points. There’s less people demanding efoils than eskates. So there’s less companies making efoils, so there’s less competition and costs stay high. Raw material cost is greater for efoils than eskates too, but I think this explains less of the price difference.
As far as I can tell, Efoiling is a much more power hungry sport. I can tell that just from the massive battery packs some of the forum users are showing off, which wouldn’t even fit on the biggest of longboards.
Then, as previous posters said, there’s the waterproofing aspect. Adds another technological barrier. So you need extra tech compared to eskates, extra batteries, and then you need a foil, a mast, and a board, which could be made from cheaper material like plywood and fiberglass, up to the more expensive aluminum or carbon fiber. Finally, demand for efoils is less, and since (mostly) only rich people who live on the coast are gonna have a need for them. Every poor college kid wants an eskate board so there’s been lots of companies making them, and they’ve gotten fairly cheap.
Whats interesting to me, and what I want to incorporate in a build, is the efoil motors are longer and lesser diameter: but their internal real estate is shared with waterproofing stuff. That means less coils of wire and less power, I believe. I wonder if a skate motor could produce more power. I looked at motor wattage to determine this: a 6380 eskate motor is 4.5kW, while the SSS 56104 is 14kW. I feel like this may be misleading, as I want the eskate to be more powerful… perhaps it isn’t, but perhaps the two companies use different measurement standard(peak vs continuous for ex)