No probably not. I'm thinking of making the jump to Lithium with this boat. I may run it on 12 cells for some testing but Lipo is the future. Why do you ask? 9XL going to hurt the Nimh batts for some reason? Saw OC's old mean machine doing 55mph with a 12XL so I'm a bit scared as to what I'm going to end up with here. [:-]