Mercury Marine - New Sterndrive

[Buckeye Boater]

Mercury Marine is now building stern drive engines in house and will no longer rely on automotive engines. One of the test boats was a 31DA equipped with twin 4.5 liter, 250 hp engines.

http://www.tradeonlytoday.com/2014/06/video-mercury-marine-rolls-250-hp-sterndrive/

 

[SeaRide]

Thanks for posting. I wonder if they just reverse engineered a GM 4.3 liter V6??????? If this engine is a success, it would be fairly easy to add 2 cylinders and make a 6 liter V8. Quite frankly I thought MerCruiser's answer was going to be a sterndrive version of the Verado, as they could gain additional economies of scale by doing so. Perhaps the inline design of the Verado presented engine compartment packaging issues for the boat manufacturers.

 

[jason78]

This is probably the direction they needed to go. It was going to happen sooner or later. I just wouldn't want to be one of the first few years of buyers while they work out the issues. Honestly Mercury has been doing a lot of their own stuff on the automotive engines for quite a number of years so I would think they have all the "bolt on" type components worked out so I suppose that is a plus.