OUTBOARD EVOLUTION
Unless you’ve spent the last decade or so hiding out on a mountaintop in Tibet, it’s impossible to have missed the explosive, global growth in outboard engines.
Outboards have certainly grown in size – where a 300hp engine might have been considered ‘big power’ only a few years ago, today it’s not uncommon to see outboards of 400, 425 or 450hp – often mounted in multiples across the back of ever-larger boats.
If you really want to go big, Seven Marine offers V8 outboards of up to 625hp – big and powerful enough to more than compete with traditional inboards and sterndrives. This massive upward migration in torque and horsepower is a big reason why we’re seeing more outboards on the water today than ever before.
And there are indeed more of them than ever, with global sales increasing from a total of 385,440 engines worldwide in 2009 to 501,569 engines in 2018 – a 30% gain in just 10 years.
All of this has made the outboard engine market a very competitive space, driving manufacturers to innovate like mad and bring better, more refined product to market in an endless effort to leapfrog the competitors. That’s great news for us boaties, because with
