Re: The Sinking of the Outboard Marine Corp.

Home Forum Ask A Member The Sinking of the Outboard Marine Corp. Re: The Sinking of the Outboard Marine Corp.


roj115


Replies: 16
Topics: 7
#79183

I watched the documentary and as the documentary maker said, he did gloss over a lot of important details. From my point of view, there were a number of important factors that contributed to the failure of the company. One is that sometime in the 1980s there seemed to be a pronounced shift in the market away from outboards to I/O. And when I say this, I’m just basing it on what I saw going on around where my lakefront cabin is. Back in the 70s, just about every boat you saw had an outboard but starting somewhere in the 80s, everyone (except me) seemed to be replacing them with I/O. By the mid 90s, pretty much all of the cabin owners around me had switched to I/O and I was just about the only hold out with an outboard. (I should also point out here that everyone’s maintenance costs went way up and mine remained minimal.) At the same time, the EPA’s stricter emission standards were being phased in and most companies chose to comply by abandoning 2 stroke and switching to 4 stroke. So now outboards were losing all of the advantages that outboards had over I/O (lighter weight, more compact, less moving parts, more dependable, better power to weight ratio, way better torque and hole shot). With those advantages gone, the market shifted even more towards I/O.

Unfortunately, OMC’s I/O offerings were not the market leaders and had a reputation for being much less reliable than their competitors’ products owing to their drive train design that was much more prone to failing compared to the drive trains made by Mercruiser and Volvo Penta. In the bay where my cabin is, I think all but one cabin switched to Mercuiser. The one cabin that switched to OMC sterndrive, had way more problems with it compared to the people with the Mercruisers.

And while EPA’s stricter standards coming into effect had a definite influence on OMC’s fortunes, I don’t blame the EPA for what they did or what happened to OMC at all.Two stroke motors were an inherently dirty technology, passing so many uncombusted hydrocarbons and other pollutants something had to be done to reduce their emissions. The fact that we have ETECs and other similar technologies now is a good thing and that wouldn’t have happened were it not for the EPA forcing the industry to reduce the emissions of their outboards.

So while you had the market shifting away from outboards, OMC was not doing well trying to compete in the I/O market. And while other manufacturers were going the easy route of more or less abandoning 2 stroke and offering only 4 stroke, OMC took the rather brave gamble of trying to make 2 stroke motors that complied with the new emission standards. This gave rise to the infamous FICHT motors. As we all know, those motors have a terrible reputation. AFAIK, the failure rate on the FICHT motor powerheads were so high, OMC’s warranty replacement costs vaulted to unsustainable levels and that was the final death blow for OMC.

Luckily, BRP bought the motor division of OMC and managed to build on OMC’s attempts to make 2 stroke motors run as clean or cleaner than 4 stroke motors. And while the ETEC and the FICHT are quite different in design (one is high pressure FI and the other is low pressure), I would imagine that there were at least some elements of OMCs FICHT design that were incorporated into the ETEC but that’s just speculation on my part.

It’s so unfortunate that so many people lost their jobs and so many dealers and customers got hosed, etc. when OMC failed but it could’ve been far worse if BRP hadn’t stepped in and took over. At least now, there are still fantastic 2 stroke outboards bearing the Evinrude name still on the market and we can still get parts for older OMC made Johnsons and Evinrudes. What if no one had stepped in and the whole thing just disappeared?