Movin’ up

Nov 22, 2022

Last week I attended the Mercury Marine introduction of their new V10 Verado 350 and 400 horse power outboards. The event took place at both Disneyland and the legendary Mercury Lake X test facility in Florida. Both places are appropriately imaginary and unique.

These new Mercury Verado models are V10 designs – so, with ten cylinders like some Aston Martin, Ferarri or Lamborgini  engines, this is an exotic powerplant that has made it into production, and yet it’s one that will surely show up in ordinary places like high-end pontoon boats and on bass boats. 

You can read more about the new engines in this issue of Boating Industry Canada News Week Digest but, I actually drove them – on several boats and in single and twin installations. Are they exotic? I’d say that from a design perspective they certainly are and yet the performance can be downright civilized; smooth and quiet like almost no other engines on the market.

Mercury stunned the industry with their original L6 256 cubic inch supercharged Verado when it was introduced back in 2006 as an engine family with 200, 225, 250 and 275 horse power versions, and that same platform has now reached 450 in the top-power 450 Racing model. It’s almost funny to see a pair of those on a pontoon, but that’s what more and more people are buying.  The new V10 Verado models fill in the space between the Mercury V6 and V8 models that entered production in 2018 and that were being built and marketed concurrently with the supercharged Verado 6-cylinder models.

Those original supercharged Verados have been very successful but Mercury went to the larger displacement, naturally aspirated V6 and V8 because those took advantage of improved design and control technologies for overall better performance through a wide range of applications. These new engines are another step.

The V10s really up the stakes for Mercury’s competitors. The multi-cylinder layout has the torque to drive a much larger gearcase and larger prop with resulting improvements in top speed and fuel economy at the same time. Some of the boats we ran had previously been powered by the supercharged Verados and we got a direct comparison between the older designs and the new V10.

Yes – the V10s will come at a cost premium, but the whole market has been moving up in recent years and for many things in life, even entry-level products are more luxurious as well as more expensive.

In spite of the government’s efforts to cool the global economy and slow things down, that does not seem to be reflected in the new boat models we see being introduced, nor in these new engines. Clearly, we are still movin’ up!

Andy Adams – Editor