Mercury Marine recently introduced four new engines — 75-, 90- and 115-hp 4-strokes and a 4.5-liter 250-hp MerCruiser gasoline sterndrive.
“These engines are a result of a tremendous amount of consumer research and development activity by [our] team and we are proud to unveil them here and have you put them through their paces over the next couple of days,” Mercury president of global sales and marketing Kevin Grodzki told about 40 journalists Monday night at the opening-night dinner of a three-day press event at Mercury’s headquarters in Wisconsin.
Mercury says the new outboards boast a large displacement of 2.1 liters and a low weight of 359 pounds (20-inch shaft) for their horsepower. The new 4.5-liter, 250-hp sterndrive/inboard engine platform is the first recreational gasoline engine designed and built in-house by Mercury, the company said.
“With outboards we have always had the luxury of deciding what technology we wanted in our engines, and now we can do the same with our sterndrive engines,” Mercury vice president of product development, engineering and racing David Foulkes told me after dinner. “The direction of the auto engines was not fully serving our customers. We are now able to give them features that are built into the engine exclusively because they are marine engines.”
