Avator 7.5e electric outboard motor 2023 First Drive

Electric motors for boats are nothing new. Brands such as Torquedo and Propspeed have all tried to surf a new wave in boating, but so far none have gained much traction in a world still dominated by fossil fuels.

But now one mainstream marine engine specialist has jumped on board – Mercury. We’re still not sure why it has jumped on board the e-revolution – the motive could be anything from virtue signalling to real fears that key European and maybe even US markets will ban fossil-fuelled incursions into some waterways. In any case, Mercury says it is the “next logical step” in the group’s future pathway.

Mercury has started small, last week launching the all-new Avator 7.5e outboard motor on the Australian market. It’s the smallest in what will grow over the next few years into a full family of battery-fuelled outboard products that are expected to top out at around 60hp.

This will be the only self-contained outboard motor in Mercury’s electric Avator range, featuring a battery that sits inside an outboard casing that looks remarkably like a shrunken-down conventional engine.

So what is Mercury’s electric future looking like? We jumped onboard a Quintrex Explorer 350 fitted with one of the first of the Avator 7.5e outboard motors in Australia at Mercury’s launch event last week on the Gold Coast Broadwater.

The first thing you’ll notice about this outboard motor is that it does not look like a science experiment. Mercury has deliberately built family familiarity into the design of the Avator 7.5e so it is instantly recognisable alongside the brand’s larger, more powerful family of engines.

Mercury has also colour-coded the Avator family to look distinctively different from its petrol-powered relatives. The motors are white with matte grey highlights and black lower legs, and feature fine blue highlights that will more easily identify them as members of Mercury’s electric revolution.

While all the cowlings and tiller handle are plastic, the motor’s conventional-look transom mount and leg are metal. Only an easily removable transom mount is offered at the moment, although Mercury will soon add a more secure version that will lock the bracket and motor onto the transom.

Mercury has developed the design of this entire motor in-house. At the base of it, the torpedo houses a 48V transverse flux electric motor (compared with more traditional axial or radial motors, these flux motors are particularly good at producing torque) that pumps 750W to one of three specially designed and made composite propellers in either standard 7P or optional 9P or 11P pitches. There is no gearbox so the drive from the motor is direct to the propeller.

The 7.5e is to be the smallest and most portable of the Avator electric motors. It will be the only one to feature a top-loading removable battery pack that will help you in two ways – first, it allows you to charge the battery remotely from the motor, and secondly, removing it makes the Avator 7.5e a significant 7.6kg lighter.

This is important because the Avator 7.5e is meant to be a portable motor. Without the battery, the housing weighs 19.5kg, while leaving the transom bracket on the boat saves another 2.6kg. The tiller can fold back parallel with the shaft so you can use it as a handle to pick the whole thing up like a suitcase. It’s surprisingly easy to carry.

Making it easier to port to and from the water is a one-lever release built into the base of the upper section of the motor that releases the pintle. You then just lift the motor up and it separates completely from the transom bracket. Slot it back in, wait for the click, and you’re set to go again.

Mercury’s design of the tiller was also an important part of the Avator 7.5e’s development, but more on that a bit later.

The Avator 7.5e’s electric motor is managed using software developed in-house at Mercury, which is constantly looking at how to refine the system to squeeze even more range and performance out of the platform. That means it could roll out future software updates that may improve things markedly for owners, including new features.

The battery and motor are both rated IP67, or as ‘waterproof’ as a modern smartphone that you can drop in shallow water with no harm.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: at $5700 for the Avator 7.5e motor and 1kWh battery and 220-volt, 230-watt rapid 3.5-hour recharger, opting for burning electrons over pickled dinosaurs is not cheap. This outboard motor sits in the same performance class as a 3.5hp petrol outboard engine costing around $1500.

The Avator’s nearest rival, the Torqueedo Travel 1103CS that puts out 520W at the prop, costs around $4000.

Mercury admitted to boatsales that it may have underestimated the demand in the US market for a second battery (a $1649 add-on cost in Australia). Range anxiety appears to be real on the water, with most buyers deciding they’d like the reassurance of carrying a backup battery just in case. 

The Avator 7.5e comes with a multifunction display that’s optimised for reading in bright sunlight. It shows the remaining battery charge in a scale across the bottom of the screen and uses soft-touch rubber buttons to scroll through screens showing everything from speed via the inbuilt GPS system to the percentage of remaining charge and estimated range.

The motor comes fitted with a 5V USB plug to take a small light, but it could also be used for recharging a smartphone.

Accessories include a battery backpack, a travel bag for the motor and, one day, smartphone connectivity that will show a range ring on a map to indicate how far you will get on your remaining battery charge, and its own connection to a mobile data network.

A wall-mounted charger will also be added to the options list.

The engine is fitted with a safety lanyard that will automatically cut power to the engine should the operator fall overboard.

Maintenance is pretty much a thing of the past, with just a couple of grease points and some sacrificial anodes to check.

The Avator’s 750W of energy at the propeller is similar to the output of Mercury’s 3.5hp four-stroke petrol engine. Let’s compare the two.

Flat out, the 27.1kg Avator 7.5e’s 1.0kWh battery will give you about an hour of runtime and will take about 3.5 hours to recharge, or around a minute to swap out the battery for a fresh one. Flat out, the 35.0kg Mercury 3.5hp’s 0.95L built-in fuel tank will give you about the same runtime, and take minutes to refuel.

Remember, you can run out of spare fuel as easily as you can run out of spare batteries, although a 5L jerry can of fuel weighs a lot less than a single battery. 

The high-energy density nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) lithium-ion battery powering our electric motor is good for around 1000 recharging cycles before it slowly starts to lose 100 per cent of its charge capacity. 

Once you remove the battery from the motor, a special cap seals off the plug to protect it from moisture.

Our test platform for our first-ever drive of Mercury’s electric outboard motor is the alloy Quintrex Explorer 350.

At 76kg for the hull only, the Quintrex Explorer 350 is suitable either as a trailerable tinnie with the engine always on, or as a car topper with the engine in the car boot. 

The Explorer 350 is rated to an engine up to 47kg, which means it tops out in performance at around 9.9hp. Stepping down to the equivalent of 3.0hp shouldn’t be a problem then.

There are no cords to pull to start the Avator 7.5e. Instead, there’s a button on the dash that you hold down for a couple of seconds until the colour LCD screen comes alive.

The first mystery is which way you twist the throttle. Mercury outboard engines have traditionally colour-coded the tiller handle so you know which way is forward (grey), and which is reverse (red). The Avator has only a tiny, difficult-to-see icon on the screen, so it’s a matter of remembering clockwise for reverse, and anti-clockwise for forward.

Then there’s the mystery of whether the prop is spinning. The electric motor is tucked away below the boat and under the water, so you can’t hear it.

It pays, then, to be quite forceful with the throttle. Wind on a bit of power and the boat will jump as the prop bites and the hull accelerates forward with a surprising amount of momentum, or if you get it wrong and wind on reverse it tilts almost completely out of the water.

That well of torque comes in handy when you point the Explorer 350 into the wind and waves. Downwind, you can easily hit 5.0kt at full throttle, but into a 10kt wind that will fall to 3.2kt with all the throttle wound on.

At full throttle, around 900rpm, you can also hear the high-pitch whine of the motor resonating through the hull.

Downwind, it’s easy to back off the throttle and build range. According to Mercury, reducing the throttle from 100 per cent to 50 per cent will extend the range from one hour and a range of about 10km to six hours and around 26km, while reducing it again to 25 per cent will extend the battery’s life to around 19 hours and 55km. That’s all before factoring in wind, tide and current.

The amount of torque this motor delivers is notable. Twist some throttle on at any speed, and the boat responds instantly with a decent shove.

Special mention goes into Mercury’s thought behind the tiller attached to the Avator 7.5e. The tiller looks like a conventional one, but can adjust for height, swap between left- and right-handed optimisation, and also swing in a 12-degree arc so that it is offset at an angle to the user. Underneath is a dial for adjusting the tension on the throttle control.

The engine will also tilt through several angles, with the steepest a 75-degree rake that on our tinnie leaves the prop sitting just below the water’s surface – great for shallow-water running.

Changing a battery on the water is easy. A small latch on the front of the motor releases the lift-up lid. Grab the battery, hit the release switch, pull it out, grab the new one, slot it in, close the lid, power up, and you’re away.

We even tried carrying the Avator 7.5e in its travel configuration. Finding the balance point is easy, and you’d happily be able to cart it to and from the car without too much effort.

In the early days of electric car maker Tesla, few buyers could afford to join the electric revolution. Over time though, Teslas have become better and more affordable to the point they’re now considered fairly mainstream.

Mercury’s Avator program is in its early days. By the end of this year, it will have an Avator 20e (5.0hp equivalent) and 35e (9.9hp equivalent) alongside the 7.5e, although the new motors will use separate, stackable 22kg battery packs rather than have them built into the unit.

Mercury’s Avator 7.5e shows that at this low end of the performance band, battery-powered motors not only have a real chance of displacing their fossil-fuel equivalents but make them entirely redundant.

Just like with Tesla, it’s up to the technology-friendly early adopters to show the rest of us that swapping a fuel bowser for a power plug is the right direction in which to turn.