Mercury’s electric outboard motors ‘warming over’ buyers

David Foulkes, Chief Executive of US marine industry giant Brunswick Corporation that counts Mercury’s Avator electric outboard motor range among its portfolio, told boatsales that more than 2000 Avator 7.5e electric motors had already been sold worldwide.

Foulkes was at the recent 2023 Sydney International Boat Show for the Australian reveal of the new Avator 20e and 35e, the two electric motors that will go on sale in Australia late this year.

The 20e, producing 3.0hp but with a claimed equivalent in performance to a 5hp outboard engine, will be priced from $12,900, while the 35e, producing 5hp but with a claimed equivalent in performance to an 8hp outboard engine, will be priced from $13,200.

If you don’t want a tiller steer, both these prices do not include rigging for a forward control – the likely way some of these two motors will be used. However, it does include the cost of the two batteries, which will weigh around 45 to 50kg in total, that will be used to power the electric motors.

The two new Avator electric motors on show in Sydney were fresh from their global launch last month and will enter production this month.

“They’ve [the Avator electric motors] been received very well,” Foulkes said.

“We have really strong orders. We’ve already started producing the first model, the 7.5e, in the second quarter, and we produced about 2000 engines already with good demand.”

However, demand is shaped by market forces, with Foulkes saying most of the orders for the Avator had come from Europe where waterways are highly regulated for emissions.

However, the two new electric outboard motors will come with some challenges that Mercury will need to work through.

“Some integrations [of the Avator 20e and 35e] are a little easier than others," Foulkes said.

“Obviously, with the first model (the Avator 7.5e), it has an integral battery inside the powerhead, so there’s no need to modify the boat at all – it just kind of bolts on the transom like any other engine.

“As we move to higher horsepower applications the battery will be in the boat. Some of the applications, that’s pretty straightforward, some you might need to make some accommodations,” he said.

According to Foulkes, the most common place to fit the batteries in a boat will be where the fuel tank would have been, but the batteries feeding the Avator motors would be heavier.

“So you need to make sure it’s, you know, appropriately placed with the central gravity of the boat,” Foulkes said.

“A lot of the applications in Europe are on RIBs (rigid inflatable boats). It’s pretty straightforward to apply them in a RIB and they’ll normally go under a back seat or something like that.”

And while Mercury’s Avator range is low horsepower, Foulkes admits the company has no ambitions to shift electrification to the high-horsepower end of the market.

“There are about 50,000 electric outboards sold every year worldwide, and 90 per cent of them are below 10hp,” Foulkes said.

“So even though you see a lot of publicity around startups with high horsepower and stuff like that, it is not very practical for most real applications.

“It’s not to say that if you have a launch or something like that which doesn’t require long range or high performance, [it isn’t worth] electrifying. But currently, for the majority of core boat models, it is tough to see electrification taking off for some time.

“We will have [battery-powered] offerings, but the higher horsepower you go, the more niche the offerings become and the more specific to the application they become.”