By Jeff Glucker
This is a car website, but we can also cover other things. Like boats, which are basically cars of the water anyway. Whatever. I’m rambling, but it’s because I want to talk about an extremely interesting new engine that popped up from Mercury Marine. It’s a monster of an outboard and the packaging alone is fascinating. Say hello to the Verado V12.
Mercury Marine takes a 7.6-liter V12 engine, stands it on its head, and connects it to a two-speed gearbox. It makes 600 horsepower and propels a craft with its contra-rotating props. Mercury states its V12 gets better fuel economy and makes way more power than its competitor’s V8s. Each engine has a 150 amp alternator, electric starter, electro-hydraulic power steering, and a dry weight of 1,260 pounds (which is beefy, for sure).
Picture a nice 40-foot boat with a quartet of these amazing mills humming off the back. You are in control of 48 cylinders, a shit-ton of valves, and 2,400 horsepower.
The Verado V12 is already now one of my favorite new engines, and I don’t even own a boat. Dear Mercury Marine, let us test this thing out!
“…with a quarter of these amazing mills humming off the back.”
I’m guessing you mean “quartet” instead of “quarter.” Personally, though, I’d be delighted to find a V3 engine for this or indeed for pretty much any application.
Well if there was four of them, then technically that would be the equivalent of 16 V3 engines, but configured in a way that would not shake itself to pieces.
Jeff meant that the other three quarters would be humming up front. For trolling. Bloogers need to troll.
UPDATE: Apparently these are going to cost $77,000 per engine.
…so, you know, that’s a lot.
Feels like the 1%er marked is just getting more and more detached. Imagine advertising these with four engines mounted…crazy!
I know nothing about boats, but that boat in the picture is sporting three of these beauties. I am wondering why you would go with $231,000 worth of outboards. Couldn’t you get a heck of a lot of inboard power for that kind of moolah? What’s the advantage of outboards? I suppose though if you owned a quart of them you could keep one for a spare and just swap one out anytime you need service on one of the other three , so there IS that, but seriously If you could afford to do that you’d just be taking one of your other boats instead, so I don’t get it.
You’re correct, it shows three, and it makes no sense, because why would a yacht like that have an outboard engine. Maybe just to show 77k$ worth of conspicuous consumption?
Quite a few advantages of outboard vs inboard. Biggest is space. It uses up a lot less space to hang the engine(s) off the back. Especially important with salt water boats who want/need the safety of redundancy and employ multiple engines. You can also get more power in a smaller package with an outboard. Another is a very small, but still real chance of your boat sinking if something happens to the baffles on a sterndrive boat. I don’t have a real knowledge of ocean going craft, but in the land of 10,000 lakes, about once a year someone’s I/O baffle goes out and the boat almost instantly fills with water and is now a rock, not a boat. Not as big an issue with a true inboard, but there is still a seal around the prop shaft that can have an problem.
It’s also handy to be able to swap out an engine without having to dig it out of the inside of the boat.
I’ve never known a shaft seal to suffer catastrophic failure though. Usually they just weep – a lot – but usually slowly enough for the bilge pump to keep up until the boat can be hauled out of the water.
> I am wondering why you would go with $231,000 worth of outboards.
The old joke is that you need that sort of horsepower for climbing really really steep hills.
Wow. I’m thinking back 30 years when 300hp seemed like a lot for an outboard, and a pair of them was able to push a ski boat faster than a field of blown V8s to win one of the biggest races around. The only time it happened too.