The truth is because most dealers were aligned with Mercury and it’s stronger in our dealership base. We have no preference on use, though we do sell many more Mercury engines.
Here’s some history:
1) During CoVid only the 100% Yamaha boat companies got inventory, and we got less than a dozen Yamaha engines a year, while Mercury continued to ship us engines right through CoVid.
2) We did sell a solid percentage of Yamaha 250 VMax engines before the HPDI models. At that time Mercury did not have a 250 in mainline, and brought out the 250 XB in Summer of 2000.
3) Then, once again Yamaha regained momentum with is whit the 250 HPDI, when Mercury did not have an injected mainline 250. They stopped at the 225 Pro XS in 2004. The 250 XS was the only injected engine built by Racing.
4) It was 2008 before we got a Mercury 250 Pro XS and they regained on the Yamaha share. Fred Kiekhaefer wasn’t letting us have the XS parts from Racing beyond the 225 engine.
5)Then Yamaha introduced four stroke in the 250 SHO V6 and started production sales in 2011. This again struck Mercury hard until they released the 250 Pro XS V8 in 2017. Which again leap frogged Yamaha.
6) Next came CoVid in 2020, which pretty much left us no choice but to sell Mercury. We held one sold consumer boat on backorder for 16 months, waiting on just one 250 SHO during CoVid.
7) The last piece of the Yamaha puzzle is they own a competitive company and definitely give preference to that builder. Mercury allowed Skeeter to buy engines for shipments in California until 2011, because the HPDI was only a 2 star engine, and the 225 and 250 Pro XS engines were 3 Star CARB compliant engines.
There is a true history on Yamaha with Bass Cat going back to the early 2000’s and Ham Hamberger, who got us a 150 Mercury out of Canadian production in 1973. We also were the selected bass boat to debut the very first V6 Yamaha at the Lake Bistineau Introduction for Yamaha in 1984. They had one operating bass model V6 at that time. The one on internal display was not operable.
added note: No the Yamaha fines did not impact availability of engines for us in the 2016 era. The popularity of either brand today is entirely consumer choice.
More could be added on Yamaha but with over 150 comments on the original Facebook post, placing the actual facts here seemed prudent.
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