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Comment by mcculley | Hacker News Reader

> "Even the largest marine engine manufacturers use mass-produced automotive engines that they modify for the boat mission, an engineering process I was more than familiar with."

This is not true at all, unless one is only talking about small inboard boats.

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90% sure he means "largest manufacturers of marine engines" rather than "manufacturers of the largest marine engines". If I'm right then the largest mfg probably produces smaller engines since there's so many more small boats.

Yeah, seems like all you see anymore for I/O engines is Mercruiser and Volvo, which do indeed use automotive engines. I'm not sure if there are even any other manufacturers left.

I'm less familiar with outboard engines, and I don't know what is more common (I/O or outboards) for recreational boating. In the Great Lakes, I/Os appear to dominate, but I've noticed that videos of boating in Florida and the east coast show a lot of outboards even on the bigger boats.

FL, especially in the Gulf, has mostly outboards because it's so damn shallow so it's nice to be able to pull them up when you're really tight. And lots of pontoon boats in the intercoastal.

I think they're referring to gasoline "small" boats, like Mercury Marine type stuff, rather than full-sized ships, which generally use industrial / "stationary" diesel engines. I think the point still stands though, as these larger stationary diesels are usually shared with locomotives, gensets, and the like.

Yes, these engines have other uses. But there is an enormous market of yachts, tugs, etc. smaller than what is considered to be a "ship" and bigger than any automotive engine could power. I argued only with the assertion about "automotive engines". It was true when I was a kid that most engines I was around on commercial boats were special versions of automotive engines. It has not been true in my experience for a couple decades.

"Even the largest marine engine manufacturers use mass-produced automotive engines" means that they use such engines for some purposes, say for the smaller watercraft. It does not mean that they exclusively use automotive designs.

So likely both you and the article author are correct.

Depending on the kind of yacht, might also be considerably smaller than an automotive engine. I'm somewhat superficially familiar with sailboat engines, and the market leaders in that segment are Yanmar and Volvo Penta.

Yanmar, AFAIU, is a big maker of various industrial and agricultural engines, so I guess the Yanmar marine engines are variants of those.

For Volvo Penta, I'm quite sure the bigger ones are marinized variants of Volvo car and truck engines, but for the smaller ones, they might sell them also as gensets or such, not sure.

Beyond Yanmar and Volvo Penta, there's a plethora of engine makers (Beta, Nanni, Westerbeke, etc. etc.), which make marinized versions of Kubota engines, which are AFAIU mostly used for agricultural and industrial equipment (e.g. those ubiquitous small Kubota tractors). These are generally well regarded, and sell for considerably less than Yanmar and Volvo Penta.

We love the Kubotas for generators and other small workloads. Nothing else we have would fit in an automobile. The smallest yacht I have worked on had engines with ancestry in locomotives.

As another commenter suggested, I read the assertion about "the largest marine engine manufacturers use mass-produced automotive engines" as "largest engine" not as "largest manufacturer". Maybe the author intended the latter.

Most yachts have 35-75hp diesel engines.

You and I are apparently dealing with very different yachts.

The larger boards will use mass produced construction and agriculture engines (I work for John Deere, so while I can't speak for the company I can tell marine engines are important enough of a market that we consider their needs when designing a new engine).

The largest ships get custom built engines.

I work in the tugboat industry. A quite standard engine there is the EMD 645. That was never a "mass-produced automotive engine" and it is not custom.

Our smallest truckable tug uses John Deere engines. Everything else uses engines that would never fit in any automotive application.

Most marine engines in that size range are used in either rail, power generating or other stationary applications. The manufacturers aren't idiots. They're gonna get as many sales out of a design as they can.

Regardless, the point is they're not bespoke for your industry.

I am well aware of the other uses of these engines. I argued only with the assertion made about "automotive engines".

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