We totally understand your pain here guys, though overall we have not seen any elevated issues on Mercury vs. other brands. We can give you horror stories on all brands. Mercury engines are tremendously more popular on BCB models, than other brands. So you will hear of more issues here than others. They are also about 98.9% of Triton sales also, thus more issues appear there as well. The Yamaha engines do appear to be living with the new oil pump modification and the Series II engines. Though it appears they are on the end of their life cycle. The HPDI engines are not able to be sold in California, and Yamaha appears to be phasing them out in 2009 to replace them with a V Max Four Stroke. So soon the 2 stroke Yamaha will be extinct is seems. As for BRP, we have those available and we sell tham also. And they are a 2 stroke variant that will be available into 2010. We have long said we are eager to see Four Stroke engines develop, and we also have said we like the Suzuki engine. Though we do know there is some time before development and acceptance merge. Int he long run four stroke engines should have less power head failure and issues. Though we dont drive our vehicles at 6000 RPMs on the Interstate highway for an hour straight, or for 40% or more of the life span. So we are unable to assume that four strokes will last. This is is only a theory till we have some history in the future. Overall the history with Mercury has been strong and inside of BCB we have several units with little issues. Though we are also aware that some of you have had more than your fair share of troubles. When we compare the results of the JD Power and Associates study on bass rigs, the scores are close. And in one instance we made the dealers aware that a particular engine company enhanced a boat companies scores. Though we also know that all of the engine data scores were relatively close. If you are overly concerned, we suggest you contact the Mercury Customer Relations team inside of Mercury Marine at 920-929-5000 and the switchboard should be able to direct you. They will need your serial number and the amount of actual service performed. If you have had one coil replaced, dont say your on the second coil. It is assumed that you would be since you had one failure. They are concerned with multiple failures, though they are also under financial scrutiny like all in the marine business are. We hope this helps, and we mostly wanted you all to know that we understand and that we too hope for more reliability. BCB
