BARD Reported Accidents by Outboard and Sterndrive Manufacturer Used to Estimate Legacy Drive Population Market Shares
We are working on a propeller safety proposal that requires an estimate of the percentage of U.S. outboard and sterndrive boats powered by the various outboard and sterndrive manufacturers that are in the field, called the boat park by other nations. These numbers may be considerably different than current market shares due to some manufacturers having large populations of legacy drives in the field. In addition, some manufacturers no longer in operation (like OMC) still have a large population of drives in the field.
We notice the U.S. Coast Guard has supplied a data field for engine manufacturer beginning in their 2009 Boating Accident Report Database (BARD). While this information is only being captured for a fraction of the accident reports, we still submit it as one means of estimating the market share of boats powered by manufacturers of outboards and stern drives in the field.
We created a spreadsheet and examined 2009 and 2010 BARD. We established a subset of data by year that only included outboards and sterndrives, then we counted those belonging to each manufacturer. Several small manufacturers only had one drive. We eliminated manufacturers that did not have at least two drives listed in at least one of the two years we analyzed. Then we grouped the results by manufacturer (like OMC= OMC + Evinrude + Johnson).
The rounded off results of our research are presented in the table below.
| Market Share of Existing Outboard and Sterndrive Boats Combined by Drive Manufacturer | |
| Manufacturer | Percent |
| Honda | 3.5% |
| Mercury Marine | 53% |
| Nissan | .5% |
| OMC & Bombardier | 15% |
| Suzuki | 3% |
| Tohatsu | .5% |
| Volvo Penta | 6% |
| Yamaha | 15% |
| Yanmar | .25% |
| Fraction of accidents from manufacturers w/only 1 accident a year | 3% |
| Total | 99.75% |
The spreadsheet we used to perform these calculations is available here.
We recognize the OMC category also includes modern day Bombardier produced Evinrude and Johnson drives. We are unable to easily separate them from the historical OMC drives.
If anyone is aware of other outboard and sterndrive boat park propulsion market share estimates for the U.S. outboard and stern drive market, please share them with us. Please recall we are NOT talking about current market shares, we are talking about the percentage of boats in the field powered by the various manufacturers.
We also note boat park outboard and stern drive propulsion market share data will not be identical to the market share of drives in the field due to some boats having multiple engines.
We are aware some manufacturers (like Tohatsu) are actually the manufacturer of some of the drives branded by other manufacturers in the table.