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It's not clear if Bombardier's management team knew what they were getting into
when they purchased the engine portion of the bankrupt Outboard Marine
Corporation (OMC) in 2001. Almost immediately, they were sucked into a
maelstrom of problems.
A mountain of warranty claims related to Ficht failures awaited them, as did
angry consumers and dealers. Industry journals reported that Bombardier
Quality Engineers had to scrap almost 90 percent of the crankshafts and 80
percent of the connecting rods in inventory due to shortcuts taken in the
months prior to OMC's bankruptcy.
Bombardier was also faced with an uphill Public Relations battle. Public
sentiment against OMC's Ficht Direct Fuel Injection technology was already at a
high level due to a large number of failures.
And as Bombardier struggled to fix the Ficht, they had to make a number of
difficult decisions about how to handle warranty claims. The least popular
of these decisions was to disallow warranty claims for engines built prior to
2000. A lot of OMC stalwarts were disenfranchised by that
decision.
 Somewhere
in the same timeframe, Bombardier decided to undertake a complete redesign
of the outboard engine as they knew it.
They asked the question - what would consumers really want to see in an outboard
engine? Forget about technology, what kinds of things would improve their
overall boating experience?
Their customer surveys and market studies told them that consumers wanted a
number of things: reliability, lower maintenance costs, peformance with
fuel economy, a quiet motor, and one that was friendly to the environment.
They decided to use 2-stroke direct fuel injection technology as a base, and set
about redefining the way 2-strokes should be built.
Part of the work involved re-engineering the Ficht fuel injection technology to
make it bulletproof, cleaner, more fuel efficient, and to allow for additional
capabilities later on. They also redesigned major portions of their engines to
incorporate the latest materials, electronics and design concepts.
The end result became the E-TEC.
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But is it too little, too late? In the years between OMC's
collapse and the release of the first E-TEC, 4-stroke outboards made large
gains in market share.
 The
growth in 4-stroke sales certainly weren't hurt by a number of failues in
Mercury's Optimax and Yamaha's HPDI engines. Unlike OMC, however, both Mercury
and Yamaha had enough financial staying power to address the issues and make
them right. But the legacy of blown powerheads continue to dog DFI 2-strokes to
this day.
The situation for 2-strokes was made even worse by proposed anti-pollution
legislation in California. The legislation, which was ultimately defeated,
sought to ban 2-stroke outboard engines from all inland waterways in
California.
Soon, rumors that government agencies were going to universally ban 2-stroke
engines (not just in California, but all over the US) began to circulate and
take hold, helped along, perhaps, by overzealous or mis-informed 4-stroke
proponents.
Now, BRP is faced with a major uphill PR battle in order to sell E-TECs. They
have to overcome the stigma of OMC's Ficht failures, hostile consumers and
dealers stung by Bombardier's Ficht warranty policies, and the public
perception of 2-strokes as being inferior to 4-strokes.
In the sections below, we go over some of the most common issues, and try to
divine the truth from the various information sources that are available.
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