Were 2 Stroke Outboards UNRELIABLE?

So it just sounds like any direct injected early run of a two-stroke was just pretty shaky

I mean, if all of them had that kind of reputation at the beginning. But then as you really start to look into it, all that fades away after like a couple years into their production run

Like everybody has nothing but good things to say about them after those particular issues were ironed out

Yeah, that's true. I mean, the Optimax ended up being actually a very reliable engine

But I kind of, I mean, I guess it also depends on what your definition of reliability and unreliable really is

Well, yeah, because that's interesting that you bring that up because I guess the way I would look at reliability is generally, you know, can I go out

and make it back, right? Yeah. And, you know, and last a couple years

Now, yeah, I get that powerheads blowing. I mean, a couple years

I hope you want more than a couple years out of your engine. Wow. You're right. But, I mean, I understand that powerheads blowing left and right is, you know

it can be perceived as unreliable. But really, by the end of the production run of that engine

was it all that unreliable? liable or was it just that its early reputation was so bad that there was no saving it

I mean, I feel like that and the fact that four strokes were already kind of getting into place

for replacing the two stroke. Taking over the market. Yeah, people were just like, man, I don't want nothing to do with this anymore

Just get rid of those things. Let the four stroke take over. Yeah, that's probably exactly right. the

I don't know because I didn't really work on that many fix

after that I mean once they got that reputation and it didn't take long

for people to not even want it it was almost like the beginning of the demise

of an entire company so yeah the popping of the powerheads really

yeah it destroyed it and I think it was just also such a complex engine

that it just constantly failed and then there was very limited mechanics to even work on it because just like the optimax

and the HPDI if you don't have a competent mechanic that knows about the engine and how the systems

function and how that engine operates then you know anybody could make a really I mean they can make

a blunder out of that engine if they try and fix it and they have no idea what they're doing because the systems are very precise and the way they operate like you said it's a direct

injection two stroke. So like on an Optimax, you've got an air compressor, you've got air injectors, you've got

fuel injectors. On the HPI, you've got a lot of different filters, you've got a high pressure pump

you got close to 2,000 PSI of fuel pressure. So if you don know what you doing and you don know what you looking at and how the thing operates you really don have a place to start to fix it So then you have a problem with this engine You take it to somebody

They don't know what they're doing. And then they get in there and just start taking stuff apart, start screwing this

screwing that, messing with this, messing with that. Next thing you know, you can't get the engine to run right anymore because they just

messed it all up. So that probably added to the reputation of being notorious. unreliable

So does that make them truly unreliable? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I think this is a whole conversation about, like you said, what's notoriously

unreliable and what's reliable and what makes it unreliable. And we should probably even just go engine to engine and, you know, kind of talk about each one

Yeah, I mean, you can bring up, first of all, the E-Tech, which was, I mean, it came right

after the fict, right? That was like the fict was its predecessor

It was the originator of the direct injected two stroke. Am I correct in that? Yeah, the E-Tech, yeah

Probably. Well, that E-tech, it didn't have a lot of problems with blowing powerheads

or were the problems mainly just parts going out and availability or

price being an issue? The E-tech is its own thing altogether. because I think what makes the e-tech for most people

I think it has this notoriously unreliable reputation too, mainly because it's so inconsistent

Like if you have an e-tech, let's say you've got 1,000 E-Tex

500 of them are just going to be nothing but problems. And then the other 500 are going to be the most bulletproof

perfect engines you've ever had. I mean, I've seen people take an E-Tech and have, like, nothing

They don't do anything to it. I mean, they'll run it for six, seven years

No impellers, no thermostats, no nothing. They put a set of plugs in it and make sure it's got good fuel

That's it. Like, I've seen people set, let one sit for three years, come back

I mean, they had, you know, good, treated fuel, but they come back, put a battery in the boat

Boom, start the thing up, fires up first. time they just roll out like no issues and then I've also seen other people that have you know

the ECUs the injectors the the the thermostat housings some of the water jacket things like

it's just non-stop legitimate issues that they have with the engine those injectors were always I mean

that's the first thing I always hear about yeah the reason why you stay away from an ETEC is the

injectors because why is it they're serialized? Yeah. What exactly does that mean

So it only works on one particular cylinder or for one particular cylinder on one particular engine

Pretty much the way it is, is that if you have an injector, you have to change the

injector, right? So each injector has its own serial number that works with that ECU

And so in order to like if you have an injector that you got to change out you have to have the computer and the software and all the stuff in order to like I guess you could say match them So that way that they work together And I mean if you not an Everett dealer which they far and few between now

obviously because they, you know. Yeah, went out of business. Right. But before that, you would have people that would have problems with injectors and they

would have to go find a dealer that had the software and the computer to put it on there

and then do, you know, what they do to match everything up to make it

work properly, which to me is just... I mean, that's ridiculous. Yeah. That's absolutely ridiculous

So, like, you can't just order a cylinder three injector, put it in yourself, and get it

to work. No. You need to hook up the computer, match the serial numbers, do all the..

Just to get it to work, right? Yes. I mean, considering there's not a whole lot of Evan Rood or E-Tech mechanics around anymore

that's a huge problem. What does an injector even cost? I'm pretty, they're pretty expensive, too

They're not. Can you get your hands on one, like pretty accessible? I don't know

Availability might be hard now. I mean, I don't know. I haven't really tried to order an injector for an ETEP in quite a while

So whether they're available or not, I don't know. It's possible, but it's also probably not possible

And they might be super expensive. So I guess that means, It's the complexity of that entire system that makes people not want to deal with them

Because you have one person that has a bad issue there. It turns into this whole ordeal where, like, he gets a bad batch of fuel, messes up an injector

There's no ever near dealer within 100 miles of the guy. He's got to tow his boat, 100 miles to a dealer

Get this done. It charges them 1,500, 2 grand to get his boat running

and it takes a month. So, like, that whole process will just ruin someone's experience to the point where, you know

people that have a good experience with something, they don't really say anything. No one complains when things are good

It's not until they had this horrible experience that calls someone to action to actually be like

you know, go out and publicize how bad of an experience they had because, I mean, you know

face it, everybody wants some sympathy or something. some, you know, you want to tell people you're like

dude, this, this is horrible. Like, this is a horrible experience, so I want to tell somebody about it

Yeah, when you start having five-digit price tag mistakes. Mm-hmm. Constantly, constantly breaking on you

It's just, I could see how it'll build a pretty bad reputation. But, well, that also probably ties into why you've got such a bad, you know

such a good mixture. Because then there's other, there's the other people. that have had nothing like they don't do anything to the engine at all and it just works right i was going to say

it's a very split camp it's like you know because i'm not old enough to have worked on a lot of these

engines but i've heard you know the fair share of stories and you know all the all the nightmares

that go along with these engines and you always hear how unreliable they are but you know then if you ever get curious and start looking it up like why What made it unreliable You start digging into forums and see there is a lot of people who are passionate about

those engines that say they're not unreliable. They're really good engines. And every engine has lemons or like, you know, it's, I don't know, it's kind of difficult

I think that all three of them, it's like the, it's like

the big three, the HPDI, 250, 300, the Opti Pops and the FIC

them old early direct injected two strokes had such bad early runs that it just

failed to save the two stroke and left a sour taste in a majority of people's mouths

And even though there were the occasional good ones, it just wasn't enough to keep them alive

you know yeah the optimax is kind of a good you know comparison there because you know that it was the

optipop and the opti pop the true optip was from like 1997 until i think 2001 so after like 2002

they pretty much ironed out all those problems and a lot of them was problems with oil or

overheat stuff like that where they it would it would blow up the engine because it wouldn't get oiling

it wouldn't getting oil or it would overheat and have an issue there

So once you got, like if you have a 2009 Optimax, that's not an OptiPop

And someone that's still mad about OptiPops, it's like those engines for the most part are all gone

Now, you know, if you have a 97 to 01 Optimax, that's considered an OptiPop

But outside of that, I mean, they made the Optimax all the way up until like the VEEEAX

V6 V8 when that came out, like, I don't know, 2016 or something, 17, 18, maybe

Yeah, I know the OptiMax had a pretty long run. And I've never known the OptiMax to be an unreliable engine up until really recently

when you start digging into it, people really dog on the Opti Pop

Yeah. But I guess just after those couple of years, it was actually a really good engine

I've never. Well, that's kind of where it gets interesting because you take that Optimax, you know, you got a thousand Optimaxes, and you might have 25 that are, you know, you'll find 25 people that either had an OptiPop experience or if they didn't, then they bought, you know, a 2002 to the end of the run of the engine

And if you pool those people together, it's going to be like an 80-20 split where 80% of the people never had those issues

Yeah. The 20% had that bad issue. Whereas when it goes back to the E-Tech, it's a 50-50 split

And that's what's amazing about the E-Tech is that I've never seen anything that has such a far, like it's either all the way

To one extreme or the other. Yeah. There's no in-between. No in-between for that engine. There's either I love it or I hate it

That's really weird. Now, if you like this video, you can watch the full episode over here, or you can watch another clip over here