Massive Center Consoles

Massive centre consoles over eighteen meters are the latest style and type of boat to push into larger sizes.  At the start of 2023 Scout presented details of a new 670 LX flagship powered by five huge Mercury 600hp outboards to be launched in 2024, the largest production centre console yacht.  With this new flagship Scout expands its size fourteen feet, and will offer the largest production centre console to the market and a competitor to the HCB 65ft Estrella and Midnight Express 60 Pied-A-Mer.

A genre invented by Boston Whaler and Dick Fisher in 1961, who among other things also invented the reputable unsinkable hull the brand is known for.  It was fairly basic for centre consoles at first, with Boston Whaler being a bit on its own, and others possibly modifying there boats to take a cut from this nice market when it started to slowly grow in the seventies.  We are speaking small sizes here, and in that time the first boat used to be a trailable speed boat about four meters in length with an outboard at the back.  In around the nineties centre consoles just as ribs started to become more common in the six to ten meter range.  But it was the return to success of the outboard in the past ten to fifteen years which has expanded CC to an unheard level of domination in the sub fifteen meter market.

Today centre consoles seem unable to stop growing, a growth shared to that of the outboard.  Although I still do think that centre console above fifteen meters should be offered with inboard diesels.  Just as it may look cool I cannot understand the reasoning of fitting endless outboards to the stern versus two diesel engines.  The market though is all for the outboards with the Midnight Express 60 Pied-A-Mer diesel engines and surface drives propulsion version never materializing.