Page 46: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (November 2021)

FIVE MINUTES WITH CHARLES GOOD, CHAIRMAN, COX POWERTRAIN

You’ve already discussed many of the hurdles that you’ve had to overcome, but it’s taken a long time for the

CXO300 to get into production, with the ? rst unit just coming out in 2020.

Simply put, what took so long?

Looking back at it now, I don’t think it actually has taken us very long. If you look at the cycle time for brand new products in other industries, they’re typically 5 to 10 years if it is a genuinely new product. Now throw in the fact that we had to develop a totally new diesel engine layout which has never been done before, one with a vertical crankshaft, and then on top of that throw in a global pandemic, I don’t think effectively 10 years from original inception and less than ? ve since the base design was settled on is a very long time.

What are your engine production rates, and looking at the coming ? ve years, how do you see that evolving?

We’re still at the backend of a pandemic, which has brought with it supply side, logistical prob- lems, shortages of containers and bottlenecks all over the place. So we have deliberately reined back production in the short term, partly because of those factors. But also because we want to walk before we run. At the moment we’re pro- ducing 10 units a week. (*Note: this interview was conducted in August 2021). Our short-term plan is that this will gradually rise through the rest of this year to 40 a week, and then of course, as the market evolves, our plan is to get to our target rate of production from the existing facil- ity of 80 to 90 units a week.

For readers that are considering an outboard diesel engine, what do you consider the main advantages for the diesel version?

It depends on what the use case is. But the ma- jority of our early adopters will be in the, what we would call the commercial segment, whether it’s coast guard or other commercial operators, or indeed the high-end leisure market, typically super yachts, where these boats and engines get used a great deal. And there, the principle driver to adopt one of our engines is simply the fuel saving. We’ve got one customer who is a heavy user who’s already estimated, their numbers, not ours, an annual saving of $150,000 for each pair

Image courtesy Cox 46 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • November 2021

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