Tohatsu Celebrates 60 Years

The year 2016 marks a major milestone for Japanese outboard motor manufacturer Tohatsu, which is celebrating 60 years of producing outboard motors this year.

Founded in October 1922 as the Takata Motor Research Institute, the company that would become Tohatsu started out by manufacturing rail cars. Some of the cars required their own independent power supply, which led to the development of generators and small gasoline engines. Designated for military production in 1940, the company resumed manufacturing recreational products following the second world war, and built its first outboard motor in in 1956. That engine – the 1.5 horsepower model OB-1 – was the first outboard to be manufactured in Japan. Although company engineers joked that a person could paddle faster than the outboard would propel them, the motor sold well. An air-cooled OB-2 model soon followed.

Tohatsu soon built a solid market for its outboards, which appealed to both recreational and commercial buyers. Now known as Tohatsu, the company began selling outboards in North America in 1984 under a distribution contract with Nissan. Today, the full line of outboards is sold worldwide under the Tohatsu name. Tohatsu even manufactures small outboards for other brands like Mercury, which are sold worldwide.

In 2005 Tohatsu opened a new state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in central Japan, with more than 370,000 square feet of space and a production capacity of over 200,000 outboards per year. In 2014, Tohatsu manufactured its 3.5 millionth outboard. The company has come a long way from the days when even its own engineers believed it would be faster to paddle.