Stalwart market leaders vs the China made Honda clones
Are the established stalwart OEM small engines brands better quality then the manufactured in China oft called “Chonda” engines? That’s the topic of this post.
In one corner of the face off circle stand the stalwarts; Briggs & Stratton, Kawasaki, Kohler, Honda and Yamaha. In the other corner stand the “Chonda’s” or “Honda Clones”.The Honda clones are a collection of different color schemed engines with hardly any name branding present. If they are sporting a name, that name may or may not live very long as these brands have a tendency to disappear and reappear under a different name. Either way most of these Honda look-alikes all appear to be produced by the same company in China and simply painted and branded for whichever customer orders them. There are more and more instances of major consumer small engine equipment manufacturers marketing these Chonda’s using their own name on them on their equipment. Cub Cadet, Toro etc to name a few.
In the stalwart corner of engine brands, you’d be hard pressed to find an engine or engine family or series being manufactured here in the USA. Long gone are the days of brands like Briggs & Stratton, Kawasaki and Kohler manufacturing the engine parts here in the USA and assembling them here in the USA. In modern times, they are producing the engine parts, usually down to the smallest part and fastener in countries like China. They are assembling the engines there as well. There are isolated instances where they are importing the parts for their engines and assembling them here in the USA.
OEM brands have been making small engines for a much longer period of time and have their storied history, market presence to back them up their established reputation. The legendary small engine manufacturers all started here in the midwestern United States back in the early 1900s. Briggs & Stratton, Kohler, Tecumseh, Clinton, Onan, Wisconsin and others all built factories and designed and built their engines here in the midwestern states like Wisconsin. These brands existed for over a century. Some of them are more fabled for characteristics like starting better than the competition in the bitter cold winters of the midwest and thus becoming the de facto engine brand for snowblowers. Tecumseh’s Snow King series engines dominated the snowblower industry for decades before Tecumseh Engines went out of business. In my opinion, their engines were the poorest built, least innovative of any of the stalwart brands. That is which I think ended in their demise. Their designs didn’t change for decades. They just kept making the same stuff decade after decade and didn’t change with the times as technology introduced better and more efficient small engine designs.
There are stalwart engine brands with designs that were proven designs and soldiered on to power small equipment for decades. The Kohler Command Pro series comes to mind. That series today is largely exactly like Kohler introduced it decades ago. To this day, it’s a legendary, extremely reliable, long lasting, trouble free engine series employed on many brands of commercial grade small engine equipment.
The stalwart OEM brands have the edge when it comes to parts availability. One of the benefits of being an established brand is your reputation for having parts diagrams and parts being available for decades to come. This is one of the biggest and most prominent features of OEM brand small engines. You need to ask yourself “do I want to purchase an expensive piece of small engine equipment with an engine brand that may not exist or have parts available 36 months from now?” There are many instances written about online whereby the chinese Honda clone engines seem to come and go with the seasons. Some of these knock-off engine brands do not even have a brand name depicted on them but rather feature a small decal with a Gmail address for you to email if you need parts. That doesn’t exude much confidence that parts will be available a year later. One could attribute some of this “non-recognition” sought behavior by these knock-off engine makers because the stalwart OEM brands like Honda have sued them and their subsidiaries multiple times already for infringing on Honda’s design and market by copying the Honda design.
Both OEM brands and Chonda brands are nowadays mostly all manufactured in China. It is difficult to find a small engine that isn’t labeled “Made in China”. Stalwarts like Briggs & Stratton and Kohler have fallen head over heels into having their small engines manufactured in China. Kawasaki being the lone player still manufacturing engines in Japan. For that, Kawasaki deserves much respect for not kowtowing to the market pressures that drive globalization and consolidation of manufacturing to China. Basically, every OEM brand has a series of engines that mimics or copied the Honda design, just as the Honda clone non-brands have done. There are Honda clone brands that have become a recognized industry leader brand of small engine. Predator engines sold exclusively by Harbor Freight come to mind. The Predator brand of small engines and small engine equipment has in their short market presence established almost as much a cult-like following and brand recognition as the century old stalwart brands.
It’s become a throw-away consumer grade small engine equipment market. With big box stores dominated by throw away grade small engine equipment, it’s impossible to ignore the trend of cheap, single season grade small engine equipment dominating the market in these large chain stores. Perhaps, that’s why stalwart OEM brands have largely gone along and are now playing the same consumer throw away grade of engines as the small engine equipment manufacturers. It would not make business sense having a commercial grade Briggs & Stratton Vanguard series engine on a beer can thin sheet metal grade lawnmower or snowblower as this would be a waste of money and expense producing a disposable snowblower with a commercial grade engine that would outlive it 6 to 1.
Are the established market leaders better than the knock-off engine brands? If you’re going to pay thousands of dollars for a piece of equipment, I’m more comfortable with an established stalwart engine brand lasting for as long as that particular piece of equipment will be in use. If it’s an inexpensive short life piece of equipment, It barely matters as the Honda clones have proven to be just as reliable as the consumer grade engine families from the OEM brands.