Why Yamaha's First Snowmobile Design Was Doomed To Fail

It's a bit difficult to know who exactly invented the snowmobile. When endless acres of land are covered with hard to traverse snow for months on end, it tends to inspire prospective inventors everywhere, and engineers in Canada and the U.S. were fast at work to do so in the early 1900s. Maine's Virgil D. White patented the word after creating a Model T Snow Flyer conversion kit, Canadian Joseph-Armand Bombardier (also the founder of Canadian jet manufacturer Bombardier) built various incarnations of a motorized sled-like vehicle, and Wisconsin native Carl Eliason put a two-cylinder motorcycle engine on a long sled. All are given credit for inventing the first snowmobile, depending on who you ask.

What we do know is Yamaha's later foray into snowmobile design came in fits and starts as they tried to catch up with their North American brethren. It began with them buying a snowmobile from Bombardier's company, not to take it for a spin, but to take it apart. They studied the design, and shortly thereafter created a double-tracked prototype called the YX15 in 1965. It was initially tested in Japan's Nakatajima Dunes, but the real test came when they brought the prototype to Canada. That's when things took a turn for the worse.

[Featured image by PekePON via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled |CC 3.0]

It was tested in Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec, and various other snow-covered Canadian locations, and the team encountered problems with the snowmobile in everyone of them, mainly sinking into the snow. Reports explained that the vehicle carried too much weight, and one rider summed it up painfully by remarking, "This isn't a snowmobile, it's a snow submarine." That would be an interesting invention on its own (like the Snowdog), but it wasn't what the Yamaha engineers were going for.

Additional problems followed with efforts at stability. The design incorporated the engine into the frame to lower the center of gravity, and yet the added stability undermined the sense of fun that comes with riding a snowmobile. Riders wanted to feel like they had more control over turns, with one complaining that "there's no real pleasure with a snowmobile that's too stable." So between sinking in the snow and the glacier-like cornering, the prototype left Canada off to a pretty bad start.

But that's why testing exists. Engineers went back to the drawing board with corrections and eventually introduced Yamaha's first snowmobile to market, the SL350, in 1968. This one had different problems. The tracks would slacken on a down slope corner, the engine lacked power, and the steering skis would snap. One more trip to the drawing board followed and Yamaha reemerged, this time for real, with a few models in 1969 that people actually liked and wanted to use on snow for years to come.

[Featured image by Hunini via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled |CC 3.0]