Sometimes it's really cool to see companies doing things simply because they can, right? Because of the things that are possible today, because of what can be engineered, kind of throwing normal conventions and normal sanity out the window and making something awesome because they can. This mower is kind of that for me in the zero turn mower space. The real heart of this machine is down here underneath this back hood, and it is a 48 horsepower CAT diesel. 48 diesel horsepower in a zero turn mower. That is a lot of power. We're very used to selling diesel machines of half this amount of power. Diesel zero term mowers is something that we've been a proponent of for a very long time for a couple of reasons, fuel economy being one, though I'm sure this thing is pretty thirsty. Your typical diesel engines are going to be more torquey, and in a zero-term mower where you got a good constant load of trucking along through the grass, the torque does really help these machines perform well.
But also longevity and that longevity was one of the things that really jumped out at me. When I was going through Ferris's kind of glossy brochures for this thing, they call this out as a 4,000 to 5,000 hour engine being twice the life of a typical gas engine. That I think is cool. That's something that we have told people for a very long time, that you get much better longevity and stuff out of these diesel engines than you do out of just about any air cooled or liquid cooled gas motor. But it's very rare to see that put into print. So very cool to see that, four to 5,000 hour engine, frankly, probably would go pretty far beyond that, but by the time you're getting there, the rest of the machine is probably getting awfully tired by that point.
Putting all of that horsepower to work can be a bit of a challenge in a machine like this, right? When you look at zero term mowers, some of which can start at $3,000, really small, lightweight components are pretty common. But when you look at the drive train of this thing, there's a lot of meat. There's a lot of big components in here that it takes to transfer this amount of power around the machine. You'll notice on the back here, there are these big rubber engine mounts. I think it's cool how visible those are. Looking down here across the rear of the machine, you'll notice about an inch and a half wide belt that transfers the power down to the hydraulic wheel motor pumps, and also down through a 90 degree gear box that feeds then up to the front mower in order to push that power around the machine. You'll notice these are traditional hydro-gear and parker components here on the back for the pumps in the wheel motors. Both of them are the higher end series, obviously in order to move a heavy machine like this around.
So in the rear of the machine back here, you're going to have the engine taking out this whole engine compartment here in the back. The engine coolers and everything in here are substantial in the whole rear engine compartment here takes up a substantial amount of the machine. There's a lot of weight and stuff back here. You're going to have your three cylinder diesel packed behind it up here. Right on the backside of the operator is the radiator. You have a big hydraulic cooler over here on the left hand side of the machine, and then your emission system back here on the rear. Anytime we cross over 26 horsepower, you're going to need to have an emission system on an engine like this. On zero term mowers, they should be fairly trouble free because they tend to work the best when they're hot, and because you're generally running these machines at high RPMs and under loads, these emission systems are going to work very reliably. So this is not something that you need to be concerned about when you see the canister back here on the rear.
The warranty on this machine is four years on the whole thing, but interestingly, CAT only puts two years on the engine, so your warranty is going to be a little bit shorter back here. One thing that we always caution people about is when you buy CAT engines and machines like this, a lot of times, us included, your dealerships may not be certified in order to work on those engines. So if there's a warranty issue on this, we're not able to work on the engine. You have to load the machine up and run it down to a CAT dealer in order to have them plug into it.
This thing rides like a Cadillac. The killer feature on Ferris zero term mowers is generally their suspension set up, the coilover shocks that they put over top of the rear and the front wheels in order to help the machine ride better. Weight, though, in a zero term mower also makes a big difference in how well machines ride. As they get bigger, shocks or no shocks or whatever, a bigger heavier zero turn tends to ride better. They take the bumps better. They absorb them a little bit more. If you take this machine, that's heavy diesel engine, this big, heavy frame, these double coilover shocks here in the rear and the suspension out on the front, I can cruise over top of potholes in this thing and be really surprised at how well it rides. It doesn't jostle me out of the seat at all, which is something that is very uncommon in a lot of zero turn mowers where you're essentially sitting right on top of the axle.
The best places that we can show the ride that this thing has is to drive across some potholes here in the parking lot. It's hard to visualize what a rough lawn looks like, but you very clearly can see the big ruts that are in the parking lot over here. So we're going to fire this guy up, come out here over top of these bumps, and you'll notice here I'm aiming for them. Sometimes when you run over stuff like this on zero turns, so you're just sitting on the axle, it feels like it's going to knock your teeth out. It just glides over top of all these rough spots, especially these big ones down here.
That suspension system is doing more for the machine than just giving you a smooth ride. If you look at the way they have this linkage set up right here, this is done in a way that when this wheel falls down into a hole, it's going to push backwards on this rod, which goes through a little arm, turns that momentum the other direction, and lifts your mower deck up. So as you're going along and this wheel is going up and down through holes, catching high areas, it's going to use this linkage in order to help keep that mower deck level the entire time, prevent scalping, and give you a little bit better quality cut.
Now with a machine of this caliber, surely when it comes to raising your mower deck up and down, you're not going to be bothered with a foot operated pedal or a lever that you're going to pull to lift the weight of that mower deck. Of course not. This thing is going to have a hydraulically lifted mower deck. So as you're going along, when you want to lift that deck up, you simply reach down here with your foot and it hydraulically will raise that deck up until it goes into its locked position. Once you want to drop it back down again, you step on the pedal to lift it up off the stops, swing this lever out to the side, and it will slowly lower itself back down again. Changing the cutting height is just as easy while it's up. You're going to move this pin right here and drop it into any one of these holes in order to set your cutting height, a totally luxurious way in order to manage the cutting height on your zero turn. All of your operator information is found on this display over here on the right hand side of the machine. It's going to give you things like your engine RPM, your engine hours, your PTO hours tracking the amount of mowing time separately from your engine time, that's kind of cool. Has a clock on it so you know the time of day. Shows you your engine RPMs, your battery voltages, everything that you could want to know diagnostically about that machine.
It's got to row of buttons across the bottom down here that are going to allow you to do a couple of different things. The up and the down are going to raise or lower your engine RPM. There is no mechanical throttle on here. And then you have two quick buttons to either set the machine to idle or set it to max RPMs. I would've liked to see a little bit of adjustability in this display. I think they could have done a lot more with this machine by diving into the programming a little bit more. The idle RPMs, for example, are set at a thousand for the engine, which is fine, but it vibrates a little bit down that low, and coming up just one or 200 RPMs, really smooths things out a little bit. I would've liked to see maybe a user-configurable idle speed, for example.
Also notice that when I turn my mower deck on, it's not using these electronics to maybe lower the engine speed to take a little bit of the shock load off of the PTO clutch. That would've been a cool feature too. So, neat diagnostic panel that they have on here, but I think they could have pushed that a little bit further on this class of machine. So, that's a little bit on the Ferris IS 6200. With its $30,000 price tag, this thing is on the expensive end of mowing, but I love the fact that they went through and just built the most awesome mower that they could, whether it's power or features or whatever, this thing checks a lot of boxes. It is really cool. We've found a lot of people very willing to pony up for this thing, to go out and get their work done and take care of their properties.
Is it necessary? No. Is it absolutely incredible? Yes, absolutely is. I can't imagine how one of these things runs. I would love to be able to get it out and run it through some really thick, tall grass and see how this thing powers along. Unfortunately, here, it's the end of September. We just don't have the grass conditions in order to really be able to put it to work in any way that's going to be able to stress this engine, so maybe check back with this, subscribe to the channel here, and come springtime, we'll look for some kind of absurd situations that we could put this thing into.
