My experience was an episode of punked! I Looked at several used boats, finally found one I liked, after negotiating on the price, (btw their in house financing did not even bother to call me back) fortunately, I had my credit union finance the loan right away. We finally got to a test drive out in the lake later that week (I had the check in hand, confident that they stood behind the condition of the boat as described). The two salesmen that accompanied me (one with one week of experience on the job and no boat knowledge), showed me exactly what NOT to do through their own apparent inexperience. One almost fell in the lake, the other one could not figure out how to lower the propeller (forgot to remove safeguard) then when he tried to back the boat out he forgot to take the tie downs off from the back....once he actually got the boat off as they are pulling the trailer back in, one of the boards came off from the trailer...needless to say things looked very bad from the get go.
Once we actually got on the water, during our third go around the engine started to rattle and we had complete loss of power, the boat would not start and after 10 minutes he finally got the boat started again, I sarcastically asked the sales guy what he thought about the deal and to my surprise with a straight face he still told me it was a very good deal for the money I was paying! The nerve in this guy! we tried to go around the lake again but I noticed the boat was no longer running to its full potential, I took us closer to dock for fear of getting stuck again and as we are approaching the boat dies again, out of pure desperation and not wanting to wait for someone to tow us in, I jumped in the water and pulled the boat to the dock myself.
I received a call from the manager a few days later and he told me he would be replacing the engine with a ?new? one and would give me a 30 day warranty , yeah? a 30 day warranty!, I played along and told him I was open for another test drive, later that day I inquired about the engine again, just to verify that indeed it would be a new engine, needless to say, the response was that they where swapping the engine and replacing it with a used one ""with low hours"" and still a 30 day warranty on the engine, but he did say that if after the warranty if anything went wrong they would fix it......right!
So if you plan to purchase a boat from here you have been forewarned and don't say no one told you so....best of luck!
and if you guys from Newport boats (Corona) read this, truly nothing personal, take it as a lesson learned and strive to stand behind your product and train your staff to be more knowledgeable, they are very pleasant and quite comical, but not very knowledgeable in their field.
more