Free: Contests & Raffles.
here you go....plenty like this:http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/boa/3549015633.html
Depends on the year, how it was maintained, and how it was powered. I can tell you this. From the end of the 90's through at least the mid 2000's, bang for your buck on a lot of the Bayliner, Maxum, and Trophy product was better than the competition. Because of the huge boom in boating from the late mid to late 80's into the 90's, boats during those times from a lot of manufactures were shoved through the factories as fast as possible. No one could build them fast enough to meet demand, and corners were cut. Bayliners brand reputation took a huge hit because of it. They weren't the only one doing it, but they were the biggest. To bring the brand image back, construction practices, cosmetics and a lot of components on the product from at least 99 through 2007ish or better, had to be to par with the more premium brands just to be considered entry or mid level product. So $ for $, you were getting a better deal on a Maxum than a comparable Cobalt or Searay, or on a Bayliner vs Searay, etc. The brand name was tarnished, so to compete the boats had to be better and sell for less. If you look at things like JD Power, you will see that, as someone else had stated, Bayliners and Maxums would get pummeled for their crappy motors, while Searay, Cobalt, or other "higher end" brands would get raving reviews. This was complete crap, because they were the same damn Merc motors. JD power will elevate a companies standing based on how much that company is willing to pay to look good - FYI. And if you ponied up and overpaid high dollar for something, are you going to complain about that product? or are you more likely to complain about the more reasonable priced product that is basically the same. Remember this is the general public we are talking about here, so image can fog perception. Side by side: chevy vs cady, ford vs lincoln, toyota vs lexus, which one is more likely to get the pass on the same issue and which is going to get dinged, again when looking at this via public perception? I can say all of this because I was a Project Manager in Engineering & Product Development there from 99 through late 2004 on Runabouts. I know what we put in to the product vs what our competition was doing. Things that they could get away with, there was no way we could do because of brand perception. I know similar considerations were done on Trophy's and Cruisers. We routinely brought in boats that had the highest ratings in the category and ran them. Few, very few, compared apples to apples on ride quality compared to our models. Some of the competition's boats didn't make it through the first 10 hours of what we ran as normal testing on all of our product before they were unusable. Our boats would run the entire 50 to 100 hour test cycle ( or more) and then be put into our employee boat use program for a few years. After all that they would be gone through, the cosmetic's of 2 to three years of hard use would be fixed, and they would be processed through Olympic with full warranties. Olympic paid about 25% of market value for those boats but would turn them as "Engineering" boats and sell them for 85-90% market value. There were even collaborations with Searay on product because they were a sister company and it was dictated form on high that we would share some components as there was some factory consolidation that may be possible ( Searay absorbed Bayliner {US MARINE} when the economy took the big dump - Both companies and many more are owned by Brunswick) The first foray into this was a 17ft runabout that we were to use this "great running" Searay hull for. We felt however, that their hull's running characteristics were not all that great. by working with balancing the upper level components on our model, we ended up with a noticeably nicer running boat than theirs with their hull. Are Bayliners, Maxums, Trophy's perfect - hell no. But compared to similar product, at least during the time frame I was there, I know they were built as well if not better than the competition - apples to apples.
Remember this is the general public we are talking about here, so image can fog perception. Side by side: chevy vs cady, ford vs lincoln, toyota vs lexus, which one is more likely to get the pass on the same issue and which is going to get dinged, again when looking at this via public perception?
