I Can't Belive It's Not Butter...

markc

markc

Well-Known Member
Joined
16 May 2001
Messages
2,262
Location
Bucks & St Raphael SoF
Visit site
I Can\'t Belive It\'s Not Butter...

except I can.........that's the problem.

Thought the same when a mate dragged me onto a Sealine at Southampton BS, I think it was the F43. Base price £260,000 and plastic seats.

"Why are you using pretend leather on here?" I said to the salesman
"it's ULTRA LEATHER sir" he replied "you can upgrade to real leather if you wish"
"It reminds me of 1970's Ford Cortinas with their plastic leather seats" I said
"That's not for me to comment on sir" came his reply with a wry smile

My question is......WHY!!!! Who on earth wants to put their bum on plastic seats especially in an expensive toy...even Mondeos have real leather now!!!!

Shame, shame, shame

M


http://www.geocities.com/jinto100/Jintopics.html
 
Re: The pretend McCoy

Indeed. Princess boats for export use fake leather, i hear, but they love it. Mind you, all builders seem to use veneered wood, and Sealine uses pretend teak on the decks. There again, I understand that the engines are only ALLOY rather than real metal, the floors are completely hollow underneath the carpet, and the voices from underneath the dashboard - it's just a radio speaker! - and NOT even a real person! At least the glass fibre is the proper gear cos you can see through it.
 
Re: The pretend McCoy

seat should be plastic outside. But at over a quarter of a million quid, it's a bit rubbish if the seats indoors are pretend leather and the sound system is £100 quid car radio.
 
Re: The pretend McCoy

Yeah - makes sense!

Most likely i won't ever have the problem of arguing with the sales guy about it... a qtr of a million.. not this year! prob not next either!

Cheers matts!

C

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1>Edited by cngarrod on 27/09/2002 09:14 (server time).</FONT></P>
 
Re: The pretend McCoy

Hello TCM
For the record, we only use man made teak substitute on the submersible part of the S48 water sports platform as it has lower maintenance and enhanced anti slip characteristics. It actually costs 4 times as much as real teak which we use on all our other decks.
Best regards
Gerard Wainwright
 
Re: Ooh. An audience with Sealine.

oho - the man himself!

But aren't you confusing what "real teak" means? Man-made substitute may wel be more expensive than teak-faced ply. But it isn't more expensive than real teak, and as Byron says, it "get's old" rather than "ages".

Think the point being made in this thread is that otherwise good boats are being spolit by material shortcuts in both senses - surface materials are easy to spot when they're fake and set the entire tone of the boat. After all, if it's leatherette in here, whatthe hell is going on in the engine department? Stands to reason that some really important corners will have been cut there if we're sitting on plastic seats in the saloon, we'd say?

Real solid teak would last just as well for occassionaly dunking, and be more easy to retro-fix if and when required. It is a monster no-no to have the plastic, and that's the reason i'd walk of the s48 and straight round to the fairline stand where they have real teak which i understand. I won't have to explain to my mates that "it's actually better for the application you know..." when they question it and they would.

For an upmarket boat (and 250k is fairly upmarket for anything) there simplyshould not be an option for cheap plastic seats, especially in the UK market which is highly sensitive to all that and has highest proportion of leather seats in cars anywhere in the world. Oh, there goes a sealine, probably with the pretend leatherette seats- that's not very good at all, sounds a bit like a granada 2.0i with no extras. Leather in continental europe is nice and cheap these days, but in uk is twice the price.

Seems that in the UK, everyone uses sunseeker as a benchmark and undercuts them on quality and price - but the italians and others are beginning to make them look silly and not at all super-luxury, merely same old beigy carpets and interiors with shiny cherry wood just like five or more years ago.

I wonder if this situation isn't very like UK cars were in the sixties with rover and jaguar "setting the standard" and then up pop the foreigners with somewhat higher standards in lots of easily-identifiable areas?...

At least, couldn't Sealine could GET RID of the nasty nasty birds-eye light walnut dashboards/fuse panels which look straight out of a late-eighties cadillac? Almost anything would be better. It might look the part in Kidderminster or Redditch, but we're giggling and walking out.

Put it this way - there is no way that I would even consider a car without leather seats, and no way i'd consider a boat without real teak in the right places. Don't tell me about the application -i don't care- i know that it's probably more environmentally correct for manmade car seat coverings or a velour holds you better and is less sweaty but i still don't care, and the same applies with the fake teak. I just wouldn't go on the thing, a pity really for someone with a targa 48, wouldn't you say?

Most of your customers will have cars with leather seats and will expect the same on board. If you suimply must hit a price point by saving on leather, make it an optional extra but fit it as "standard".

Tell you what, I (and others hereabouts if u like) have reasonable experience of what decent stuf should look like could come up and have a chat free gratis. Yes - we've even got engineering degrees and not from poxy Coventry like the fairlinies - but don't let that put you off! It'll be like a customer clinic - except that you don't want a clinic with existig customers - you should wat a clinic with potential customers who (at the moment) wouldn't be seen dead in a sealine. The japs did this, launched the lexus LS400 and lots of people who otherwise would refer to jap crap went and bought one. Note that the droolable thing was the intial driver experience at a crucial price point (£39,995 in their case) - nobody gives a toss about the clever drives or irrelevant stuff - as witness ally-bodied audi A8 and 4-wheel drive jaguars being left on the shelves. You can take stuff off or reduce optional variable to hit a particular price point, but loading it up with cheap materials is an absolute no-no.
 
Re: Ooh. An audience with Sealine.

Not being in this league, I have a question. For your money, do you get anything extra over and above the competition (price wise) to compensate for the placky seating like a few extra feet or berths or a faster motor?
 
Telling the customer what\'s what.

You wouldn't necesarily expect to have the choice, and done properly, it isn't necessary. At home, you decide what to eat and in what surroundings. But at a top class restaurant, they decide the food and the decor and show you how it's done - and if it's done properly then you're fine about it. Customer don't need the choice of various crap things if an alternative is a very limited choice of high quality. There are almost no options for a lexus, using my earlier example. The better restaurtant will tell you where you'll sit, whereas macD and in pubs you "choose". Sealine are already doing fine with having no "blue-hull" option where fairline have got themselves into all sorts of a mess with having blue hulls and then discontinuing on some models.
 
Compensation

That's partly the point - at this level lots of buyers won't accept spending 260k and then having some compensation for it being a bit crap. They'd rather spend 262k and have leather. Or £263k and have leather and real teak.
 
Dashes and things....

.....On that point about walnut dashes - its all a matter of taste. The black glass (that's what it is I believe, not Carbon Fibre) on the T43 looks just as pretentious IMHO, and coloured panels for those who don't like wood (ala BMW's dashes) look worse..

Maybe the move to the less polished less grainy woods (new 7 Series) would look better. Even Bamboo?

If anybody's interested we sell a unique range of coloured fibreglasse cloths - blue, gold, red, black, bronze, aluminium. Widths of up to 80 cm. Can make up your own panels, looks good when polished.
 
But you said it ISN\'T fair enough

Er, you started it off by recounting your dissatisfaction at SIBS - in other words it ISN'T fair enough having a boat of that size available (in the uk) with fake leather. Indeed it was so unacceptable that you discounted the boat entirely from your thinking, and let others know of your standards in this regard?
 
Re: Compensation

maybe they're saving costs 1k at a time in 15 or 20 places, and by doing away with options so that it's cheap AND looks good to the Charter company buyer (placky seats)?

I haven't seen t'boat so maybe I'm being unkind. The new sealines I've seen look pretty enough from a distance. Is it obviously not leather?
 
Re: Compensation

ultra leather ( ibeleive) is soft-feel leather than it actually too perfect - which partly gives the game away. It's also too "warm" unlike real leather. Yes, it's fairly obvious i'd say. Markc guessed it straightaway, and so did i somewhere else (princess for export i think)
 
Re: But you said it ISN\'T fair enough

sorry matt, you misunderstand me. Firstly I would never buy a Sealine because the build quality dosn't appeal - I was with a mate who might have though.

My 'fair enough' comment was with it being built to a price, the consumer market wouldn't work if everything was built to the same high standard. My point was that the plastic leather was a cost cutting excercise too far.

So there ;-)

http://www.geocities.com/jinto100/Jintopics.html
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top