Our Ongoing Leopard 45 Warranty Experience with External Suppliers

In this video Trent shows poor installation of our autopilot that resulted in it needing to be replaced by Raymarine under warranty and properly reinstalled. He touches on some of our experiences dealing with the new yacht warranty process when externally supplied parts are involved irrespective of who they came from.

Trent wanted to note that the points he is making are based on the process of how some large companies who supply parts for the Leopard treat warranty claims and how varied their responses can be from location to location. Some are great and some render the warranty functionally worthless to people with visa constraints.

He also wanted to note that what isn't mentioned is the time cost and stress of multiple parts of the Raymarine system as one example, failing slowly over time due to poor installation. That it would be far more cost effective and less stressful for him to just have a reliable contractor install the entire system or do it yourself to save time and money.

Basically, that these warranties on external parts have limited valued in our opinion to international cruisers. It is best to assume that you will have to absorb all costs yourself if internationally cruising due to the time it takes to have simple issues rectified.

Once you add in the possibility that the shipbuilder caused the failure at the point of installation it basically turns into a circus and you could be requested to get a surveyor to validate every single claim and get multiple quotes to fix the issues at which point they may not even pay for all of their own poor workmanship knowing that you will need to litigate to take it further.

Nobody told us this before closing on the hull so we wanted to pass it on.