Picking the best limo manufacturer

Video Transcript
Transcribed by Kimmi Clark

ME: Hey everybody. I am here with Dennis, he is our Operations Manager.

DH: Hello.

ME: We’re looking to purchase a brand new limo after our problems with the H1 that keeps costing me more money. My buddy Tim has started calling me and asking me “How’s the money suck?”, and that’s all it’s been. I don’t even have it home yet, I’m hoping today to find out more information about that.

So we’ve been looking at brand new limos and I’ve found this Hummer that I fell in love with. It has a 240 inch stretch, tandem axel, and a large screen HD television in it. There is also a dance floor, a fog machine, laser lights, the whole works. It seats around 24-26 people with a really nice bar configuration inside. It was from California limos, http://www.kalifornialimos.com , if you go to their site right now though; unfortunately it says that their web domain has been suspended. Maybe that means they’ve gone out of business, I really don’t know. All of the information I had for contacting them was on that site so I can’t get to it now. I guess they’re out of luck.

I did some searching around in the limo forums, www.limos.com. I got recommendations and questions answered about what I need to look for in a brand new vehicle and everything. The biggest thing that they were all telling me is about warrantee. The first recommendation was www.krystal.cc and I didn’t call them first, instead I looked at the California limousines picture and started looking around at some of the other builders. I found that www.royalcoachbyvictor.net looked to be the limo that we wanted. So I called Royal and I talked to them there, I got a quote from them and everything. In the background here you can see a picture of the H2, 200 inch stretch. I asked them about a 240 inch stretch with tandem and everything and I didn’t get what I wanted. Dennis and I were talking about it and the best that they’ll give us is a 200 inch.

DH: Why don’t they do the 240 inch stretch?

ME: Well what they told me was that they manufacture five cars per week in an assembly line and for safety reasons they don’t do the 240. Even though they acknowledged that the one I saw on the California site was probably made by them. It appears that’s a policy made within the last year.

DH: What about the tandem axel option?

ME: The tandem takes an enormous amount of time and this goes back to their five a week assembly line. If one car takes longer than the other cars it holds everything up.

DH: Will money buy what you want?

ME: I did offer more and they said it just wasn’t possible. I’ve decided after talking to them that I really like the way this car looks. I really like the Lamborghini style front doors and the suicide doors in the back. It’s really cool looking, two-toned with really nice rims. I can show you the inside interior in just a minute.

So let’s get back to www.krystal.cc, their website is 100% flash and is very hard to navigate. You have to wait for menus to pop open; you can’t just look at pictures. It also has noises on everything you click on. This is the standard option for Krystal, they do offer a two-toned option but they don’t offer some of the other things I wanted. For example, let me show you the Victor one here again (Royal Coach). Here is the site and a picture of the limo I was just showing you. They have a dance floor, the large screen TV, (By the way the television I am using here as a monitor is a 46” Sony Bravia, I talked to them about it because it will do really high computer resolutions, it will do 1920 by 1080. I talked to them about putting these in there and they said it was just fine. So we’re going to use one of these puppies up in the front.), and they talked about having the dance floor style stuff up in the head bars up here. It’s pretty nice interior; I actually like what I see there.

Then I talked to Krystal about their warrantee because they have a 3 year 36k mile warrantee on all their Hummers. All I would have to do is take it to their dealership and it will be fixed. They also had a warrantee on their own electronics and they would ship out new warrantee parts of there was a situation. Although, with Krystal, this is it! You don’t get extra frills. The interior is just one design that I could get out of them. It looks very nice but it’s not quite the seating capacity I was looking for. Their seating capacity is 14 people. We can do 24 in the Victor but we have to give up some stuff. We wouldn’t have to give up the TV up front but there would have to be seats across that portion. The problem with that is I can see people banging the back of their heads into the TV and I don’t think that it would be very smart. We could do really high seating capacity, around 24, but what it really looks like is that we’ll end up doing about 20 in order to get all of the features we want.

www.royalcoachbyvictor.net , I talked to them about warrantees as well, including Krystal’s, and what they said was that the warrantee was an after market warrantee (when you cut a Hummer in half you void the warrantee) and so the after market warrantee is not an actual hummer warrantee even though you take it to a hummer dealership for service. It’s an extra warrantee and if you dickered with them you get take that off of the price, roughly around 2k. They also told me that if I wanted a warrantee like what Krystal offered I’d have to add a couple thousand dollars to the price. I guess that sounds very much the same although maybe it’s the way the presentation is between the two warrantees that makes Krystal’s sound more like a factory warrantee.

DH: Krystal is selling the warrantee more as a feature, more than Royal is.

ME: Correct. In fact Royal does have a warrantee, their warrantee is on all of the electrical and components put in for 1 year and then the exterior is 3 years, I believe it’s either 3 years or 300k miles. I wouldn’t quote me on that but I think that’s what they said it was. The exterior warrantee is for the paint not to bubble, and no issues with the body, and they guarantee that it will not sag or crack on the frame. That to me actually sounds really good because with the H1 we found some stress cracks, and those are going to have to be repaired now too. I’m sure that will be a fair deal of money!

So for features, I really like the Royal version, the only thing I don’t like is the length, I really wish we could get it longer. We will be able to get the flat screen TV, two 17” TV’s, and a 7” TV. It will also have a nice sound system, bass boxes, and an intercom system. Since where the TV (on the picture from the monitor) goes is actually where the partition will be it does not raise and lower. Since it doesn’t raise and lower there is an inferred camera, in the interior on the passenger section, so you can see what’s going on back there. I’ll assume that we’ll have to make our camera very visible or we’ll have to let our clients know about that. We don’t need any extra curricular activities going on back there and catch it on camera. It has other stuff like an Xbox 360 with wireless controls and we’ll have computer input on the screen. We will also have a disco floor and disco parts on the ceiling rails. We’ll get the suicide doors, even though it’s a 10k option. I think it will make it much easier to get and out of the vehicle, plus it looks really cool. The total that they’re quoting me right now is 134k so that is within our ball park for what we’re looking for, for our new limo.

DH: I still can’t get past the fact that we’re not going to be a really monster limo with it. If we can’t do the tandem axels and we can’t do the longer stretch, I personally don’t see a reason why we would get it.

ME: That is a concern, especially since one of the things we’re doing is going for the biggest limos in town. I think we’re going to look some more, I might have to settle on this because I do believe that warrantee is very important. I haven’t been able to find very many manufacturers that our going to do the extra length. In Oregon we can go up to 40 feet and I would like to do that if I can find one, ideally a 240”-260” stretch with a tandem axel (mostly for the breaking power).

Are there anymore questions?

DH: No that’s it!

ME: Thanks everybody for watching!