Technology coupled with specialized manual labor has certainly drove the costs up as far as what is actually put into the boat. However, we as "customers" are also guilty in this aspect because we are constantly evolving from sport to sport and the boat engineers are drastically playing catch-up. Look at the early 90's, Slalom ran the industry. Sure Wakeboarding was around but was no where near evolved to what we see today. The boats were mostly direct drive, 19-21', relatively low freeboards and specialized hulls for leaving minimal wakes. Then fast forward 10 years, all of the sudden we are seeing gravity games, X-games, and worldwide wakeboard competitions. At this point Boat Engineers for 10 years have been mastering how to make a hull make no weight, to making hull that makes a clean big wake at 60 feet. We start to see introduction of ballast, V-drives, Electronic Cruise Controls, Deeper Freeboards, and "BLING". Now here we are the better part of 2 decades later, and we want WAVES, touchscreens, automation, push button changes, rider profiles, crazy freeboards, huge supercharged motors, new transmissions, Surf specific systems, and on and on. All the while the engineers are staring at a CAD drawing of 21' foot ski boat from 1995 and a 2018 Centurion Ri257 (Cruise Ship) scratching their head saying what's next. I would venture to say that the amount of fiberglass in a Ri257 vs. 1995 MC ProStar 190 is Triple at least, and the amount of engineering time, technology, trial and error these manufactures go through is well North of $1M (including the cost of a mold and the changes to the mold after R&D).
With the cost of certain brands and models surpassing the $250K mark and most Mid-level boats North of $100K on top of the fact they are getting longer and more freeboard the cost of these boats will eventually hit a point where only the top 10% can afford a Top-Shelf Tow boat. Its unfortunate, I am 31 years old and don't see myself being able to afford a new boat in 5-10 years.
With the cost of certain brands and models surpassing the $250K mark and most Mid-level boats North of $100K on top of the fact they are getting longer and more freeboard the cost of these boats will eventually hit a point where only the top 10% can afford a Top-Shelf Tow boat. Its unfortunate, I am 31 years old and don't see myself being able to afford a new boat in 5-10 years.
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