I arrived to the dealership on my scheduled purchase date on October 13th, 2015, and was met by my friendly salesman who was ready to give me a tour of the vehicle to explain the new features and how to use the various new systems.
The RV was opened up and ready for the tour, and it was plugged into power, which made sense as they were prepping it for me to pick it up. As the tour got underway, everything seemed fine, and we were excited by the prospects of all the new capabilities that our Ranger had lacked. In fact, the title picture in the header of this site is the panorama shot of our soon-to-be traded in Ranger and our come-see-me-I’ll-be-yours-soon new CS Adventurous.
Roadtrek parked at the dealership
But during our tour, there were issues with the power. Lights were flickering – the LEDs that lit the cabin area were flickering when the power sofa in the rear was reclined. Huh, that’s odd, I thought. The salesman’s explanation was simply that someone who had prepped the vehicle likely left something running which had drained the batteries. At the time, it sounded perfectly reasonable, though in hindsight, I’m not sure why there should have been power issues while it was plugged in to shore power. He told me that it would charge on my drive home (using that fancy engine generator) and I would need to plug it in at home to charge for possibly a few days as these batteries needed an extended charging time when they were deeply discharged. Again, that sounded reasonable. Hey, we’ve all left things running accidentally, right?
Figuring everything was OK, after the tour we all went in to the dealership to sign the papers and make it official.
If you get nothing else from this blog, PLEASE remember. When buying an RV especially, NEVER SIGN THE SALES PAPERWORK BEFORE CONFIRMING THAT THE RV IS WORKING!
I know that the buyer should always do his due diligence. But not being 100% familiar with the new battery system, it sounded completely reasonable that hey, they were just empty and by the time we got home and gave it some juice, we’d be A-OK.
WRONG.
We packed up and set off from the dealer with our brand new CS Adventurous. If ‘Someone’ had told us at that point, ‘hey, that’s a nice new RV you have…you know, you won’t be able to use it until at least next year’ we would have called them crazy and laughed. Unfortunately for us, ‘Someone’ never did try to warn us like that before we left to drive the 2 hours home.
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