“Pathetic quality”: RV dealers are fed up...

2012Coleman wrote:

Someone wrote:
But until the public starts holding the manufacturers accountable, they will continue to sell cr@p.

LOL - this statement has been repeatedly posted since I joined this forum in 2012. And now we are supposed to be mad at the dealers who should be holding manufacturers liable for quality by refusing to sell their products?

First, you quote me yet actually change the quote to remove my screenname? A bit tacky.

Second, I never said to get mad at the dealers. I said that until the manufacturers are held accountable for putting out a cr@p product, nothing will change.

As long as people continue to buy poorly built campers, the manufacturers will continue to make poorly built campers. This is true for any and every product made.

Per this article:

Our list of RV brands includes almost 100 entries and more than 500 distinct brands and model series. But would you believe only six parent companies own 95+ percent of the market?

And the Big Two own a whopping 85 percent?!

Thor Industries
Foresr River


The other four parent companies are Winnebago Industries, REV Group, Northwoods Manufacturing and Gulf Stream Coach.

That means that companies like Casita, Oliver etc, are capturing 5 percent of the market - combined. These companies make a very small range of RVs. Most often the small "couple sized" travel trailers.

For family sized RVs, there are far fewer options outside of the six major companies, and Thor and Forest River can afford to sell their entry level models at a loss - getting the new RVer into the market. If that entry level RV only holds up for one or two years, that's great. The consumer will have bought into the "RV life" and will upgrade, hopefully several times.