Who's Looking Out for Our Interests?

2012Coleman wrote:

kohai wrote:
I am new to the RV world and bought my first 5th wheel this year. I was willing to spend more for quality if I could find a floor plan and size that matched.

The biggest problem is visibility of who makes a quality unit. I spend days searching the internet trying to find who made great quality units. However, I never could find the right combination of quality, floor plan, size, etc. Even when I did narrow down some units, all I could do was find people online complaining about things and you can find people complaining for any brand.

So, how do I know somebody makes a quality unit? Is there any industry standard reporting on failure rates by manufacturer? How do I know that Brand X has a problem with their slides? Or that Brand Y has a problem with their gel coat?

In my past life I helped create surveys for consumers. I'm really tempted to start up a survey of forum members from across the internet to start quantifying the quality problems for each manufacturer.

Then, I could make that information publicly available to every buyer on the internet for free. Buyers will be able to make purchasing decisions based on hard numbers related to quality instead of just reading random info on forums.

Manufacturers would then be exposed in regards to their quality (or lack thereof) and they would also see how they stack up against the competition. I believe this would then cause an uptick in attention to quality. The component manufacturers will also be exposed (lipert, etc).

The challenge is getting enough responses to the surveys to cover so many manufacturers.

This is a great idea, and I would be willing to help. But I wonder if the mods would allow links to such surveys.

As a newbie shopping for a TT, I too was not very successful doing the research as so many suggest on this thread. And of course I could speak with my wallet and just not buy, but who does that hurt? Well who?? Reality check on aisle one!

I also subscribed to the TL mag - note past tense. As stated. i's just a fancy brochure - nothing more. They TT's and fivers they write about never have a thing wrong - maybe the selection of knobs on the drawers are cited as a drawback at most.

The OP is simply frustrated at the lack of some entity that has a non biased opinion an a range of RV's.

I don't think GS is going to help - why would they shoot themselves in the foot?

Great idea. Who is going to provide you the info? The same people that come here complaining. In order to get reliable info, you need reports from the shops that do the work. I doubt ever getting that info because they have no incentive to provide it. If you take the word of the "complainers" on this forum, just list every manf. as "junk" and be done with it. GO PURCHASE A BOAT TO ENJOY.