Looking at some Airstreams

jmtandem wrote:

IMHO it's not so much what kind of a deal did I get but more how good the rig fits our camping lifestyle after a few times out. If it doesn't fit no deal is a good deal.

This is an excellent point and the previous suggestion to go to Airforums is also solid advice. Airstreams are a lot like Harley Davidsons. They might be in the motorcycle family but in many ways they are a lifestyle. Airstreams are very similar as they are more about a lifestyle than an RV. If you are comfortable in that lifestyle there is probably nothing else in the RV world that will satisfy. If not, the Airstream will likely not work that well for you. MSRP is a secondary consideration.

Really, . . . on this planet? "Lifestyle" is itself one of those bogus marketing terms folks "think" has vailidity? Care to define it? And then how it is supposed to apply?

An Airstream -- like its' upmarket cousins now gone (Avion, Silver Streak and Streamline) -- was designed to be pulled by the family car. And last for a generation or more, not just a few years. A higher initial cost, yes, but a long-term lower cost in operation and ownership.

Quality has its' price. So for those who'd rather not throw away money on a disposable travel trailer but buy one when the children are small and be used until one is literally too old to travel by car anymore, an all-aluminum, aerodynamic trailer with fully independent suspension is a fairly easy choice.

For those for whom a trailer, any RV, will be used just a few years (and toss away tens of thousands in some instances) any brand of plastic white box with terrible road performance and high horsepower demand will apparently satisfy.

Don't get too far out with the H-D motorcycle analogy. A technically inferior bike. All sizzle and no steak. Obsolete. A genuine waste of money except for the criminal cachet which attachs to it. T-shirts, tattoos and felonies . . something to which to aspire?

Americans don't individually take home as much of GNP as they once did. And a travel trailer , the upmarket versions, that once cost as much as the average American house, no longer have the market they did in the RV golden era of the 1960's. Women going to work fulltime and less time off for families, etc, changed the market. Not just that fuel that is no longer cheap. Plenty of demographic changes. For travelling continent-wide this was the TT to have before truck and airline "de-regulation" (read: profit confined to fewer hands).

Airstream was also doomed before being bought to be the flagship of an RV conglomerate. Changes to keep costs down, yes, and no longer a leader in tech innovation. But there is no other leader. Nor is there any better TT to pull. With a tow vehicle that won't break the bank like a $1/mile pickup in daily, year-round use a family car or minivan can pull nearly any of them.

As with any quality brand there are those for whom cool and shiny is enough. Planety of laughable pickups out there --lifted, bechromed and fitted with offroad tires that all together make it an even worse choice for towing than originally (already the least safe vehicle one could buy) -- so one might say that those who intentionally waste their families money buying one cheap trailer after another to be pulled by a too-expensive tow vehicle are the ones seduced by marketing. Lifestyle.

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