Looking at some Airstreams

Mot have been a slow day for you. Not sure anything you said is right or wrong but you voted aluminum with your RV so I guess I can provide some insight. Maybe you agree, maybe not. That is the beauty of the forums.

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?

I did define it. Those that live in it all or part of the year and love to travel with the RV. That is a lifestyle, not a recreational camper.

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.

You can call them cousins; Airstream has been around 80 plus years and is still around. The cousins are not. And something like 70 percent of all Airstreams ever built are still in use.

They also were pulled by a very fit bicycle racer in an advertisement. That has nothing to do with lifestyle. But, since you mentioned cars and station wagons, I will add bikes.

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.

The point I was making was that the amount off MSRP for an Airstream might buy or come close to the total cost of a standard box 30 foot trailer. Why would somebody that only uses an RV occasionally care about getting $20-30K off an Airstream when they could purchase an entire same size box RV for that amount. It does not pencil out. The RVIA (Recreational Vehicle Industry Assn) estimates that the average useage of an RV is about 20 nights a year and that factors in those that full time in theirs. So most recreational users could probably stay in hotels for the money invested in an RV, tow vehicle, insurance, registration, camping fees, etc. And the standard box RV depreciates about 50 percent in five years adding to the cost of ownership.

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.

It seems that way; most folks never take into consideration the depreciation costs. A $30,000 white box will be worth around $15,000 in five years. I sure hope the original purchaser got lots and lots off the MSRP.

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?


I never said Harley's were good; I said they were a lifestyle and that lifestyle is often promoted by the factory advertising. It is very much like Airstream as there are many, most in fact, that will not ride any other motorcycle. And most AS owners will not have another brand of trailer. They might have a truck cabover camper to augment the Airstream, but their AS is THE TT of choice.


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).

This might be true, but it has nothing to do with the OP's quesion or my 'lifestyle' comments. An AS that cost $30,000 in the 1960's today costs $90,000. Most prices on things since the 1960's have tripled or more. Check out college tuition if you think that is not true. Check out the new $50,000 pickups compared to what they cost forty years ago. So, for an AS to cost three times the cost of forty years ago is not out of line compared to most things. At least the AS owner gets something that will last longer than the payments.

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.

Almost doomed means nothing in the business world. What is important is that they are still in the game and many that were around in 2007 are gone let alone back in the 1930's.

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.

Really? Where are your facts? Families spend on many things so why does it matter if their priority is an AS. Again it IS a lifestyle thing. We spend on lifestyle things regardless if they are motorycles, boats, airplanes, horses, trips to the south Pacific, or what ever.