Why are Truck Campers so poorly made?
So I bought a new hard side truck camper recently. I'm not going to say which. Before that I had a pop-up, so this is my second camper. I looked at a half dozen more campers before my purchase, but...
Forum Discussion
Airstream hasn't been it's own company for a long while now, it's owned, like Heartland a few other lines, by Thor Industries.
Joe,
You are correct. However, Airstream is still around. Fleetwood in trailers and fifth wheels and truck campers is not. Avion is not. I know Fleetwood is trying to reinvent themselves with motorhomes. My comment about Airstream was that it freed itself from Beautrice Foods, that was not a good marriage. Just like Harley being owned by a bowling pin resetting machine manufacturer (AMF) was not a good fit either. Avion did not take back themselves like others have that are still in the market and doing well. There is nothing wrong with a parent company if it has Airstream's needs at heart.
The real issue is the limited market for high quality RV's. Not everybody wants a Prevost motorhome, or maybe a better way of saying it is that everybody wants a Prevost, but not everybody wants to pay for it. Same thing with Airstream, Northernlite truck campers, Bigfoot, Alaskan truck campers (I owned one for ten years, lost $500 in depreciation over that time -- unheard of in the RV world), and a few others. If everybody wanted quality, the manufacturers would build it. They build for the market. If most want cheap, they build for that as well.
With the possible exception of the 6.0/6.4 diesel, I would rate Ford cars and trucks as good as or better quality then Toyota. Ford makes hybrids, just like Toyota. Ford also makes trucks in sizes Toyota does not. We Americans need to wake up and understand that in some areas the Asian market does not have the edge it might have had a few decades ago. To those that think we need competition from Asian RV builders, we don't. We just need American builders to build quality stuff. We are doing it with cars and trucks and can do it with RV's as well. We have always done it with aircraft, and in many ways ships, boats, freight trains, large trucks, mining and construction equipment, etc. It can be done, parent company or not.
