Kia, Hyundai: Please come to the rescue "Pathetic Quality"

[vtraudt]

I think the market is ripe for a 'disrupter'. Maybe foreign builders need to enter the market to wake up the "Indiana RV Maffia"

"One West Coast dealer echoed those thoughts. “My greatest fear now is watching the motorized RV industry get toppled,” he said. “They just don’t have the expertise to complete a motorhome in Northern Indiana anymore. Their labor force has no eye for quality and they have no way of teaching it. The industry is ripe for someone else to step in and start producing quality products, but it will likely have to be someplace other than Indiana. Right now, if the workers there get
upset by something, they just walk off because it’s easy to get a job in Elkhart right now.”

https://www.rvtravel.com/pathetic-quality-rv-dealers-fed-manufacturers-producing-1017b/?fbclid=IwAR2teVjEoUA7FN2L5rJzIU89iYB3WXm9dyZ8Wu309q_2BSBiX0UVYKrj7cw

[majirameb]

A market size of $50 billion has been determined for electric vehicle financing in 2030, which is about 80 percent of the current size of the retail vehicle financing industry, which is now estimated at $60 billion. This statistic was studied by me back in the quarantine period. When I worked with Pacific Motors, I learned that they were investing less than it was making them a profit. The automotive industry is growing very rapidly, but because of people like Greta Tunberg we have to make environmentally friendly cars - and that's maximum cost, minimum cost and high income for the public.

[vtraudt]

Arn wrote:

Unfortunately inspection is a lost art. In North American manufacturing there has been a major swing to self inspection. If I do it wrong without realizing it then it goes down the line like that. Owners save money by having a minimal quality department at the expense of, you guessed it, product quality.

And if supply and demand are somewhat in balance, then there IS a penalty (=cost) associated with low product quality.

But currently, it is and Indiana monopoly (the RV Mafia), and they get by even AFTER the 2021 price hike of 25% (last dealer survey).

[Arn]

wildtoad wrote:
Don’t blame the line workers, blame the management for not doing a proper job of inspecting the work product at each step of the process. Most RV’s are built by hand unlike the modern automotive industry which uses a lot of robots and other automated processes. Ours was built missing a rear window, was missing floor heat register, the Dura Shield on the front had to be replaced twice as it came from the factory looking like bubble wrap. Yes the workers may have made an error, but obvious stuff should have been caught. What really frost my buttocks though is the crappy furniture and appliances that go into these things.

Unfortunately inspection is a lost art. In North American manufacturing there has been a major swing to self inspection. If I do it wrong without realizing it then it goes down the line like that. Owners save money by having a minimal quality department at the expense of, you guessed it, product quality.

[Arn]

Given the proper training, the proper tools & a reason to want to do the job right (pay, pension, benefits etc) anybody anywhere can build quality anything. Look up the ladder, that's where the problem is.

[Bluhorn]

Part of the problem is "Piecework" Which always did push quality down. Did you ever see a video of them building an rv? They aregetting paid on how many they can buil in a given time, not quality work. Now there is a bigger demand and the faster they go with less skilled workers and shortage of workers due to you know what. You dont expect quality to go up do you?

[valhalla360]

rlw999 wrote:

toedtoes wrote:
So for most people, paying for a better quality vehicle is a no brainer. But for an RV, many folks will forego quality to get a better price, or get the floorplan or size they want.

I think the floorplan variety is part of the problem - like look at Forest River - they have 4 bumper pull travel trailer sub-brands (and that doesn't even include their fifth wheel and toy haulers), and each of those sub-brands has between 10 to 17 different floorplans.

There's no way they can develop custom jigs and other tooling devoted to each floorplan when they need to assemble 40 different varieties of TT, and they also can't develop best practices for how to assemble them because lessons learned on cable routing or how to mount the cabinets more securely aren't the same for each floorplan.

This is the fundamental problem.
- 30-50,000 units per year is marginal to keep a model of car going.
- A very popular RV model may do 5-10,000 per year.

There is no way to do a dedicated production line for each model of RV.

There are plenty of threads where people are looking for some oddball layouts...where those layouts exist, it's likely sales numbers in the 100's not even 1000's.

Home building is a much more comparable industry and anyone who has had a house built, knows there is a teething period where the contractor is called back to address issues.

On top of this, it's boom times for the industry and they can't hire enough workers...let alone high quality workers. Expecting them to give up 30-50% of sales when they are getting top dollar today is insanity.

Disrupting the market is far easier when the economy is down, particularly for a luxury item. Companies can be choosy about picking workers. Companies aren't under pressure to get more units out the door, so they can put more emphasis on quality and cutting warranty costs to protect thinner margins.

And to be quite honest, probably 90% of buyers of new RVs emphasize layout and cool looks over quality. The guys who buy so they can keep an RV for 20-30yrs are a negligible part of the market.

[Lantley]

I think the prior post raise a good point.
All or at least most of the towable manufacturers that built a better unit are out of business.
Excel,Carriage,DRV are gone. We claim we want better, but we don't seem to support the companies that build a better unit.
When the time come we settle for the mass produced mediocrity vs. paying more for a better unit.

[wapiticountry]

toedtoes wrote:

rlw999 wrote:

toedtoes wrote:
So for most people, paying for a better quality vehicle is a no brainer. But for an RV, many folks will forego quality to get a better price, or get the floorplan or size they want.

I think the floorplan variety is part of the problem - like look at Forest River - they have 4 bumper pull travel trailer sub-brands (and that doesn't even include their fifth wheel and toy haulers), and each of those sub-brands has between 10 to 17 different floorplans.

There's no way they can develop custom jigs and other tooling devoted to each floorplan when they need to assemble 40 different varieties of TT, and they also can't develop best practices for how to assemble them because lessons learned on cable routing or how to mount the cabinets more securely aren't the same for each floorplan.

I wish each manufacturer would have fewer choices in length and floorplan but more focus on quality.

But floorplan, apparently, is what sells -- it's easy to walk into an RV and see that the bed and bathroom are where you want them, it's much harder to see that they routed a wiring harness under the sewer line so it's going to chafe and wear through in a few months.

I always liked how Irv Perch handled that with the American Clippers. Because they were molded fiberglass shells, he was limited. A window move meant a separate mold for that wall, which was very expensive. So of his 21ft models, he only had two molds. One was used for the rear kitchen and side kitchen layouts. The outside storage, windows, door, fridge, furnace, tanks, and water heater remained in the same locations so wiring, piping, etc, was standardized. The second mold was specific to the bunkhouse layout. If you see a clipper on the road, you can easily idenify a bunkhouse because of the windows and door placement. This was the only model that had different placement of fridge, furnace, etc.

Even the 24ft models maintained the same basic positioning of those items. So, there was little variation to the hidden build.

Where he gave options were in things like a standard dinette versus an L shaped dinette, or two chairs and cabinet versus a couch. They were cosmetic differences only. Between the 3 molds, he offered 27 floorplans, but the build centered on only 4 variations (side kitchen, rear kitchen, bunkhouse, 24ft).

And the rest of the story is American Clipper went out of business in 1980 after being in business less than 8 years. So maybe it wasn't a better mousetrap after all.

[vtraudt]

rjstractor wrote:
I'm not sure why Kia and Hyundai were mentioned in the OPs post

Simply space holders for any market disruptors, those being the most recent once from the auto industry.

Earlier examples where Honda, Toyota.

Could be a new player from Canada or Mexico.
Could be a new player outside the current "Indiana Cartel" that holds a monopoly on the RV market in the US.

Maybe a big European manufacturer wants to seize the opportunity and break into the North American domestic market with a good value proposition (bang for buck, Quality:Price ratio).

Or a big China player just buying up one of the Cartel members, putting up new plants outside Indiana, new top management, more dedicated managers and workforce.

[toedtoes]

rlw999 wrote:

toedtoes wrote:
So for most people, paying for a better quality vehicle is a no brainer. But for an RV, many folks will forego quality to get a better price, or get the floorplan or size they want.

I think the floorplan variety is part of the problem - like look at Forest River - they have 4 bumper pull travel trailer sub-brands (and that doesn't even include their fifth wheel and toy haulers), and each of those sub-brands has between 10 to 17 different floorplans.

There's no way they can develop custom jigs and other tooling devoted to each floorplan when they need to assemble 40 different varieties of TT, and they also can't develop best practices for how to assemble them because lessons learned on cable routing or how to mount the cabinets more securely aren't the same for each floorplan.

I wish each manufacturer would have fewer choices in length and floorplan but more focus on quality.

But floorplan, apparently, is what sells -- it's easy to walk into an RV and see that the bed and bathroom are where you want them, it's much harder to see that they routed a wiring harness under the sewer line so it's going to chafe and wear through in a few months.

I always liked how Irv Perch handled that with the American Clippers. Because they were molded fiberglass shells, he was limited. A window move meant a separate mold for that wall, which was very expensive. So of his 21ft models, he only had two molds. One was used for the rear kitchen and side kitchen layouts. The outside storage, windows, door, fridge, furnace, tanks, and water heater remained in the same locations so wiring, piping, etc, was standardized. The second mold was specific to the bunkhouse layout. If you see a clipper on the road, you can easily idenify a bunkhouse because of the windows and door placement. This was the only model that had different placement of fridge, furnace, etc.

Even the 24ft models maintained the same basic positioning of those items. So, there was little variation to the hidden build.

Where he gave options were in things like a standard dinette versus an L shaped dinette, or two chairs and cabinet versus a couch. They were cosmetic differences only. Between the 3 molds, he offered 27 floorplans, but the build centered on only 4 variations (side kitchen, rear kitchen, bunkhouse, 24ft).

[Skibane]

^Absolutely.

Pick any two: Variety - Quality - Price

[rlw999]

toedtoes wrote:
So for most people, paying for a better quality vehicle is a no brainer. But for an RV, many folks will forego quality to get a better price, or get the floorplan or size they want.

I think the floorplan variety is part of the problem - like look at Forest River - they have 4 bumper pull travel trailer sub-brands (and that doesn't even include their fifth wheel and toy haulers), and each of those sub-brands has between 10 to 17 different floorplans.

There's no way they can develop custom jigs and other tooling devoted to each floorplan when they need to assemble 40 different varieties of TT, and they also can't develop best practices for how to assemble them because lessons learned on cable routing or how to mount the cabinets more securely aren't the same for each floorplan.

I wish each manufacturer would have fewer choices in length and floorplan but more focus on quality.

But floorplan, apparently, is what sells -- it's easy to walk into an RV and see that the bed and bathroom are where you want them, it's much harder to see that they routed a wiring harness under the sewer line so it's going to chafe and wear through in a few months.

[Skibane]

This Is The Hyundai Porest, And It's A Cool Compact RV You Can't Buy

[Bird_Freak]

If Kia built a RV I would buy it tomorrow. 240K miles on Sorento and runs great.