If I sound too demanding, I'm sorry, but after owning and living fulltime for 4 months to a year at a time in 3 different types of RVs (pusher, conversion bus, and trailer), I've concluded that a lot of RVs are built with too many built-in potential issues, and I feel that life is too short to spend it trying to deal with those issues.
The industry as a whole, except for a few exceptions, tries too hard to go for sizzle versus "good bones". I realize that this is a result of what people are willing to pay for and what they are not willing to pay for. Unfortunately, it means way too many RVs have some or even all of the following issues:
- Water leaks from the exterior, that remain hidden until the damage is fairly severe, caused by too many shell joints or shell joints that require too much maintenance to remain reliably watertight
- Water leaks from plumbing, that remain hidden until the damage is fairly severe, caused by cheap plumbing components and unskilled or rushed workmanship
- Unreliable electric and/or electronic systems that fail, caused by cheap components or improper installation, and by a general focus on providing whiz bang features to wow the buyers, ignoring the unreliability introduced by the bad combination of cheap components and iffy workmanship
- The use of heavy components because they are cheaper to use in the build process than more sophisticated lightweight solutions. Examples include waferboard which is heavy and easily damaged by water leaks, I-beams because they require less labor than box beams, stacked beams because they require less welding and labor than engineered space frames, plywood floors and roof skins that are heavy and easily damaged by water leaks
- The use of so many slides per unit that basic structural integrity of the RV is severely compromised, leading to cracks in sidewall skins, and almost no ability to handle minor accidents
- The use of "one button does all 4 slides" systems that prevent either movement or use of the RV when they mess up
For me, the attractions of an RV lifestyle are supposed to include simplicity and low stress. But leak potential and its resulting severe damage, having to buy and maintain a BIG diesel tow vehicle, towing 7 to 10 TONS on hilly and rainy highways, and electrical and electronic failures that irritate, or worse prevent usage (e.g. slide problems, leveling system problems), are not consistent with simplicity and low stress.
It looks to me that the most reliable and simplest RV solutions are not marketed primarily as RVs, but rather as horse trailers (for hauling horses and housing their owners at shows) and race trailers (for hauling racecars or racing motorcycles and housing their owners at race tracks). Those 2 solutions seem to have their emphasis on the right things: reliability and durability. Maybe because horse owners and racecar owners won't tolerate having to do constant maintenance on their trailers - they are too busy focusing on their animals and race vehicles, which are their moneymakers and the things they enjoy doing in life.
I wish that the same philosophy used on horse trailers and race trailers would be applied to RVs.
Unfortunately, I can't quite adopt either of those 2 solutions by the looks of it. I can't finance a horse trailer with my current combination of income, credit score, and desire to avoid making my Social Security taxable via a big 401k withdrawal. And used versus new horse trailers that are 8.5' wide and 40' long are too rare (Most are "narrow body" - some as narrow as 6'8"). I can much more easily buy a used race trailer for surprisingly low prices (when a racer decides he wants a bigger one, he generally sells the current one for a pretty reaosnable price from what I have seen!), but my rssearch shows that race trailers have 2 characteristics that are not good:
1. They usually have pretty "basic" living quarters, because the race wants to put as much of his scarce cash as possible into parts that will make his car go faster and thus let him win more prize money and sponsor support, and
2. The rear half of the trailer - the car garage - generally has NO windows (for security reasons), and adding windows to a trailer that does not have the proper framing from the factory for them, is always very costly (trailer has to be unskinned and new framing members welded in) and often utterly impractical.
A "vendor" trailer has the robust construction of the horse and race car trailers, but is seldom anywhere near 40 feet long - they are usually about half that length.
Still looking. I'm very persistent.
Jim G
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