Are all off-road caravans suitable for off-road travel?

Caravancampingsales’ experts continue to answer the hard questions about buying and owning a caravan, camper trailer or motorhome. Here are the latest lot...

Fundamentally, ‘Yes’. Most off-road caravan have a higher ride height and hence might lean a little more on their coil spring suspension than lower on-road vans, whose body movement is limited by semi-elliptic leaf spring suspension.

Vans fitted with airbag springs sometimes have a self-levelling feature that limits body roll by sending more air to the suspension under pressure.

These days, most caravans have ‘all-road’ suspension – usually coil spring – that allows you to travel on properly formed roads off the bitumen, given the wish of many caravanners to explore inland. These vans sit a bit higher than their strictly on-road predecessors, but otherwise are perfectly capable of maintaining any posted road speed limit safely provided they are loaded properly.

However, if your itinerary includes a number of corrugated roads, creek crossings and free camping, then you should consider a purpose-built ‘off-road’ caravan, knowing that it will be perfectly safety on the bitumen roads you’ll need to take getting there.

For a start, you’ll avoid tickling its belly on rocks or steep river banks, which will minimise maintenance and hence enhance its resale.

The downside of a high-riding van is that you need more steps to enter it and things like your roll-out awning release might need a portable step to reach, as will cleaning it at the end of a trip.

However, getting underneath to unscrew water tank bungs to drain them between trips is easier on a ‘high-rider’.

If you need a steadying hand, some sort of outside body-mounted handle is a good idea.

For more about buying an off-road van, click here.

Introduced close to 10 years ago, many caravans are fitted with either AL-KO’s DSC or Dexter’s DSC (or various other ESC units) as standard these days. If not, you may be able to twist your dealer’s arm to clinch a sale, or pay around $1000 to $1500 more to have it fitted.

Is it worth having? Like a safety airbag, not until you need it; then it’s priceless!

If you're a careful, experienced caravanner, who sticks to posted speed limits, loads your van correctly and never overtakes until you can see the curvature of the Earth, then you may never feel its intervention, as it applies the brakes selectively to your caravan to stop its sway.

Electronic stability control, like all safety measures, is designed to protect you from the unexpected.

My opinion is to get it, as at the very worst it may help you sell your van when your travelling days are done. It requires no maintenance, so it’s ‘fit and forget’.

If you watch the dramatic dash-cam videos on the nightly news, it’s obvious that most major caravan accidents begin with uncontrolled sway.

Unsafe overtaking, beginning with poor judgement of your ability to pass the vehicle ahead, is a fundamental error, but so is loading your caravan badly, amplified in the rush and impatience from family members to get going.

‘Central and as low as possible’ is the universal loading advice, all within your tow car and van’s legal load limits, of course.

Then there’s your schedule. Make it conservative and flexible, rather than subject to a strict time pressure that will trigger many of your worst driving decisions. Also make sure you're rested, rather than tired, before you set off. 

Toilets have come a long way in caravans since the shovel and box of matches used in days of old, and there is now a choice of models and strict rules on how to empty them that every caravanner should know.

Until recently, the chemical-filled cassette that slides under the toilet through a hatch in the side of the caravan, was all you could get. It complied with National Park requirements and all major towns have ‘Dump Points’ where they can be emptied, en route.

Portable cassettes are simple, readily available, easy to handle and leave no mess unless you allow them to over-fill.  Get one with wheels and an extendable handle to make the walk to the dump point easier.

If you're planning to be off-grid longer and don’t fancy digging a hole, purchase a second cassette. Not cheap, but simple.

Now, there are marine and composting toilets available for many off-road caravans. With much larger capacities, this means you can stay in remote places longer, but these ablution options in some cases require some compromises.

One option offered on many caravans is a marine toilet, which uses no more water than a normal electric cassette toilet to flush. A major advantage is that the waste, which is  typically stored in a 140 litre 'black' tank, allows stays of up to seven times that of a normal 19 litre capacity portable cassette tank.

The black tank can be emptied via a supplied hose at a council or caravan park dump point and is designed and fully developed to give you the ultimate outback remote camping experience. Ideally, you should also flush the tank out with water to keep odours at bay.

Macerator toilets also allow you to stay off-grid longer and are usable in National Parks, but they also provide a more environmentally friendly alternative than portable cassette toilets, with less moving parts, no chemicals or wasted water!

The downside of some macerator systems is they can be noisy to flush, so best to adopt the mantra ‘if it’s yellow, let it mellow’ for those ‘wee’ hour visits.

My personal preference is still the humble cassette system. Simple, lightweight, doesn’t require maintenance, easy to empty at a dump point and with the latest biodegradable chemicals, safe for the environment.

Do you plan to get bitten by a venomous snake? Break a leg? Have a major vehicle failure on a deserted track? Get lost on a bush walk? If so, take a satellite phone on your next trip.

And if you don’t plan any of the above, take one anyway – not to keep up with your social networks, but in case something you don’t plan happens.

My wife and I have a different reason. Because we prefer to travel alone rather than to march to the beat of someone else’s drum deciding when we rise, have breakfast, etcetera, we don’t have friendly back-up on hand in case of mishaps. Plus, the sort of tracks we often travel don’t carry much passing traffic.

So when we go on a big trip to a remote area, we either hire a satellite phone or carry an emergency satellite messaging devise, like a SPOT device.

Hiring a phone is a lot cheaper than purchasing a new one, but you still have to sign up to a usage plan and pay for your calls. So it’s for emergency use, not social calls.

The choice may soon be simpler once Apple rolls out a new satelite connection with its future iPhone 14 models. Apple’s new Emergency SOS via Satellite feature is reportedly coming in November, but will only be available in the United States and Canada at launch. A new report, however, suggests that Apple has ambitious plans to bring the feature to other countries as soon as late this year. Stay tuned.

This will only be for emergency, not social use, and it’s not yet clear whether you will be able to tether it to a tablet or laptop, or what its service cost we be, but it’s a big deal.

On of our most recent big trips, we carried the Spot messaging device, which allowed those at home the ability to see where we were at any time through its messaging service. This was handy if we left the caravan and went on a walk.

Just like a sat phone, SPOT products also require a service plan to function. Service plans are unique to each product and additional features such as Enhanced Tracking and Rescue Insurance can be added to some plans.

So before we left home, we left a rough itinerary of our trip with our (adult) kids and our expected dates at major locations giving them details of how to log on to check our actual position in case we were stuck somewhere unexpected for a while.

In addition, our caravan was fitted with a Black Knight anti-theft tracker, so it could easily be worked out if we were separated from the van.

It all worked; nothing happened; but next time we’re taking a sat phone because it gives a wider range of options.

Of course if you're travelling major tourist routes, or travelling with a group, then sat communication is less necessary.

I’ve tried many over the years, from Cruisemaster’s well-proven DO-35 and DO-45 off-road pin couplings, the Hitch-Ezy novel self-latching pillar coupling, several poly-block couplings and of course a standard ball coupling. My answer is that it all depends on what you're towing and what terrain you're hauling your caravan or camper trailer over.

Off-road, the DO-35 is the by-word for its simplicity and articulation, but the Hitch-Ezy coupling matches it in the rough stuff and has the advantage that it visibly self-locks once lowered onto its fat pillar.

Of course the higher-volume coupling manufacturers have now caught up, with AL-KO now offering a low profile 50mm ball coupling to cater for vehicles with drop-down tailgates in addition to their traditional and inexpensive 50mm trailer ball coupling used by most on-road caravans.

The advantage of proper ‘off-road’ couplings is that they ensure your trailer stays connected safely during extreme angles of operation, such as when climbing steep banks after fording rivers and, if the worst happens, will usually allow the trailer to roll over independently without taking the tow car with it.

Price is a rough guide to quality and sophistication, with a basic ball coupling selling for around $50, while you can expect to pay closer to $1000 for a top-shelf 4500kg-rated off-road coupling.

Fortunately most are mounted by four or six bolts to your RV’s A-frame, so swapping them over is a simple ‘at home’ job.

Probably ‘yes’, if you have the option. For various reasons (including compulsory door and wall venting for safety reasons in caravans with gas-operated fridges and cooktops), all-electric caravans are now very much in favour with off-the-grid travellers, meaning that they may attract a better re-sale price down the track.

The advent of portable air fryers and the bad publicity attracted by faulty gas cook-tops has also hastened the change, while compressor fridge technology is now a match for three-way fridges.

By ‘all-electric’, I mean caravans and campers without any indoor gas appliances, although I would say that the latest 48-volt battery technology is still in its infancy and prices may come down from their current high levels. Appliances that vent externally, like gas cabin heaters, are not affected here.

Personally, I wouldn’t buy a new caravan with internal gas appliances now, as the tide of public opinion is changing quickly.