Aura joins ‘toff roader’ set

The rapidly shrinking, unexplored places on the planet have led to a surge in big, beefy ‘off-road’ caravans designed to allow owners to survive the most distant and inhospitable places with minimum discomfort.

Long-established brands like Queensland’s Bushtracker, Kedron and Spinifex and Victoria’s Trakmaster and more recently, Halen, have built their businesses on Outback cred.

However in recent years they’ve been joined by a new breed of big and brassy ‘toff roaders’ that, at least on paper, offer serious off-road specs combined with a new level of bling in the bush.

The latest of this new breed not surprisingly comes from Australia’s caravan capital of Campbellfield, Victoria, in the unmissable form of the new Earth series by industry ‘newbie’ Aura Caravans. 

While Aura might be mistaken as simply another pop-up Campbellfield builder, the people behind the project can claim crystal ball credentials into Australian caravanning trends with their combined 30-plus years in the business.

The best known of Aura’s backing trio is ex-Nova, ex-Roadstar Paul Golding, who now runs a pub in Nagambie. Under Golding’s watch, the Terra Sports became one of Nova’s top selling models thanks to its aggressive positioning, backed by impressive real-world testing, but Aura’s Earth Series takes the ‘go explore’ concept several steps further.

For a start, rather than blend into the environment, the first two Earth caravans built this year were designed to stand out in it, like Uluru.

Clad in smooth and shiny bright blue and red Aluwell aluminium composite panels respectively, they were designed to be noticed – a marketing ploy that has worked well so far for caravan colour ‘king’ Enzo Gnocato, who builds his Van Cruisers in a wide spectrum of ‘out there’ colours in Carrum Downs on the opposite side of Melbourne.

Whether subsequent Earth customers want to attract so much attention is yet to be tested, but Aura clearly believes there's a good and growing market for large, eye-catching off-roaders. According to the company’s Facebook page, the first ‘Big Red’ Aura Earth has already found a home via current sole dealer Kratzmann in Brisbane.

Standard specs on the 22ft 6in ‘Big Red’ Earth included a rugged 150mm Preston chassis with a 15 degree angle rear cutaway, tandem axle Cruisemaster XT independent trailing arm suspension, twin 100A/h batteries, twin 150W solar panels, standard RV Wi-fi, twin drawbar mounted taps for hot and cold water, a generator slide, a standard Weber Baby Q and a purposeful-looking aluminium rear ladder for rear roof access.

While it certainly looks the part, the lack of underbody stone shielding for its plastic plumbing, a single rear-bumper-mounted spare wheel and the absence of front stone mesh makes this big bush beast (and its occupants) more vulnerable than some of its rivals.

However, as the plan ultimately is to build Aura vans at the rate of just two per week, owners of Earth and newly-released Studio on-road slide-out models will have every opportunity to customise their van with tougher options.

This will undoubtedly elevate both the price and weight of Earth vans from around $90,000 and 3000kg laden, but perhaps Aura knows its potential Earth customers better than we do.

Despite an impressive three-year off-road warranty of all components, it’s questionable how many owners will really want to take their big and beautiful vans into hard places.

They look the part and make a statement and for many travellers, ‘toff’ rather than ‘tough’ may well be enough…