Austrail offers Euro-light chassis

Epping, Victoria-based chassis-maker Austrail RV has designed and built a lightweight chassis with composite floor stiffening for the Australian industry to allow local manufacturers to compete with lightweight imported European caravans.

Some of the new Austrail ‘super-light’ chassis – which weigh just 450kg compared with the 750kg of a regular tandem-axle chassis – may even find their way under European built, but locally-assembled caravans to give conservative local buyers confidence that the stylish Euro van will survive tough Australian touring conditions.

The new lightweight chassis are constructed along European lines like those produced by giant RV component-maker Al-Ko, with fewer cross members than ‘stand-alone’ Australian chassis.

Instead, their stiffness is restored with the use of thick composite flooring glued to the chassis, which has the added benefit of greatly increased underbody insulation.

Austrail boss Stan Guthrie said the first Austral lightweight chassis have already been sent to an Australian caravan manufacturer in Queensland and are awaiting field testing. Other manufacturers are expected to be interested once the results come in.

In the meantime Austrail is re-engineering its stock tandem axle chassis to allow newly Chinese-owned Regent Caravans to reduce the ATM of their mainstream tandem axle caravans down to the Prado legal braked trailer towing limit of 2500kg. It is understood that current Regent caravans are about 100kg too heavy for the popular Toyota 4X4.

Austrail was completing the first two of these ‘Jenny Craig’ chassis this week. They are expected to shave up to 150kg off the weight of a regular Austrail chassis to meet Regent’s requirement.

Guthrie said the weight saving had been achieved by reducing some of the regular chassis’ lattice work, fitting hollow axles and reducing tyre size to 205 section, rather than 235. Some weight has also been saved on the main chassis rails “and by a lot of praying”.

He said the redesign had not reduced the strength of the chassis for its intended sealed road touring application.

Despite the purchase of Regent by the giant Chinese Daide Group, new Regent CEO Wei Zhu said it was the company’s intention to retain Australian-built chassis in the immediate future.

“Australian chassis are strong and Austrail has a reputation for high quality,” he said. “These are values that attracted Daide to Regent in the first place.”

Austrail chassis are widely respected in the Australian RV industry for their quality construction and exceptionally high quality finish, which some say to be amongst the best in the world.