Australia’s safest campervan available to order

It had to happen. Queensland’s Revolution Motorhomes, which has built its reputation by building stylish motorhomes out of Toyota and Volkswagen vans, has completed a partial conversion of the new Hyundai Staria Load, which has recently been rated as Australia’s safest van.

Their introduction to the Korean brand came through a customer who cancelled his order for a Volkswagen Transporter because of the long lead time to take delivery of the base unit and brought the Hyundai one-tonne medium van to them to be fitted with a pop top roof.

However he elected to carry out the Hyundai’s internal fit-out rather than have Revolution complete the conversion.

To date, we're not aware of anyone in Australia yet carrying out a full motorhome conversion of the new Staria Load, which replaces the iLoad that was on sale in Australia for a mammoth 14 years.

Some Australian businesses including Victoria's Achtung Campers offered a classy and cheap camper conversion of the iLoad van, while a number of camper conversions of the new Staria Load have broken cover overseas, including this one in its home market of South Korea.

However, with its recent class leading safety features, scoring the first-ever ‘Platinum’ safety ranking for the performance of its ADAS suite, besting the previously ‘Gold’-rated HiAce, Transit and now the Vito, the Staria Load is certain to be sought-after among the local motorhome customer demographic in the near future.

With seven airbags – including one in the centre of the front seat row – autonomous emergency braking, blind spot warning, rear cross-traffic alert, lane assist, all-round parking sensors, plus front, side and rear cameras, the new Hyundai with its next-gen technology has vaulted up the ‘wanted’ charts.

As the front-wheel drive Staria shares its platform with the  Hyundai Sante Fe SUV, it's also quite car-like to drive, thanks to a smooth 2.2-litre 130kW turbo-diesel paired to an 8-speeed automatic transmission, while its modern cabin, which incorporates all the current technology ‘goodies’ like sat nav and Apple Car Play, makes it as easy to live with as a small hatchback.

The Staria’s lower loading height and roomier load space to its predecessor works well in its adaption to motorhome duties, while its braked towing capacity of 2500kg and 100kg tow ball loading means that you can also tow a boat on your carefree travels around Australia.

The only bad news is that the new Staria Load costs around $3000 more than its iLoad predecessor, but the extra cost is well justified with the extra equipment and safety gear.

While Revolution Motorhomes at present has no plans to offer a motorhome version as a catalogued item, the company has pioneered many designs before, such as its smart-looking custom campervan conversion of the new Ford Transit Custom last year.

As they say, watch this space...