Choosing a camper trailer

Once it was simple; there were just tents and caravans. Then someone put the tent in a box trailer and we had camper trailers.

While at first very rudimentary, campers now come in a variety of forms.

The fold-out soft floor camper trailer is the most tent-like and offers the largest footprint, making it the cheapest and most family friendly.

Yet its principal features are its disadvantages. Lots of canvas takes time to set up, making it unsuitable for short stays, requires a lot of level real estate and is a hassle to pack up when it gets wet.

Not only do you have to stuff it away wet, but you then have to find space to set it up again at home to dry out, otherwise mildew sets in.

Hard-floor camper trailers, where the canvas tent section is attached to the fold-out floor, are now more popular, but even here there are variations on the theme.

The first ones folded out to the rear; you slept in a bed that sat on top of the trailer body and sheltered under the extended tent section with its hard floor.

Now, forward-fold hard floors have taken over, where the bed overhangs the A-frame and the trailer body forms the living area. This means that the trailer occupies no more area than its own length and on well-designed ones, you don’t even need to unhitch for the night.

Further variations on the theme include the pull-out bed campers popularised by Jayco and others from the early 1980s and hard shell campers, pioneered by Track Trailer with its Tvan from the start of the 20th Century. The latter put the sleeping area inside the solid walled and roofed camper body, with canvas used sparingly for additional under-cover living areas.

Hard shell options

These hard shell campers effectively spawned two niche products; the first was the Hybrid caravan – a cut-down pop-top off-road caravan with the accent on outdoor living introduced again by Track Trailer with its Topaz in 2008. Hybrids have since become the fastest growing segment in the Australian RV market, blurring the line between camper and small off-road caravan.

But now there’s a new RV on the market – the box camper– and it’s aimed at the many thousands of Australians who still love traditional camping, but are cashed-up, time poor and happy to leave canvas behind.

At the entry level of this emerging market we have the camping pods – the Jayco JPod, Avan Weekender, etc. – and these in turn have spawned the very latest much more upmarket and more sophisticated and expensive box camper models, like the hard-core Boss and drag anywhere BRS Sherpa.

You might consider these new Box campers, which at the upper, off-road end of the scale typically sell in the $50,000-$75,000 range (depending on options), have relatively less to offer for your money compared with the many well-equipped off-road hybrids in the same, or slightly higher, price bracket.

However if you're thinking this way, you’ve missed the point. A Box camper, like Zone RV’s new Expedition, is marketed as the ultimate for those who love camping.

Because it doesn’t fold out of a trailer, or have an opening roof to weaken its structure, it can be made entirely of full-thickness composite materials – 32mm thick for the floor and a little thinner for the walls and roof in the Zone's case – all glued together by the latest two-pack bonding materials.

So, it’s immensely strong – almost bomb proof – thermally very efficient, hail resistant, faster to build and should survive more punishment than a regular camper.

A Box camper like this can also be relatively light. In the case of the Expedition,  its 10ft long structure is self-supporting on a beefy chassis, meaning that its centre of gravity is low, which also aids its stability.

Without a fixed roof, conventional campers need aluminium or timber body frames to which fibreglass, aluminium or steel panels are then attached on both sides, adding weight and manufacturing time.

OK – it’s not quite as light as many top-end Australian campers (imported campers are usually heavier than their local counterparts, as lightweight technology and materials are more expensive).

It follows, given sufficient production volume, that Box campers could actually be cheaper to buy than conventional campers, but we haven’t reached this point. Our Australian cottage camper industry, where hundreds of people work with a few mates on subsistence wages in small rented factories, plus low overseas labour costs, still make conventional campers cheaper to build than high-tech and higher material cost composites.

Campers get you out there

Anyway, why a camper? Well, many people are trying to escape the convenience of modern living, rather than take their home comforts on holiday, but the pace of modern living makes them time-poor.

So they want to get to beautiful, hard places, smell the bush, hear the birds, then head back to work rather than spending all those precious moments setting up camp.

Because they're usually larger and heavier, most hybrids simply won’t take you that far. This makes the comparative cost of a top Box camper versus a bigger hybrid less of an issue and if you really want to take your partner or your kids on the Telegraph Track, or across the Simpson Desert;  it comes down what you can afford.

Zone RV’s Expedition will start at $49,900 when it goes on sale in February, which prices it at the head of a small but select range of other high-end Australian Box campers, while if you go wild with the option boxes you’ll end up with an Expedition Deluxe costing around $75,000.

Go wild with the options on a Patriot or a Tvan and you’ll outlay similar. However Zone RV expects that most Expeditions will leave the factory priced around $60,000-$65,000 with more focussed option choices. For example, staying with simple and proven Cruisemaster XT coil spring suspension instead of the $4850 ATX air-bag upgrade; forgoing the optional $4850 integrated roof-top queen bed and making do with a quality, quick set-up tent for the kids or friends; purchasing a small propriety inverter than optioning the $2800 2000W ePro.

Being ruthless with your choices should see you spending less than $60,000 on a very capable camper.

Alternatively, you can shop around for a quality local or imported forward-fold camper trailer and put up with its canvas inconveniences while counting the savings.

A good imported camper like those offered by Stoney Creek and MDC will cost you around $20,000, while you can expect to pay in the low-mid-$30,000 bracket for a good Australian-made equivalent, like a forward-folding Cub Campers Frontier.

Pros and cons

Having recently tried a Box camper and a canvas forward-folding canvas camper trailer side-by-side, overnight, I’ve reached the following conclusions:

Canvas camper pros:

• Canvas brings you closer to nature. Zip-down fly screen windows offer more connection with your environment than hard walls

• You experience the wind and rain

• With practice, some forward fold campers can be set-up for overnight stops almost as quickly as a Box camper

• They are generally cheaper than Box campers.

Canvas camper cons: 

• Canvas is noisy. It flaps and makes rain sound heavier than it is

• You are more vulnerable to falling tree branches

• You are more vulnerable to intruders, animal or human, when free or remote camping

• They are a pain to put away in the rain

• Vulnerable to theft

• Even with auto folding mechanisms, they can be quite ‘physical' to erect and pull down.

Box camper pros:

• No canvas

• Weather-proof

• Require minimum set-up space

• Quicker and easier to set up, so you can travel longer, arrive later and leave earlier – if you wish

• Composite construction allows them to be made stronger and lighter

• Animal, intruder and thief-proof

• Generally better re-sale value than a canvas camper.

Box camper cons:

• Not as inclusive with your environment

• Generally more expensive

• For some diehards, not the ‘authentic’ camping experience

Final word

If you have the money, but not the kids or the time, a Box camper may be for you; if you have a small budget, kids, dogs and the time, a Canvas camper trailer is the place to start your camping experience.