Like the Super Bs, manufacturers of Class C motorhomes have stretched the definition of that label to include giant “almost-Class-A” versions. The biggest (like the one shown in the nearby figure) are usually built on a Freightliner chassis with Cummins diesel engines and Allison transmissions. But despite their size and features, they still retain the distinctive front-engine truck cab with a hump overhead design. In their outline, they look very much like some sort of luxury semitruck.
Because of raised customer expectations demanding more and more high-end options, some of the top Class A makers have started to offer the biggest and most feature-laden Super Cs on the market. So, if you’re looking at Class As, it’s worth peeking into some of the high-end Super Cs, too.
Photograph courtesy of Christopher Hodapp
Towables
A towable RV is just what it sounds like: an RV with wheels under it that has to be pulled around by a separate tow vehicle. Most people simply refer to them as trailers or travel trailers. Towables are usually described by their total length, along with a few specialty designs or functions: travel trailer, fifth wheel, toy hauler, pop-up, and teardrop. (We cover those specialties in the following sections.)
The travel trailer (see Figure 2-6) is the classic American RV, and they’ve been around for almost a hundred years (or longer, if you stretch the definition). Trailers are the modern-day equivalent of a wagon pulled by horses. Emperor Napoleon famously had a carriage he took on campaign with many of the luxuries we think of today in an RV. After his final defeat at Waterloo, it was displayed all over England for years and wowed the locals.
Photographs courtesy of Christopher Hodapp
FIGURE 2-6: Travel trailers can be short or long or anywhere in between.
TRAVEL TRAILERS, PARK TRAILERS, AND DESTINATION TRAILERS
Occasionally, you’ll encounter the terms park trailer and destination trailer. These terms have very real distinctions when it comes to the trailer business.
An RV type of trailer is a travel trailer, which means it’s meant to be moved around — it has wheels, it’s fairly self-contained, and its utilities like water, power, and sewer hookups are meant to be temporary. In other words, you can travel with a travel trailer. Duh.
A park trailer (also known as a park model), on the other hand, is a different sort of beast. The RVIA pretty narrowly defines a park model as a trailer meant to be hauled someplace and then have its wheels and hitch taken off and parked pretty much permanently. Hence, the name park model. Although a park trailer may have slides to increase the interior room, it can’t be any bigger than 400 square feet on the inside. Lots of park models have big “cathedral” picture windows, high ceilings, sliding-glass doors, ceiling fans, fireplaces, extra bedrooms, and other amenities and comforts of a house. But park trailers don’t have generators or freshwater, blackwater, and graywater tanks, because they aren’t needed. All utilities like electrical, water, and sewer lines have to be hooked up securely, as they would in a normal house. When you see a park model, it usually has a covering around the base, called a skirt, that covers up the pipes, heating ducts, drains, and other stuff that would normally dangle down in a house’s basement or crawlspace. They often have a deck built on and a semipermanent stairway leading up to the door. Even a semi-attached carport is a pretty common addition.
For all intents and purposes, a park model is designed to be a small house that stays put. Can it be moved if necessary? Yes. But it’s a major undertaking to do it when your park model is, er, parked. Even if you get wanderlust and decide to disconnect everything, jack it up, and reattach wheels and a hitch, park models are often wider than RVs, which are limited to just 8½ feet. That makes them an oversize load as far as the U.S. Department of Transportation is concerned, which means that a commercial truck has to move it into place or haul it anywhere else. You won’t be moving it yourself with your Ford F-150 pickup.
A destination trailer occupies a fuzzy space between the travel and park trailers. Like a park model, destination trailers are big, with lots of square footage inside. But a destination trailer is designed so that you can tow it (or have it towed) to your favorite vacation or retirement spot, and still have the option of easily changing your mind when somebody abruptly builds a warehouse overnight, blocking your view of the mountains or your path to the trout stream. The wheels and the tow hitch stay on a destination trailer, they’re under the 8½-foot width limit, and the temporary campground utility hookups all work just like an RV.
Travel trailers are designed to be at least marginally aerodynamic so that they’re easy to tow without driving like a cinder block on a windy day. Not so with a destination model — they’re meant to be moved, just not every other day. Like park models, they can have giant windows and sliding-glass doors, ceiling fans, high ceilings, and lots of space. But a destination trailer still adheres to the 8½-foot width limit, so if you have a truck that’s robust enough to move it, you can go find a new happy trout-filled place far from that warehouse without
