But I’m keeping mine, for the moment. It’s a 16-foot Scamp, which to the uninitiated resembles a fiberglass egg on wheels. Inside, it’s not much more than shelter, with four almost-comfy beds and a gas cooktop. Other luxuries are available, but we’re keeping investment and weight low as we can. At one ton even, it’s towed easily by my Forester. Eighteen mpg is our usual result when towing.

Small trailers like these remain in high demand. They’re made only by a handful of US and Canadian manufacturers, who do little advertising. You won’t see them on dealers’ lots, since every one is presold, usually around $10K and up.

They’re a slick solution to the family camping problem I faced. My wife hated sleeping on the ground. I could have bought cots, thicker air mattresses and other portable camp luxuries, but the car was already packed full. My choices were three: buy a bigger car, or buy a trailer, or never camp with the family. My marriage is stronger today because I avoided Option 3, and my total family fuel economy average is a lot better off because I avoided Option 1. And I like the Scamp far better than a pop-up tent trailer. It’s warmer (or cooler, as necessary), durable with little maintenance, and far handier. It takes me just a few minutes to hitch up and go, and only seconds to stop by the roadside and make a meal.

Not that I go out in it all that often. At these prices, even 18 mpg is hard to accept!

The other that there is more than one segment of the RV industry. While the market for class A and class C RV’s may be in the tank, the last I heard was that the market for towable RV’s is up and growing. More companies are getting into the lightweight towable market, building models that can be towed by CUV’s and cars. The market for pop-up campers is thriving as well, since if you own a full-size SUV you can generally tow the biggest pop-up made today with no significant hit to your fuel mileage. Most mileage reports from people towing the big highwall pop-ups with full-sized SUVs come in at around 15mpg because the camper is still below the tow vehicle roofline, whereas towing a travel trailer with the same usually results in a 5mpg hit because of the height. They’re not unlike dragging a barn door down the highway.

But like was eluded to earlier, the cost of fuel is not that big of a factor in the financials of RV ownership. Depreciation is far greater.

At any rate it looks like there will be some sweet deals in used motorhomes coming.

You only need a fraction of the owners of current lightly used units to pull the plug and put theirs on the market in order to really tank things for the already falling new RV sales.

I remember the gas crunches of the 1970s very well. At that time GM and FMC were both making some of the best built RVs in the industry, and they bailed in short order. The entire RV industry went into a tailspin then. In the 1990s people pretty much forgot what it had been like …. and now here we go again!

http://www.toyotamotorhomes.com/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/toyota-campers/

They rarely cost over $10k to purchase and they typically get 14-17 mpg.

I do a lot of cycling, and one feature of new mcmansion developments is that parked next to every other house is a big ass RV, so big they often drop my jaw when I see their cartoonish dimensions. Judging by the ages of the children in these neighborhoods, the parents must be in their late twenties to mid-thirties. They have real jobs. They cannot be using their RVs for more than a few weekends and perhaps a week long vacation per year.

Financially, it cannot make sense to own a motorhome the size of a city bus. For a lot less money, they could stay in nice hotels. They could buy top end backpacking gear instead. I assume you can rent an RV for the very few times a typical family would actually put one to legitimate use.

I cannot help but think that they are a giant waste of money.

Trucking rates are almost universally a two part tariff. There is the rate and the fuel surcharge that floats daily or weekly and is pegged to the price of diesel.

A typical rate for truckload service with a 53′ trailer would be $1.80/mile plus 30% fuel surcharge.

Back in 2001-2002 when the economy tanked there was no fuel surcharge and a lot of trucking companies went under. Ever since then it is pretty much a pass through cost.

What you have been hearing about in the press lately is the public whining of Independents who don’t have a fuel surcharge.

I guess most RVers are still the weekenders, though–more affected by fuel prices than fulltimers or partial fulltimers.

In other words, I’d be curious to see a breakout in sales for buyers intending on fulltime usage. I bet it’s a lot flatter than the overall downtrend.

I mean, sure, $4 diesel, high interest rates and a tanking economy might have a *little* to do with it, but I think the trouble really started when James May showed the world how RV’s disintegrate while going around an oval track. Even with Captain Slow at the helm, those plywood boxes don’t hold up well.

And speaking of helms, it probably didn’t help the industry when Hamster’s camper Vanagon-slash-canal tugboat nose-dived to the bottom of the English Channel, either.

If I were Winnebago, I’d really hate those guys.

Now people can’t afford the fuel or the payments. Not just RV’s. The luxury boat market has collapsed as well. Was talking to a guy this weekend who got a $50,000 rebate on a 32 foot SeaRay. Insane. Nobody is buying.

We bought our rig 6 years ago when I retired. I can honestly say, if I were retiring today, we would not be in the market for a motor home.