Similar sort of size I guess - your experience is encouraging.
I can understand that! The VW is more like camping… I introduced my wife to camping, going twice - first was part of our honeymoon(!), second was when out first son was about one year old. There will never be a third!
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I wondered why they are cheaper than others - but against that, Hymer is at least £5k more for the same spec, which is a lot of money on top of something already very expensive. Are Hymer really so much better? As for Ducato cabs, already noted - and waiting lists inevitably seem to mean next year at the earliest.
Living on the Isle of Man, that makes a lot of sense. It would be worth you looking up prices for the ferry crossing; I believe a motor home is cheaper than a car and caravan. There seem to be various length categories for motor homes too, from talking to people I get the impression that <6m is some sort of critical point. The ability to go out for the day, park up and maybe stay a night is a strong appeal. We have Hayling Island nearby and there are loads of people using their motor homes as mobile beach huts.
There is a size of van bigger than a VW but smaller than the Ducato van conversions that may be more practical, but you lose the fixed bed and converting the sitting area to a bed every night is a right pain.
One thing that plays on my mind is the whole petrol and diesel phase out thing. I suspect that cities are going to start to bar diesels at some point, which could make van ownership tricky. Dora weighs about 1,100kg I believe, and towing is ok with our Audi A3 which weighs 1,500kg. 1,000kg seems the limit for some electric cars and reduces the range massively. Hopefully this will improve as I wouldn’t want to get another petrol car and wouldn’t entertain a diesel given their particulate issues.
My wife wants to buy new, unlike our norm with cars which I never will do - her argument with motorhomes is that they hold their value and that even after 10 or 15 years, resale value would be good. I am sceptical because of the move to phase out fossil fuels, and suspect resale values by then will be a lot worse than now. With caravans our present car can manage the ERIBA 430 or 530, though at 14 years old it is getting near end of life - we’re hoping it will last a few more years until decent electric (including range) becomes affordable, and caravan towability would be a complicating factor. If I had retired 10 years ago it would have been simpler!
I did check ferry crossing Dover-Calais, being possible online, and found it is at least £200 more return trip with caravan than that size campervan. Assuming at least the same for IOM-UK (it is a much longer crossing), means at least that much extra for every trip with it to UK, and double for every trip to the continent. Maybe not a dealbreaker, though a consideration.
interesting thread - just had a good read
my wife and I will be looking to make the same decision in 2-3 years time so we can tour around Europe - for our maximum 90 days of course
I’d say for 5k more I’d go with a hymer/dreamer - for me the differences are worth it. But Its best you have a good look yourself to assertain if the differences matter to you. We paid about 5-7k more than the equivalent uk made van to go to Pilote (a French make) and are pleased we did. We have a Pacific 706s which has bunks in the back for our kids and a drop down bed over the lounge. Not a particularly popular UK layout. The differences for us which made the cost palatable was the better quality fixtures and fittings a more considered internal design, GRP walls, a huge payload and much much better heating and insulation so we could use it all year round - ours has fake leather trim an auto box and a more powerful engine. I’d suggest also looking at Adria vans as they have a good reputation. I believe in recent years there have been some narrow body coachbuilts if its the width which is worrying you.
Elddis is a bottom of the range / cheap van and ours was good for what it was. Ours was a dealer special, so had fancy graphics on the side and an enhanced specification and was a luton so was 3.2m high and 7.2m long. They do load them with goodies, however I had concerns over its long term survival and I found driving such a high vehicle quite stressful - the length was never an issue. Our Elddis had water ingress at 1 year old, cheaply made plastic mouldings (which cracked within the first year) a cheap whale heating system which was noisy and struggled in the cold, poor insulation. We also learnt a lot from driving it about. But we had it nearly 4 years and loved using it. Took it all over the UK and into Europe.
One thing to be very careful of is payload. The quoted figures from manufacturers are notoriously optimistic and are often quoted with a tolerance of +/- 5% (check the small print) and often without onboard water or optional extras. On new vans chassis upgrades are available to increase the payload.
- Fixtures and fittings - cheap doors vs properly made doors, cheap cabinetry vs locking fixings, slatted bed bases vs solid bases, properly finished woodwork. Nicely constructed and supported shower tray vs ones which flex. Decent water drainage points (50mm wide) vs 5mm wide so we can drain our tanks quickly, being able to open up the tanks for cleaning vs sealed tanks. Routing of heating pipes over water pipes to stop them freezing in the cold etc. etc.
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Our Audi tows Dora, who is a 530, quite happily, though we do slow down on inclines to save fuel. It’s only a 1.5 engine with 150PS and at three years old we have time to wait to see how EV cars evolve. We are off to Provence next summer and having to recharge every 100 miles would make things very challenging.
It will be interesting to see how electric van conversions come along too. Re your new/used dilemma I’m not sure I’d be going with new. You can find nearly new for a good saving - quite a few people splash out on a new unit and then quickly realise it’s not for them. It’s a lot of money for sure. Then there is servicing, road tax, insurance, storage…
Thanks for the detail!
Re payload, that had already attracted my concern - and interestingly that quoted by the manufacturers for the same spec Hymer and Compass are significantly different, with Hymer having the (apparent) advantage of being something like 100kg lighter, leaving me wondering why (same chassis). Meanwhile the 540 length has an inherent weight benefit over the 600 - but they seem hard to find!
Re towing using an EV. The issue with these charge points at the moment is you may need to unhitch to charge at many of the charge points. Which would be a right pain if you had to do that every 200 miles. Im hoping the infrastructure improves so this becomes less of an issue in time.
I am also worried about the long term viability of a diesel motorhome and it remains a risk, but bought one anyway. We would be moving it on in 5 years in any case and at the moment there isn’t a viable EV alternative chassis for a motorhome and diesel will be available for 15+ years (IMHO).
Our new van was 50 odd grand, it was about 2-3k cheaper to buy the same van second hand from the same dealer. We felt it better to buy new. But the market is very skewed at the moment due to covid and there are very few second hand vans on the market and new vans are restricted so prices are high.
that is really odd. I would expect Hymer to be heavier. Hmmm… They may be calculating payload differently. I think the continentals do that (could be wrong).
We had the dealer put ours on the weigh bridge to make 100% sure it was ok and it was a condition of sale, I could do that because it was a stock van. I imagine they may have been less accommodating had it been a factory order. It was lighter than expected - but I understand this is not always the case.
I am very sceptical that these larger family vans 7.5m+ can have a good enough payload, all the mod cons and still remain under the 3.5te limit which they are often quoted to have.
We have gone through exactly the same process buying a small caravan then upgrading this year to a fixed bed. We contemplated a motor home but we are so glad that we went for a caravan. Unless you’re permanently on the move a caravan offers much more opportunity to explore, walk, go out for a meal without the hassle of moving a motor home.
We’ve faffed about whether to get a campervan or a small caravan for years, and in the end always feel they are expensive options (maybe not so bad with C world we are living through).
In the end we decided a nice car and staying in a variety of accomodations was a better bet and less worrisome, we live in rural somerset and see all sorts camper vans/caravans stuck in tiny roads. Our nearest campsite is not for the faint hearted.
We did a month in europe, stayed in everything from a tent to Spa hotel and enjoyed open air driving all the way.
I still look at campervans and caravans occassionally but it’d have to be a smallish one.
Enjoy the journey as they say.
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Yes, they aren’t cheap, though you can pick up old caravans for very little. We paid for Dora with money from my accident compensation - she was quite expensive at £25,000 but Eribas hold their value very well. Holidays are now very economical and it’s nice knowing we have everything we want with us. Of course, the £25,000 would pay for a lot of ‘swankier’ holidays! That said, we are happier on a campsite than being stuck in a hotel room. It still doesn’t bar one from doing city breaks in hotels in the winter. It’s great to have these options and different people like different things.
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“different people like different things”. Absolutely. Everyone circumstances are different and how they want to holiday is different.
I hate to holiday in hotels and airplanes as up until covid I spent a lot of my work travelling (nice hotels and Buisness class long haul) - so it didn’t feel like a holiday to me to travel by air and stay in hotels - usually of a lesser quality, than I did whilst travelling for work. We also need multiple rooms etc which really adds to the costs.
We have two kids and when they were toddling we wanted to be able to self contain them when going on holiday and that’s really easy to do in a motorhome and much more of a pain to do on an airplane.
We can’t easily get a caravan on the drive as I’d need to reverse it through narrow gates from a main road next to a roundabout. But a camper / motorhome is easy. Also for a caravan we need a big enough car - which for the type of van we’d need is costly.
At one point I was also using the Motorhome as a support vehicle when doing trackdays and racing, where its ideal.
However now the kids are getting older, we use our motorhome more like a caravan. Staying in expensive sites with lots of facilities for the kids. My wife and I tend to just lounge around whilst the kids race around the site on their bikes and playing with other kids.
As the kids get older how we holiday will probably change again and I suspect we will want to tour and stay in smaller more remote places moving more frequently where a smaller van would be more useful.
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I wondered, so asked, and they both claim to be doing the same (which apparently is following an EU standard).
Payload is equally an issue with caravans - however some heavier things potentially could go in the car, so maybe not as much of a challenge as a campervan.
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My wife’s latest idea following a discussion about campervan size and caravan towability, and small roads, is get a larger motorhome…one with a garage that can take a Smart car, then drive to a campsite and travel locally using the Smart car, with range better than bikes. I’m not keen, and I guess cost will be substantially more so a non-starter (though Smart cars appear quite often in local aurion, going for peanuts) - but need to look into to know rather than assume!
Some tow a small car behind a motorhome, either on a trailer or using an A frame. Fitting a car into a garage and your into something quite specialised and expensive (imho).
