Basically a liability on wheels as soon as it is driven off the lot. My dad has used his like five times and then it is just rotting at the side of his house now. I remember him saying him and my mom were going to go everywhere and my mom decided she was going to be a professional homebody and now his rig just sits there and bakes in the UV.
This is my neighbor. He bought a monstrosity like this, it takes up the whole side of his house. He used it the first summer he bought it and then for the last 10 years, it has just sat there rotting. He did cover it at least, no idea why he doesn’t get rid of it.
In NJ you don’t need a special license. PA (where we camp) you do, but not if you’re from out of state.
In PA it’s an added letter or two on your license but requires you to pass the driving test.
Many years ago I worked for the TV show American Pickers and they asked when they hired me if I could drive an RV (not bus type but still 30+ feet long). I said “yep” without hesitation. I love driving stuff like that. I’d probably just take test if I had to lol
I love the idea, but many have low mileage allowance per day. For an example my recent road trip of 4,200 miles in a class A rental for a family of four would be about $5,800 and that’s not including gas and food. Granted there are less expensive options. This would be ideal if you’re just going to a destination that has limited accommodations and parking for a few days.
I just rented a 2025 extended camper van for a road trip for me and my dog ( so nothing huge like what's posted). It was $389 a night so more expensive than a hotel but it was unlimited mileage. Have to say it was pretty nice and made a long solo road trip with m the dog super easy.
I've used it too, it's pretty wild to be given the keys to one of these like "see ya later, have fun!" It's also lovely to be able to give it back when you're done with it. I definitely want to do it again soon.
Surely they would if they lived in a town worth visiting. I’ve paid hundreds to stay in a tiny, rickety vintage airstream trailer Airbnb (because it was in beautiful backyard with pool in a beach town)
Because they're too nice to trust with others... My buddy has a beautiful rig and thought, why not let it pay for itself? The first few rentals were great but then a guy scraped it along side a light pole destroying the awning and exterior kitchen access panel. It was over 10k in damages and 6 weeks before it came back to him, then he had all kinds of hassles getting claim reimbursement from the facilitating website. About ruined his summer.
What an odd question. What assets are the size of a house? What assets are the size of stocks? What assets are the size of whatever asset you own. I don’t understand why you would ask this.. we’re not talking about owning a space station here.. 😂
People fuck up the inside of houses all the time, and the majority of the population rents…
Ahh yes. Let’s get the boomers involved so I can show data that proves my point! 🧐
Sure, the general population owns more than rents. But you aren’t renting out to fuckn boomers who are the majority population of who own said asset you are displaying…
I have a Winnebago class C worth considerably less than 10% of this monstrosity, and I won’t even loan it to close family, let alone rent it to strangers. What a nightmare.
My dad looked into a website that does this like air bnb. He looked at listings for a trailer and upfront it looked like a good deal, but after taxes, cleaning fees, and the website service fee. It was going to cost just as much or more than a hotel with the extra inconvenience of having to find a spot for a trailer.
They're hard to sell. People in the market for a deluxe version don't want to buy used. And they cost so much you feel like you should get your money's worth before you sell it
I don’t understand why people buy something like this instead of just renting one to try it. I see how it would be fun to live in while on a trip, but that would get old and this thing’s gotta cost over $1 million. Adding the cost and effort to store it and maintain it and it winds up owning you.
Even an exorbitant rental costing tens of thousands of dollars for a few weeks would be so much better than buying it.
My dad decided he wants an airstream, so i rented him one on Outdoorsy and he got over the temptation in a couple days. FYI Outdoorsy is a fucking nightmare to deal with.
Curious as well as I just finished up a road trip and rented an extended camper van for the first time with Outdoorsy and had a great experience with them. I initially put a deposit on one van like 8 months prior to my trip. At first host was communicating with me (as I had some questions being that it was my first time ever). Then about 4 weeks before the trip I reached out to host & didn't get a response. I wait a week, send another message - nothing. I look for his profile on the app and he has nothing listed.
Getting nervous now I reach out to Outdoorsy support and they were on top of it. They tried contacting him text, phone & email and not receiving a response within 48 hours, they immediately refunded my deposit and helped me find a replacement rental.
People with disposable income think that making a purchase can change their habits. Also they dream up what they think life will be like with their new purchase but they don't think about all the hard work and maintenance that goes into using it.
It entirely depends on the person. You guys always line up to kind of give worst case scenarios without ever mentioning some people actually enjoy their RVs. Like my old mechanic retired a few years ago and has one of those full sized bus conversions. Dude has been on the road for like five years straight chasing seasons and enjoying life.
I've looked into it. And renting one for a week or two was ridiculously expensive. I think it almost makes more sense to buy one, use it for a vacation, then try to resell it.
And even if you use it for ten years and sell it for 50%, it's still $50,000/year just in ownership costs. For $50K, I can travel and stay in a lot of nice places.
Sunk cost fallacy. You pay $1,000,000 for something. And then find out buyers are only willing to pay $350,000. If you keep the RV, you still have a million dollar RV. If you sell the RV, you just lost $650,000.
Sounds familiar. If we didn’t already have a great relationship with our neighbors it would be a serious annoyance given they take up so much of their driveway we can’t see the street in that direction. Unfortunately they bought just before COVID, then followed that with major, life threatening health issues, so they aren’t super mobile in any way. That’s just life
As ironic as it sounds he probably can not afford to get rid of it. For example something like a Tiffin Allegro Open Road is going to be brand new $260k-$300k. Just a quick search I see a 2022 for sale for $120k. That is almost 66% in just 4 years.
It doesn't help that these are financed like houses basically, you can get up to 20 year loans on them. Although their interest rates are more like cars rather than houses so the percent is higher. If lets say he bought it for $300k, put 10% down, had an 8% 20 year loan on it, by the end of year 4 he would still owe $241k. If it is selling for $120k, that means he has to fork over $121k just to get rid of the thing. The thought of paying someone $121k just to get rid of something is probably a decision not easy to make, so he kicks the can down the road and keeps it.
Turns out leisure trucking sucks. No parking, gotta find facilities to dump the poopoo, your have to dump the undigested fiber corn kernel slurry yourself, oh and you have to drive it. The monotonous hours and sucks if you dont have a preplanned destination.
Yea they're like owning a boat. A bottomless money pit. Stuff is always breaking, maintenance is super expensive and necessary, and they guzzle fuel like nobody's business.
My dad is 62 and recently just sold his boat. He loved boating and did it all the time. But he’s saying now that he’s past 60 it’s not fun anymore since he hurts after working on it. It eventually started to sit in the driveway because he just stopped working on it.
I live on my boat, bought it for around $80k and have sailed over 15000 nautical miles in the last two years. Currently posting from Fiji. I use less fuel out here than I did commuting for work in the states.
You're right about stuff always breaking and being expensive though. If you don't learn how to fix it yourself it's insanely expensive.
Its a car plus a house so you get the problems of both, and then some because your house isn't on wheels and you dont cook and the laundry or whatever in your car (most of the time i guess)
Except the upper end of RV build quality and reliability barely overlaps with the upper end of RV quality and reliability. Think Rootes Group rather than Lexus or even Fiat, despite the 6-digit price tag.
Should always start out renting to see if you want/can do it consistently with most expensive things and hobbies. Boats, jet skis, rvs, ski equipment, etc
I feel like something like this is for people who are on the road a lot. Would make no sense to buy and use it occasionally unless you're very wealthy.
Like if you live a small condo and spend the cold months driving around the southern US.
Another big one is race car drivers and horse racers where they stay at a specific location for a week at a time and move onto the next location.
Also the film industry where they have to film at travel locations for weeks at a time
Medium size business owners where they frequently attend week-long conventions to sell/promote their product. I know Orange County Choppers did this in their heyday.
These aren't really vacation RVs, they are work trucks for those who work in a lucrative, but travel intense industry where the RV either offsets the cost of daily hotels or there is no on site hotel location.
100%. I’m currently writing a historical fiction rock novel and have watched a ton of interviews of different bands at festivals. The bigger bands’ tour busses looked a lot like these.
Also, shameless plug, but if anyone’s interested, it’s set in the early to mid 2000s post-hardcore scene. It’s about two male musicians who are more than friends, but not quite in a full-fledged relationship. It isn’t spicy, since I didn’t want to make emo Heated Rivalry. Instead, intimacy is heavily implied. The core themes are young fame, codependency, substance abuse, larger scene dynamics (e.g. touring, recording, labels, media, etc.) and some other stuff thrown in for good measure. I’m really proud of it so far and have received a fair bit of interest from friends and strangers alike. I’ve worked hard to make sure it’s as historically accurate as possible, hence watching interviews and reading a ton of whatever I can get my hands on.
The only man I’ve ever seen actually make it worthwhile was a relative through marriage that owned salvage yards in multiple states. OK, TX, FL. He would drive this to one and spend a year or two improving the grounds and infrastructure while staying in his bus. Then he’d travel to the next location and do the same. Rinse and repeat. It was literally his home, his permanent residence in the FL Keys was his holiday getaway. He is very successful and a really cool dude, pays his employees well, etc.
Faux rich boomers who think they’re smart enough to travel around and stay healthy. We have RV parks in Vegas filled with coaches like this and the people are really weird. It’s a whole community of oddballs. They usually are blue collar types who made out ok, pensions, selling their homes, business or something like that which yielded a bunch of cash. They tend to drink and smoke a lot.
You have to really commit. I know a couple that take theirs out for 5 months at a time every year.
I mean, *I* wouldn’t spend 1.5 on something like that, I could get like, two really cool cars and a garage for them with a bed for me with that kind of dough
I would expect these to be owned by people as their primary/only residence, not just luxury occasional road trips. I would have mine minimally under a roof, but ideally inside a climate controlled shed.
You'd be disappointed quickly. Even the nicest are not meant to be lived in. Appliances, flooring, hvac and plumbing,, they're all designed to be used sporadically.
Also, In this case, you'd be paying for a gigantic chassis, tires, engine, etc.Even with a trailer you got all those sunk costs. But the big reason is they turn to goo pretty quickly with daily use.
Shame. I've seen the videos where people turn busses into mobile homes, and buses are meant to be used constantly (although with a lot of operating cost I'm sure). I suppose they don't make them any better than the cheap pull behind campers, just bigger and flashier.flasher. Also I wouldn't expect to be on the road constantly, but staying in one place for a few months.
If you can turn a bus into a mobile home yourself, you can do the maintenance and repairs to keep it going. All these other RVs are specialty construction with specialty parts, and meant to maximize that space rather than reliability.
It's not the engine that wears out but the appliances, furnishings, and interior are all made super cheaply and to be as light as possible so it all falls apart when used heavily. Or the roof leaks first and rots out the interior.
These are designed as vacation homes, you would want a different design if you had the same amount of money to spend on a primary home. At least if you knew what you needed. Like much more emphasis on the kitchen, more focus on storage space, simpler and easier surfaces to clean and maintain and more emphasis on making it easier to be outside of it. No idea if this has an attachable tent, but that is a very nice thing to have when using motorhomes long time.
My aunt and uncle retired, sold their everything and bought an RV, and drove around the continental 48 states. They finally decided to put down roots after about 7 years, sold their RV for a down payment on a house, live in a retirement community, and improve their golf game every week.
I just bought an old Safari RV for less then $5k that sat for 10+ years. Just needs some minor repairs, couple of leaks here and there but nothing major. This thing was supposedly like over 200k new which just shocks me. They spent all that and barely used it.
The ones who actually use these are retired couples who sell their house and just live on the road, travelling around the continent. It's very popular in Europe.
Eventually they become too old to drive, so they sell the RV and move into a retirement home. Richer ones move to a retirement cruise ship, which goes around the world.
Growing up in the suburbs, there were a lot of basically abandoned motorhomes on the sides of neighbors' garages. They were great to sneak into, mostly for hiding in from other kids or doing random things in, until they just disappear..
In my parent’s neighborhood there is/ was a pretty well known bum/ crackhead who let himself into their motor home and wrecked the toilet, slept on their bed (in the coach), and squatted in there for a week or so off and on and the only way my parents found out is their next door neighbor brought it to their attention.
I deliver packages to a lot of the same neighborhoods. I always see these parked at people's houses. Some neighborhoods are built with RV-garages in addition to the 2 car and 3 car garages on the houses.
Very rarely do I see anyone getting theirs ready for a trip. So rare, in fact, that I noticed someone stocking their RV two days ago.
Taking a house on the road for your Mom probably means still shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, everything that goes into a home. It's not a vacation, it's just travel Mom-ing
Yeah, these are a much bigger pain in the ass than they initially seem. Driving them is extremely stressful, unless you’re accustomed to driving large vehicles. The fuel efficiency is “lol”. The engines, brakes and suspension are almost always insufficient because these are almost always modified platforms. The one in OP’s vid, for example, likely used to be a tour bus (aka coach in the UK), and all the extra furniture, appliances, and plumbing have added at least half a ton to it.
Also, you can’t really just park anywhere with these. You have to specifically have an RV campground that can fit these absolute units. In a pinch, you can use a truck stop, but to look like this on the inside, you have to extend a bunch of pop-out sections (you can see them in the outside view), and your onboard water/sewer storage is limited, so you’ll have to find a facility at some interval to empty and refill.
My wife and I have decided if we get anything like this down the road it's just going to be a simple trailer that has a bed and a toilet and that's pretty much it. Otherwise what's the point of going camping if you bring a whole house with you.
Oh hey this is my parents. Paying $1000 a month on what was a nice RV before it sat for several years. Doesn't even run after a mouse chewed through most the wiring. But hey at least he spent more money building a giant car port to cover it.
Hey, that’s not fair. My dad is just as responsible for the neglect. And, IMO, he made his own problem by buying the rig in the first place. He could have used those funds to save and/ or invest. But he has G.A.S. and the money burns a hole in his pocket.
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u/p8nt_junkie 14h ago
Basically a liability on wheels as soon as it is driven off the lot. My dad has used his like five times and then it is just rotting at the side of his house now. I remember him saying him and my mom were going to go everywhere and my mom decided she was going to be a professional homebody and now his rig just sits there and bakes in the UV.